According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

The primary purpose of this article is to clarify the nature of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct and to propose a contingency framework for investigating the relationship between EO and firm performance. We first explore and refine the dimensions of EO and discuss the usefulness of viewing a firm's EO as a multidimensional construct. Then, drawing on examples from the EO-related contingencies literature, we suggest alternative models (moderating effects, mediating effects, independent effects, interaction effects) for testing the EO-performance relationship.

Clarifying the Entrepreneurial Orientation Construct and Linking It To Performance

This paper differs from previous examinations of organizational learning in that it is broader in scope and more evaluative of the literatures. Four constructs related to organizational learning knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory are articulated, and the literatures related to each are described and critiqued.

The literature on knowledge acquisition is voluminous and multi-faceted, and so the knowledge acquisition construct is portrayed here as consisting of five subconstructs or subprocesses: 1 drawing on knowledge available at the organization's birth, 2 learning from experience, 3 learning by observing other organizations, 4 grafting on to itself components that possess knowledge needed but not possessed by the organization, and 5 noticing or searching for information about the organization's environment and performance. Examination of the related literatures indicates that much has been learned about learning from experience, but also that there is a lack of cumulative work and a lack of integration of work from different research groups. Similarly, much has been learned about organizational search, but there is a lack of conceptual work, and there is a lack of both cumulative work and syntheses with which to create a more mature literature. Congenital learning, vicarious learning, and grafting are information acquisition subprocesses about which relatively little has been learned.

The literature concerning information distribution is rich and mature, but an aspect of information distribution that is central to an organization's benefitting from its learning, namely how units that possess information and units that need this information can find each other quickly and with a high likelihood, is unexplored. Information interpretation, as an organizational process, rather than an individual process, requires empirical work for further advancement. Organizational memory is much in need of systematic investigation, particularly by those whose special concerns are improving organizational learning and decision making.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2634941.pdf

Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures

We describe the development and validation of a new instrument, KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity, designed to assess perceived stimulants and obstacles to creativity in organizational work environments. The KEYS scales have acceptable factor structures, internal consistencies, test-retest reliabilities, and preliminary convergent and discriminant validity. A construct validity study shows that perceived work environments, as assessed by the KEYS scales, discriminate between high-creativity projects and low-creativity projects; certain scales discriminate more strongly and consistently than others. We discuss the utility of this tool for research and practice.

Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity

The present study integrated a number of streams of research on the antecedents of innovation to develop and test a model of individual innovative behavior. Hypothesizing that leadership, individual problem-solving style, and work group relations affect innovative behavior directly and indirectly through their influence on perceptions of the climate for innovation, we used structural equation analysis to test the parameters of the proposed model simultaneously and also explored the moderating effect of task characteristics. The model explained approximately 37 percent of the variance in innovative behavior. Task type moderated the relationship between leader role expectations and innovative behavior.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/256701.pdf

Determinants of innovative behavior: a path model of individual innovation in the workplace

Time‐Based Management of the New Product Development Process

Adaptive responses by conservative and entrepreneurial firms

(1978) How Organizational Factors Affect R&D Innovation Research Management: Vol 21, No 2, pp 12-15

How Organizational Factors Affect R&D Innovation

Recent concerns over national and corporate competitiveness have stimulated a renewed interest in the measurement of R&D productivity. However, the complexity of measurement problems in R&D organizations has resulted in a situation where there is a scarcity of generally accepted techniques. The authors review the major measurement issues connected with R&D productivity and presents the results of a case study to develop a R&D productivity measurement system. They describe the process of designing such a system for a high-tech product-development organization, and also provide a reduced list of ten R*D productivity indicators for ongoing monitoring purposes. >

Observations on the measurement of R&D productivity: a case study

Executive Overview Industrial competitiveness can be evaluated in many ways, but for high-tech firms no measure is more important than that of getting new products into their relevant markets ahead of the competition. Especially for companies with technology-driven products, where technological obsolescence compounds the problems of head-to-head competition, speed-to-market is an essential factor for survival. As the last few years have seen more international competition for many U.S. companies, there have been numerous alarms calling for increased attention to this aspect of corporate competitive behavior. Partly in response to these clarion calls numerous studies in recent years have pointed out the economic and strategic benefits associated with the accelerated product introductions. Unfortunately, relatively few studies have examined the situation in detail, so that previous recommendations have often been limited to highlighting such mainstream concepts as concurrent engineering and cross-functional...

Warren B. Brown

Papers

Time‐Based Management of the New Product Development Process

Adaptive responses by conservative and entrepreneurial firms

How Organizational Factors Affect R&D Innovation

Observations on the measurement of R&D productivity: a case study

Leading the way to faster new product development