True Innovators Draw on Different Cultures and Multiple Identities
When a corporation lets ideas from varied and far fields infiltrate its organizational culture the result may be chaos, but may also be strategic innovation. In A Cultural Quest: A Study of Organizational Use of New Cultural Resources in Strategy Formation, (with Violina Rindova, McCombs School of Business, and Elena Dalpiaz, Department of Management and Technology, in Organization Science, Vol. 22, No. 2, March-April 2011, pp. 413-431, doi: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0537), the last of a streak of scholarly articles co-authored by Davide Ravasi (Department of Management and Technology), the authors develop a robust theoretical model that relates the use of new cultural resources to the development of unconventional strategies and strategic versatility.
Recent sociological research conceptualizes culture as a flexible toolkit (or repertoire) of cultural resources (concepts, stories, symbols, rituals) that are used by individuals to develop different strategies of action and to achieve different goals. Through the historical case study of the Italian manufacturer of household products Alessi, Ravasi and his colleagues show the benefits, as well as the difficulties, a company faces developing an organizational cultural repertoire which incorporates resources from fields conceptually far from its industry.
The authors analyze four rounds of resources incorporation from 1970 to 2006 (when the company successively incorporated resources from the registers of art, craft, anthropology and psychoanalysis) and observe how the introduction of new ideas by Alberto Alessi – the third generation entrepreneur – would often generate clashes with the incumbent culture, followed by a process of "cultural repertoire enrichment", which would eventually lead to "identity redefinitions" encompassing organizational and productive changes. The availability of cultural resources from different fields would translate, thus, into strategic innovation. The process is not one of cultural substitution, but of cultural enrichment, meaning that resources from the four registers now coexist and allow Alessi strong strategic flexibility.
The authors mapped the changes in the content of Alessi corporate texts, traced the incorporation of new concepts, analyzed their effects on Alessi's actual organizational practices and examined the effects of the practices on Alessi's product-market strategies. "We observed", they write, "that the changing practices of product development, production, marketing and distribution enabled Alessi to compete in the marketplace through strategies of action that were new not only for Alessi but also to the industry. This analysis led to the identification of unconventional strategies and strategic versatility as strategic outcomes".
Ravasi and his colleagues give a compelling and convincing narrative of the process, showing that a manufacturer with a standard industry cultural repertoire in 1970 could adopt new cultural resources through the years, thus creating brand new market segments; "many of these segments", the authors add, "afforded the company higher price premia (...) Thus, cultural repertoire enrichment led to the development of new strategies that were both unconventional and appropriate and appealing".
The use of identity and culture as resources supporting decision making is at the centre of Ravasi's scholarly work, which developed through historical case studies (e.g. Bang & Olufsen, Oticon, 3M) and the collaboration with scholars from international business schools. Among the published outputs: Davide Ravasi and Majken Shultz (Copenhagen Business School), Responding to Organizational Identity Threats: Exploring the Role of Organizational Culture (Academy of Management Journal, Volume 49, Number 3/2006, pages 433-458); Annemette Kjærgaard, Mette Morsing (both Copenhagen Business School) and Davide Ravasi, Mediating Identity: A Study of Media Influence on Organizational Identity Construction in a Celebrity Firm (Journal of Management Studies 48:3 May 2011 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6486.2010.00954.x) and Davide Ravasi and Nelson Phillips (Imperial College London), Strategies of Alignment: Organizational identity Management and Strategic Change at Bang & Olufsen (Strategic Organization, May 2011, Vol. 9, No 2, doi: 10.1177/1476127011403453).