The Theory Of Innovative Enterprise

This chapter outlines the theory of innovative enterprise, showing how it provides a framework for explaining the growth and performance of the firm, and drawing out the methodological, ideological, and political implications of the theory. In combination with strategic control and financial commitment, key to the success of the corporation is organizational integration, which is a set of social relations that provides participants in a complex division of labor with the incentives to cooperate in contributing their skills and efforts toward the achievement of common goals. Organizational integration provides an essential social condition for an enterprise to engage in and make use of collective and cumulative, or organizational, learning. Through organizational integration, people in a hierarchical and functional division of labor work together to create value that would otherwise not exist.