Organizational innovation impacts: a selective survey

Abstract

Innovation has been the subject of several lines of research in the last few decades. An exploratory analysis of the literature on the impacts of organisational innovation was made with a focus on organisational innovation, an innovation type that has been relatively neglected by the literature, compared with other innovation types, which has received the bulk of attention in the academic debate. The methodology of this research is entirely based on a literature review. It is an initial exploratory literature review, extracted from journals ranked in the two first quartiles of a major referential database. This study allowed to extract several significant contributions to the debate. The main limitations of the present study are related mainly with the limits imposed for the selection of articles. The contributions of this research include the identification and presentation of the effects of this kind of innovation, the acknowledgement of important interrelationships between the impacts of organizational innovation, other types of innovation and affected areas, and a summary presentation of what has already been done in this field. More research on the subject is needed because it is still relatively scarce, definitions are not completely consolidated, and conceptual relationships or generalisations are yet incipient.