Framing innovation success, failure, and transformation: A systematic literature review
Orlagh Reynolds, Aideen O'Dochartaigh, Enrico Secchi, Donna Marshall, Andrea Prothero
kHUB post date: January 2025
Originally published: 15 November 2023 (PDMA JPIM • Vol. 42, Issue 1 • January 2025)
Read time: 65 minutes
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Framing is a powerful tool shaping innovation success, failure, and transformation. However, innovation framing is not recognized as a unified domain of research and the extant literature is theoretically fragmented across diverse fields. Inconsistencies in definition and operationalization of constructs stall theoretical advancement of innovation framing theory and practice. Importantly, an understanding of the underlying mechanisms enabling framing to mediate innovation outcomes has been missing. Using a systematic literature review (SLR), we integrate diverse theoretical perspectives. Stemming from this, we develop a unified conceptual framework of innovation framing. In so doing we make three vital contributions to the field. First, we develop a typology of construct categories of innovation framing, defining these framing concepts and identifying their theoretical basis. Next, we emphasize the importance of key mechanisms (sensemaking, interpretive flexibility, consensus) in explaining innovation outcomes. Our third contribution identifies innovation stage-specific differences in the role of framing processes, frame types and characteristics, and the temporal elements of these. Finally, we discuss the implications of our research for innovation practitioners, while concluding with a detailed agenda for future innovation framing research.
Practitioner Points
- Innovation practitioners can now recognize when and how to develop the frames of individuals such as individual team members or end users (micro frames), the frames that will be used in portraying an innovation to diverse groups of innovation stakeholders (meso frames), as well as eventually in shaping fields and institutions (macro).
- Innovation practitioners can use the framing paths identified for each mechanism to move through each as innovations progress, establishing initial sensemaking, leverage the benefits and reduce the risks of interpretive flexibility to achieve strategic ambidexterity, and finally achieving and maintaining favorable consensus.
- The stage specific, temporal nature of framing identified here enables innovation practitioners to follow framing guidance depending on which point of the innovation journey they are at creation and definition, adoption and implementation, or development and management.