IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wsi/ijimxx/v16y2012i05ns1363919612003861.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Killing Mushrooms: The Realpolitik Of Terminating Innovation Projects

Author

Listed:
  • JOHN A. DALY

    (Department of Communication Studies and Management, University of Texas, Austin, 2504A Whitis Avenue, Austin, TX 78712-0115, USA)

  • ALF STEINAR SÆTRE

    (Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Alfred Getzv. 1, 7491 Trondheim, Norway)

  • ERIC BRUN

    (UiS Business School, University of Stavanger, 4036 Stavanger, Norway)

Abstract

Successful organizations depend not only on highly successful ideas and projects, but also on terminating poorer projects so that they do not drain their intellectual and other resources. There is, however, evidence that organizations let many projects go on for too long before terminating them. This paper investigates managers' termination behaviors in the energy industry along two dimensions — termination and accommodation. Managers have two main concerns when terminating innovative ideas and projects. One is that the idea is actually abandoned (termination) and the other is that whoever came up with the idea does not become de-motivated when a project is terminated (accommodation). We explore the variance in the data to generate categories of termination and accommodation behaviors. We group our findings into seven major categories of termination strategies that vary with respect to accommodation. We then discuss three major features of accommodation strategies.

Suggested Citation

  • John A. Daly & Alf Steinar Sætre & Eric Brun, 2012. "Killing Mushrooms: The Realpolitik Of Terminating Innovation Projects," International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(05), pages 1-30.
    • Handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:16:y:2012:i:05:n:s1363919612003861
    DOI: 10.1142/S1363919612003861
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1363919612003861
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1142/S1363919612003861?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kasper Edwards & Robert G. Cooper & Tomas Vedsmand & Giulia Nardelli, 2019. "Evaluating the Agile-Stage-Gate Hybrid Model: Experiences From Three SME Manufacturing Firms," International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management (IJITM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(08), pages 1-32, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:ijimxx:v:16:y:2012:i:05:n:s1363919612003861. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscinet.com/ijim/ijim.shtml .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.