Maintaining Professional Competence in Innovation Organizations

Public organizations concerned with planning and implementation of developmental activity, education, research and development, as well as private firms delivering professional services and operating in a rapidly changing socio-economic environment are often concerned mainly with innovation, problem solving and learning rather than with the production of any tangible outputs. The income streams of such organizations also often stem from environmental support rather than from a sale of widgets. Sustaining developmental activity in part requires maintaining such organizations at a high level of productivity, which calls for special design considerations that this paper attempts to delineate. A formal model of the production, knowledge acquisition and governance functions of an innovation organization is developed and experimented with through computer simulation using the heuristical approach of system dynamics. The analysis suggests that professional competence in organizations may atrophy, eventually leading to demise, due to the development of a governance system that is largely driven by manifest authority unless a concerted effort is made to preserve collegial decision roles. In terms of organizational design, this translates into considering constituents other than those used normally for creating mechanistic and organic components of organizational structure. Since professional competence often emanates from collegial rather than manifest processes, an important aspect of the design is to sustain collegial roles. Since collegial roles are undefined, their maintenance calls for placing constraints on manifest roles with prolific expansion potential. A promising design constituent for sustaining an appropriate governance system for an innovation organization appears to be a chartering process that should create an organizational manga carta clearly stating the limitations of the manifest roles. Other possible entry points into the system, albeit external, include bringing in leadership perspectives and linking with market forces that should allow to curtail prolific expansion of manifest roles.