Catalysts and Barriers to the Adoption of New Innovation Methods

Abstract

Academics have developed a wide range of tools and methods to support innovation and the product development process. Unfortunately, few of these methods and tools have been widely adopted in industry. The current work seeks to identify what catalyzes and blocks the adoption of R&D innovation tools and methods in large organizations. Semi-structured exploratory interviews were conducted at several U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies. Interviewees include executives, managers, and individual contributors. Future work includes interviews with at least two more organizations with at least eight to ten individuals per organization. Initial interviews were transcribed, and open coding sought themes (commonly called categories) containing the catalysts and barriers. Initial findings indicate six themes that catalyze adoption: Confidence in the Method, Characteristics of the Method, Characteristics of the Practitioner, Practitioner Benefits, Leadership, and Organization. Barriers identified include Organization, Characteristics of the Method, Characteristics of the Practitioner, and Practitioner Drawbacks.

Headnote

Academics have developed a wide range of tools and methods to support innovation and the product development process. Unfortunately, few of these methods and tools have been widely adopted in industry. The current work seeks to identify what catalyzes and blocks the adoption of R&D innovation tools and methods in large organizations. Semi-structured exploratory interviews were conducted at several U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies. Interviewees include executives, managers, and individual contributors. Future work includes interviews with at least two more organizations with at least eight to ten individuals per organization. Initial interviews were transcribed, and open coding sought themes (commonly called categories) containing the catalysts and barriers. Initial findings indicate six themes that catalyze adoption: Confidence in the Method, Characteristics of the Method, Characteristics of the Practitioner, Practitioner Benefits, Leadership, and Organization. Barriers identified include Organization, Characteristics of the Method, Characteristics of the Practitioner, and Practitioner Drawbacks.

Keywords: Innovation; Design Methods; Innovation Tools; Interviews; Qualitative

1 Introduction

While academia produces many methods for new product development, few see widespread adoption in industry. While methods like Six Sigma, TRIZ, and Design Thinking achieved high penetration and use, methods like biologically inspired design see mixed adoption. This research seeks to understand the catalysts and barriers to the adoption of innovation methods in large industrial R&D organizations, to provide guidelines for how organizations can leverage new design methods, and to provide academics with best practices for method development and deployment. Within this context, we use the term "method" to include design methods, processes, and tools, including computationally supported software tools.

R&D organizations require new methods capable of generating solutions to meet existing needs while anticipating future challenges. Academic researchers continue to develop new methods with theoretical potential, but these methods provide minimal impact on industry (Frost, 1999; Dorst, 2008; Araujo et al., 1996). While this trend of low adoption rates has been investigated, existing studies regarding the adoption of innovation methods are limited to personal experiences or narrow case studies (Wallace, 2011; Daalhuizen, 2014), focused on specific methods such as Model-Based System Engineering (Chámi and Bruel, 2018; Purwandani and Michaud, 2021) and Green Business (Purwandani and Michaud, 2021), or fall into general organizational change management research regimes.

This research applies qualitative research approaches to understand innovation method experiences of individuals within large R&D organizations in order to formulate theories about the catalysts and barriers for adopting new innovation methods. By looking across organizational strata and product domains, this research seeks to discover causal factors that will guide organizations, users, and creators in developing and deploying high-impact methods to support R&D practitioners in addressing complex, modern challenges. This research-in-progrcss paper investigates the following exploratory research questions:

RQ1: What catalyzes or inhibits the adoption of R&D innovation methods in large R&D organizations?

The research question was further subdivided into (a) catalysts to adoption, (b) barriers to adoption, (c) evaluation of adoption, (d) selection of design methods, and (e) origination of design methods. Initial findings are presented, followed by areas where the authors seek feedback on their process and results.

2 Methods

Semi-structured, exploratory interviews were conducted at multiple Fortune 500 companies to develop an understanding of what catalyzes or blocks the adoption of new design methods. Participants from these organizations held a wide range of positions, ranging from individual practitioners up through managerial and executive personnel. Interviews generally lasted for one hour, though executives were only interviewed for a half hour. If an organization belonging to a given industry agreed to participate, no further organizations from that industry were sought for participation.

These interviews were conducted by three authors of this paper, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, a research scientist, and a Ph.D. student. The professor led the interviews, the research scientist leveraged their industry background to ensure clear communication of business and academic terms, and the Ph.D. student ensured consistency between interviews, verified topics were covered during the interview, and documented terminology.

Interviews were conducted using Zoom, with call recordings transcribed using Rev, an online transcription service. Transcripts were de-identified and cleaned so that no identifying information about the participating individual or organization was present.

The transcripts were analyzed using Open Coding for qualitative analysis (Saldana, 2016) which allows for the categorization of a wide variety of observations. To provide structure to the coding process, initial top-level "parent" codes were established for each research sub-question. This research-in-progress paper covers the results of the catalyst to adoption and barrier to adoption parent codes only.

The data presented in this work contains an analysis of 20 interviews conducted at two companies, a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company and a chemical company. After coding the interviews, catalyst and barrier codes were clustered into themes, the results of which we report here. Additional planned interviews will provide a broader set of data that will further inform the categorization of catalysts and barriers to method adoption.

3 Findings- Catalysts

Thematic analysis of the data finds six themes that catalyze an organization's adoption of a new product development method: Confidence in the Method, Characteristics of the Method, Characteristics of the Practitioner, Practitioner Benefits, and Leadership, Organization. In Table 1 through Table 6, each theme is divided into sub-themes, for which definitions are provided. While the number of references docs not necessarily correlate with importance, for brevity, all sub-themes with fewer than 5 references are excluded.

4 Findings- Barriers

Thematic analysis of the data finds four themes that create barriers to an organization's adoption of a new product development method: Organization, Characteristics of the Method, Characteristics of the Practitioner, and Practitioner Drawbacks. Table 7 through Table 10 document each theme within the barrier category.

We note that while some themes in barriers have reciprocal themes in catalysts, for example "Method saves time" vs "Method slows me down," other themes are asymmetric, appearing as a catalyst or barrier, but not both, for example "Method provides formal structure" appears as a catalyst, but there is not corresponding barrier for a method that does not do so. In particular, none of the catalysts within the leadership theme show reciprocal barriers. We suspect the latter arises at least in part due to interviewee concern about mentioning negative comments with respect to leadership, and in general we note such asymmetry arises in instances where the opposite of a theme is the non-existence of it e.g. one can identify a bug in software, but rarely does one note the non-existence of bugs. We also note that one theme, "The organization mandates use of the method" is perceived in some instances as a catalyst to adoption, and in others as a barrier.

5 Areas for feedback & development

The primary feedback that the authors are seeking is to determine if the identified catalysts and barriers align with the lived experiences of the industry members. Further, the authors' current background literature is limited to work within the realm of design science and therefore, would benefit from recommendations of other works that may have looked into the adoption of design tools from other perspectives and backgrounds. We would also welcome feedback on our process and how to make the results more impactful for industry.

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No.2230550. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

References

References and Notes

Araujo, C., Benedetto-Neto, H., Campello, A., Segre, F. and Wright, I. (1996) 'The utilization of product development methods: A survey of UK industry', Journal of Engeering Design, 7(3), pp. 265-277.

Chámi, M. and Bruel, J.-M. 'A survey on MBSE adoption challenges'. INCOSE EMEA Sector Systems Engineering Conference (INCOSE EMEASEC 2018), 1-16.

Daalhuizen, J. J. (2014) 'Method Usage in Design: How methods function as mental tools for designers'.

Dorst, K. (2008) 'Design research: a revolution-waiting-to-happen', Design Studies, 29(1), pp. 4-11.

Frost, R. (1999) 'Why does industry ignore design science?'.

Purwandani, J. A. and Michaud, G. (2021) 'What are the drivers and barriers for green business practice adoption for SMEs?', Environment Systems and Decisions, 41(4), pp. 577-593.

Saldana, J. (2016) The coding manualfor qualitative researchers. 3rd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Wallace, K. (2011) 'Transferring design methods into practice', The future of design methodology·. Springer, pp. 239-248.