Converting inventions into innovations in large firms: How inventors at Xerox navigated the innovation process to commercialize their ideas

Research Summary How can inventors in large firms navigate their organizations' innovation processes to commercialize breakthrough inventions? Using historical case studies of three breakthrough inventions at Xerox—office workstations, personal computers, and laser printers, we illustrate how inventors navigated multiple evaluation criteria across different organizational units to attract resources toward inventions. These criteria stemmed from Xerox's first successful breakthrough invention, the 914 copier and the specific objectives of the organizational units. We highlight two approaches deployed by Xerox inventors—searching across the organization for more favorable evaluation criteria and shaping the evaluation criteria to help attract resources. While searching leveraged the heterogeneity of evaluation criteria across the different organizational units, shaping required the presence of evaluative uncertainty with respect to the appropriate criteria for evaluating breakthrough inventions. Managerial Summary The challenges of commercializing breakthrough inventions in large firms have been studied extensively through a lens of managerial decision‐making and resource allocation. This perspective has characterized the innovation process in large firms as one in which inventors confine themselves to idea generation, leaving idea commercialization to other actors, subject to organizational inertia. We develop a complementary perspective of the innovation process in which inventors may navigate organizational inertia by going beyond idea generation to attracting resources toward commercializing their breakthrough inventions. By offering a novel account of how inventors at Xerox navigated multiple evaluation criteria to commercialize their inventions, the study sheds light on an important yet overlooked aspect of the innovation process in large firms that can facilitate the commercialization of breakthrough inventions.