The Rise and Fall of Management of Innovation. The Transformation of a Concept and of Management Practice in the Knowledge Economy

Management of innovation (as a concept) was invented by Burns and Stalker (1961). Managing innovations, of course, was the natural outcome of a process, which, among innovation theorists, has been called the Schumpeter Mk II mode, that is, the transformation of innovations to corporate research and development (R&D) departments. This phenomenon, discussed in Schumpeter (1943 [19811), was one of the consequences of the development of corporate capitalism, observed by Berle and Means (1932) and Burnham (1941) already but was a process with origins (also) in the German chemical industry in the late 19th century (cf. Schmookler, 1957; Freeman, 1974; Mowery & Rosenberg, 1998). This chapter argues that the management of innovation concept has become increasingly irrelevant for the understanding of management problems — and thus as a basis for management decisions — related to industrial change. The conditions for this loss of relevance were present in the 1980s already, that is, during the phase when management of innovation theory developed as a research field in academia. This loss of relevance is also, it is argued, related to the emerging problem of isolating ‘innovations’ from activities in general in the knowledge-based economy.