The professor of management received honors during the society’s spring conference.
Kevin O’Mara, executive director of the Doherty Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and professor of management in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, received the Best Paper Award at the Academy of Business Research spring conference, held March 23-25 in New Orleans.
The paper titled, “The Interactions and Intersections of Structure and Culture: Why Firms Can’t Innovate,” offers recommendations to firms attempting to initiate and maintain an innovative culture and, thus, an innovative organization.
The paper’s abstract reads:
“For the past decade a survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) indicates that innovation is among the top 3 priorities of CEOs each and every year. In fact, no other measure comes close. There are two important implications of these results. First, innovation is incredibly crucial for the current and future success of firms in today’s hyper-competitive economy. Second, despite the clarion calls for innovation, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on innovation, the seemingly endless hours devoted to innovation training, and the expansive cottage industry that exploded around the innovation concept, companies still cannot innovate at the level they desire. Otherwise, if firms understood how to innovation, it would not be a top 3 priority since it was being done. Which begs the question again – ‘why can’t firms innovate?’
“This conceptual paper is loosely based on Chandler (1962) seminal work on strategy and structure which argued a firm should first establish a strategy and then design a structure to support that structure, not the other way around. This paper presents an explanation for the dire state of corporate innovation that the real problem is companies attempting to force an innovative culture into an existing (and likely highly efficient and effective) organizational structure. Analogies involving engineering versus farming and designing versus cultivating are utilized to flush out the underlying principles of the paper. Recommendations are made to firms attempting to initiate and maintain an innovative culture and, thus, an innovative organization.”