Continuity and Transition in Corporate Capability: Incentives, Management, and Innovation at Dofasco, Inc

environments which exhibited variations in the configuration of their constituents (suppliers, customers, research agencies, government, and competitors) influenced the rate at which the steel industries of Japan and the U.S. adopted a single technique, oxygen steelmaking (BOF) [12]. Roger Miller used a similar approach to compare the speed with which new techniques pread among European and American steelmakers over a ten year period [15]. These studies uggest that firms which possess generalized innovation-supporting characteristics (including informal administrative structures, leaders with experience related to new processes, initiators who occupy positions near the top of the hierarchy, and high levels of "openness" to environmental stimuli) progress more rapidly through the stages of decision-making (search, approval, and implementation) that underpins innovation.