Knowledge at the Edge: Moving A While Hoping for B

Edge-driven innovation is gaining recognition from organizational strategists as an important source of explorative capability. Yet its effectiveness depends on being able to move practices accomplished by front-line workers as they interact with customers. This paper presents a study of a large retail chain that has implemented centrally driven initiatives for fostering edge-based innovation. What follows is an account of how these initiatives have played out and, in particular, why they have not succeeded in a meaningful way. We locate the source of dysfunctional knowledge movement within the relationships among those at the edge—between front-line workers and their supervisors, and between these supervisors and their superiors. We develop managerial archetypes to illustrate the nature of these relationships. We then suggest that they underlie ways that valuable tacit knowledge is getting stuck and mundane explicit knowledge is being moved rapidly. This system also reinforces the practices of senior leadership at headquarters, since it filters out edge-based practices that might surface systemic problems. No mechanism exists for decision rights to evolve, and since the allocation of decision rights reinforces the relationships between the managerial archetypes and senior leadership, so the system neatly perpetuates itself. From the perspective of senior management the system is very sensible—it reinforces their practices, shields them from having to relinquish decision rights, and creates the appearance of knowledge movement. However, it leaves the overall organization with little capacity for moving the kind of real knowledge that has the biggest impact.