1.

Introduction: building bridges between

innovation and project management research
Andrew Davies, Sylvain Lenfle, Christoph H. Loch and
Christophe Midler

INTRODUCTION

This inaugural edition of the Elgar Handbook on Innovation and Project Management is
the first of its kind to explore the theoretical and practical connections between the man-
agement of innovation and projects. The Handbook examines the management of innovative
projects in various forms (e.g. R&D, new product development, agile, collaboration, trust and
ambidexterity) and diverse contexts (e.g. aerospace, defence, automotive, nuclear power, cul-
tural industries, social innovation and urban railway systems). It introduces new theoretical
and empirical research by leading scholars examining how organizations launch and manage
innovative projects to compete in global markets and tackle some of the immense economic,
social and environmental challenges facing organizations and societies in the 21st century.
In this introductory chapter, we begin by suggesting that the ability to successfully con-
ceive and execute innovative projects is increasingly important to the survival and prosperity
of organizations – firms, start-ups, government bodies, NGOs and many others – particu-
larly when conditions are increasingly uncertain, complex and rapidly changing. We then
briefly explain how project management and innovative studies emerged and developed as
two largely distinct literatures, offering quite different conceptual insights and contrasting
practical guidance on how to manage innovative projects. Next, we introduce key theoreti-
cal research developed by pioneering scholars working at the interface between innovation
and project management. We then provide a summary of the chapters in the four parts of the
Handbook and how they advance our thinking by exploring synergies and building bridges
between innovation, project management and adjacent research. We end by identifying prom-
ising new avenues of research to improve our understanding and offer practical guidance on
how to manage innovative projects in the future.

MANAGING INNOVATIVE PROJECTS: A KEY CHALLENGE FACING

ORGANIZATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Projects bring together people and other resources in a temporary organization to produce
novel, one-off or highly customized products, services, outcomes or events as diverse as air-
craft, operas, the Olympics or new processes and capabilities within an organization. But
they play an even more fundamental role as the engine of innovation – developing and imple-
menting novel ideas – in globally competitive markets. Firms depend on projects to under-
take exploratory R&D, develop novel technologies, design, test and deploy new products and

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2 Handbook on innovation and project management

services, launch entrepreneurial start-ups and internal corporate ventures, introduce new pro-
cesses and organizational changes and implement entirely new business models. As new ideas
proliferating rapidly across the internet are more easily shared or copied, product life cycles
become shorter in some industries and others face major technological disruptions, firms rely
on projects to create new products and services before existing ones become obsolete across
industries (e.g. smart phones, aviation, electric vehicles, renewable energy and digital plat-
forms). Projects are also used to tackle sustainability strategies and the political, supply chain
and trade disruptions affecting a growing number of industries in recent years. As a result,
many firms are now run like a collection of projects to create flexible, faster and flatter struc-
tures focused on problem-solving and innovation.
Whereas projects in the private sector are undertaken by firms to gain competitive advan-
tage and increase profitability and shareholder wealth, those in the public sector are created
to maximize public welfare, create social value or address societal challenges. In many cases,
the profit and non-profit boundary is blurred in projects involving multiple public, private
and hybrid organizations (e.g. NGOs and research institutes) in developed and developing
countries. Governments, manufacturers, international bodies, universities, consultancies and
other organizations often collaborate in large, inter-organizational projects to tackle complex,
urgent and challenging social, political and ecological problems (e.g. retrofitting homes and
workplaces in cities, providing humanitarian aid or dealing with ecological disasters) and
achieve transformational societal missions (e.g. space exploration, vaccine development and
nuclear fusion).

Projects, Innovation and Operations

Until the late 20th century, many large firms became successful by improving productive
operations rather than projects (Peters and Waterman, 1982). Designed to perform standard-
ized routines in stable, predictable and growing markets, high-volume operations created
value for organizations over the past century through a stream of advances in mass produc-
tion, such as Henry Ford’s assembly line, Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management, Total
Quality Management, lean production and mass customization (although continuous improve-
ment and gradual change have always been important competitive tools). Formal, bureaucratic
and mechanistic forms of large-scale organization were established to deal with routine opera-
tions performed by engineering, manufacturing, sales and other functional units.
Firms that had previously focused on improving their operations, however, struggled to
adapt to an increasingly volatile, rapidly changing and uncertain environment in the 1970s
and 1980s. They could no longer survive by only improving their operations and began to
focus on projects to unlock new sources of innovation and competitive advantage (Peters and
Waterman, 1982). Concepts introduced to describe project-based organizations as organic
(Burns and Stalker, 1961), adaptive (Bennis, 1966) adhocracies (Toffler, 1970; Mintzberg,
1979) were ideas borne from more turbulent conditions and the incessant pressure to innovate
and change. The project-based firm (Gann and Salter, 2000 Whitley, 2006), project-based
organization (Hobday, 2000; Lundin et al., 2015) and post-bureaucratic organization (Kellog
et al., 2006) are some of the more recent attempts to capture the variety of innovation-oriented
forms of project organizing.
It may be misleading to suggest, however, that projects are simply displacing operations
as the dominant form of organization in the 21st century, as some authors claim (Shenhar

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 Introduction 3

and Dvir, 2007; Neito-Rodriguez, 2021), when projects have become even more closely cou-
pled with different types of productive operations (Benghozi et al., 2000; Le Masson et al.,
2010). As illustrated in Figure 1.1, upstream R&D projects create new knowledge of materi-
als, technologies and intangible services that are eventually incorporated downstream in new
product development projects (Imaï et al., 1985; Wheelwright and Clark, 1992). New ideas,
technologies, materials and practices are combined, tested and implemented in new product
development projects before moving further downstream into various stages of production
from low- (unit and batch) to high-volume (mass and continuous flow) operations.
From this perspective, new product and new process development projects are the “engine
of innovation” (Randolph and Posner, 1988; Bowen et al., 1994; Rosenbloom and Spencer,
1996; Midler and Navarre, 2004) driving all productive operations, and the unit stage of novel,
one-off and highly customized production is entirely based on projects (Davies and Hobday,
2005), such as capital goods, architecture, advertising, consulting and sporting events. As the
pace of innovation accelerated in the late 20th century, batch and mass production operations
supported by digital technologies had to become more flexible to produce an increasing variety
of products at lower costs. In recent years, many mass-producers – IBM, Renault and Coco-
Cola among others – have outsourced high-volume manufacturing operations and become
orchestrators of a network of external suppliers involved in product development projects.

Innovative Projects Past and Present

Until scholars began to recognize that innovation requires project forms of organization, gen-
eral management theory had surprisingly little or nothing to say about the subject. Yet projects
have always been important throughout history as the organizational form used to launch new
ventures, develop new technologies and coordinate multiple parties involved in any large-
scale endeavour, such as building the first canal, railway and telegraph networks (Scranton,
2015; Davies, 2017). In a new synthesis of public and private power, scientists, politicians,

Continuous Flow

Mass Production

Mass Customization
New Product
R&D Projects Development
Projects Large Batch

Small Batch

Unit/Project

Note:   project-based activities shaded in grey.

Figure 1.1  Projects, innovation and operations

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4 Handbook on innovation and project management

engineers and contractors collaborated on construction, energy and transportation projects,

often on a gigantic scale, such as the American Pacific Railway or the Panama Canal, creating
the infrastructure underpinning the rise of modern industrial societies in the 19th and early
20th centuries (Berman, 1982).
Projects really came of age, however, during and after the Second World War when new
forms of project and matrix structures and the “systems approach” to project management
were created to develop America’s radically new weapons and space exploration technolo-
gies, such as the Manhattan Project that produced the world’s first atomic bomb in 1945,
the Atlas and Polaris ballistic missiles in the 1950s and NASA’s Apollo moon landing in the
1960s (Sayles and Chandler, 1971; Sapolsky, 1972; Johnson, 1997; Hughes, 1998). America’s
aerospace-generated systems approach to project management quickly spread since the 1960s
to most other organizations and industries elsewhere in the world involved developing innova-
tive new products and services, building complex systems, infrastructure, buildings and other
assets, and trying to solve some of the grand challenges facing societies, such as the climate
emergency and ecological destruction (Morris, 1994, 2013; Hughes, 2004). For example, the
Apple New Product Process (ANPP) for developing and bringing breakthrough innovations to
market, such as the iMac and iPhone, is based on NASA’s systems approach to project man-
agement used for the Apollo moon landing in the 1960s.
A vast array of innovative projects are behind the accelerated pace of Schumpeterian “crea-
tive destruction” in the 21st century. Established industries dominated by a few global firms
have already been transformed by revolutionary new product development projects led by
outsiders with the imagination and insight to anticipate what customers in the future might
value and desire, such as Amazon’s dominance of retail, Apple’s iPhone or the phone-based
MPESA payment system. The creation of entirely new industries (e.g. nuclear fusion, hyper-
loop transportation and hydrogen low-carbon energy) is often initiated by large, complex
inter-organizational R&D projects sharing people, resources and facilities often located in
many countries. Construction, architecture and other project-based industries that have been
less susceptible to disruption are finally being opened to up an influx of new digital tech-
nologies and practices. Frank Gehry, for example, adopted project software originally used in
aerospace to design some of the world’s most iconic buildings, starting with the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao, Spain. New types of project-based organizations have emerged in recent
years focused entirely on working in overlapping, collaborative projects to generate ideas,
experiment and produce novelty, such as Thomas Heatherwick’s London design studio’s inno-
vations ranging from products (e.g. London’s fuel-efficient bus) to experimental buildings (e.g.
the UK Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai) and urban spaces (e.g. Little Island in
New York). Most importantly, many innovative projects are underway and urgently needed to
solve some of the most pressing problems and grand challenges of our time, such as design-
ing the zero-carbon, energy-efficient infrastructure or developing vaccines at a rapid pace to
prevent the next global pandemic.

Project Society and Challenge of Innovation

“Projectification” is the term used to describe the far-reaching and ongoing transformation
of work and daily life brought about by the spread of project organizing since the mid-1960s
from traditional project-based industries (e.g. construction, civil engineering, defence and
aerospace) to almost every part of society (Midler, 1995, 2019a). More recently labels such the

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 Introduction 5

“project society” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Lundin et al., 2015) and “project economy”
(Nieto-Rodriquez, 2021) have been proposed to underline the significance of this global phe-
nomenon. Although exact data is difficult to obtain, an indicator of the global economic activ-
ity undertaken as projects is fixed capital formation, which has been increasing steadily as a
percentage of global GDP. World Bank data in 2015 indicated that 23 per cent of the world’s
$114 trillion GDP is fixed capital formation (construction, infrastructure and capital goods),
which is almost entirely project-based, and in some newly industrializing countries the figure
is much higher – 31 per cent in India and 46 per cent in China (Davies, 2017). The extent of
projectification, however, is likely to be much greater as these figures fail to capture the grow-
ing share of project work in organizations involving all non-routine work with a specified
target, such as R&D, new product development, organizational change and other initiatives. In
Germany, for example, projects were estimated to account for 33 per cent of total GDP in 2013
(Schoper et al., 2018) and as much as 41 per cent in 2019 (Neito-Rodriguez, 2021).
In recent years, many innovations have been applied to improve the performance of pro-
jects in one industry before spreading to others, such as new product development in auto-
motives based on heavyweight project management and concurrent engineering (Clark and
Fujimoto, 1991), digital technologies offering a “single source of information” to coordinate
complex projects in aerospace, collaborative models of integrated project delivery in con-
struction (Whyte, 2019) and agile development in software (Boehm, 1988). Despite efforts to
increase productivity by learning from the experience of executing an ever-increasing number
of projects, surprisingly few achieve their cost, time, quality and longer-term objectives. In
their study of 600 projects in public, private and non-profit sectors, for example, Shenhar and
Dvir (2007) found that 85 per cent failed to achieve their time and cost objectives. Efforts to
improve performance are even more challenging when projects are highly innovative in rap-
idly changing and uncertain environments.
When we turn to the literature to understand how to improve the management of innovative
projects, however, we find two distinct fields of study – “project management” and “innova-
tion studies” – with entirely different scholarly motivations offering opposing interpretations
and conflicting advice. Some of the key differences between project and innovation manage-
ment are summarized in Table 1.1.

HOW “INNOVATION” IS CONCEPTUALIZED IN PROJECT

MANAGEMENT

The origins of project management can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s when scientists,
engineers and managers working on large American defence and aerospace projects began to
articulate and codify the new systems approach comprising a cluster of interrelated develop-
ments in project management, systems engineering and operations research (Johnson, 1997;
Hughes, 1998).

Systems Approach to Project Management: Controlled Stage-Gate Process

After the great breakthrough projects of the 1950s, which produced a few spectacular suc-
cesses but also many failures, in spite of virtually unlimited budgets (Art 1972), an explic-
itly more disciplined and “professional” approach to project control was developed under the

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6 Handbook on innovation and project management

Table 1.1  Comparing innovation and project management: key differences

Project management Innovation management

Theoretical Single (systems theory) Multiple (e.g. contingency theory,
foundations evolutionary theory, industrial
economics, behavioural theory of firm)
Approach Optimizing, fixed, stage-gate Adaptive, emergent, contingent
process based structure based
View of projects Projects are similar Projects differ
Goal Getting task completed on time, Achieving business results in existing
within budget and requirements for and new markets
client
Definition of success Achieving project goals, intolerance Achieving business strategy, tolerant
of failure of failure
Management style One size fits all Adapt to variation in the environment
Managerial level Middle management/project Top management
management
Tasks Predictable or plannable, linear Uncertain, complex, non-linear,
(controlled sequential stages) interdependent (sequential, concurrent
and parallel)
Planning Plan at the outset and replan as Plan, replan and adjust over time to
needed, put things back on track changes in the environment
Approach to Focus on negative risk, methods Focus on opportunities, positive risk,
uncertainty of risk management, controlling risk willingness
progress, avoiding deviations
Management focus Operational, tools and techniques Strategy, design and structures, as well
as processes and tools
Environment Minimal, detached after project is Affects projects as structure and
influence launched process during planning and execution

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Project management tools, techniques and organiza-
tions (e.g. pure project and matrix structures) were created to combine functional and project
lines of authority, integrate specialized knowledge and deliver complex, novel projects on
time, to budget and according to specification (Sayles and Chandler, 1971; Johnson, 2002).
Indeed, project management is aptly described as a key innovation in how innovation can
be accomplished (Gemünden et al., 2013). Systems engineering techniques were developed
to coordinate the design, development and integration of complex technological systems
(Sapolsky, 1972). Operations research emerged as a discipline to analyse military operations
within which projects were conceived and executed. Articles on project management began
to appear in journals (Gaddis, 1959), the first textbooks on the subject were published (e.g.
Cleland and King, 1968) and professional project management associations were founded in
the United States and Europe – including the International Project Management Association
(IPMA) in 1967, the Project Management Institute (PMI) in 1969 and the Association for
Project Management (APM) in 1972.

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 Introduction 7

From its foundation as a discipline in the 1960s until very recently, project management
research and practice have been dominated by the assumption that there is a standardized
“one-size-fits-all” model applicable to the management of all types of projects (e.g. Project
Management Body of Knowledge [PMBoK]). Advocates of project management emphasized
its practical importance and the need for people trained in highly standardized guidelines,
processes and bodies of knowledge, such as the PMI’s PMBoK (PMI, 2021). Although defi-
nitions vary, most project management textbooks and handbooks agree that projects can be
defined as unique, one-time endeavours undertaken to produce a novel, one-off product, event
or outcome (Cleland and King, 1968; Maylor, 2005; Pinto, 2010). Projects range in size from
large inter-organizational endeavours (such as the multinational project established in the
1990s to launch the International Space Station) to small projects undertaken by a department,
group or individuals in an organization. Success is traditionally measured in terms of whether
projects achieve a predefined goal within time, cost and quality – the so-called “iron triangle”
of project management. Projects are sometimes defined as complex because they incorporate
many interacting parts and functions, with inputs from members in various departments or
other organizations.
Projects are temporary because they have a start and end date and dissolve on comple-
tion of the task. According to the standardized model, projects should be planned, controlled
and managed in life cycle stages – the “stage-gate” approach originating in NASA’s Phased
Project Planning in the 1960s – from initiation through execution to commissioning and hand-
over, involving many tasks performed sequentially in distinct order, with some overlapping
or undertaken in parallel over time. Requirements and resources can be defined at the outset
(e.g. work packages, contingencies, cost and schedule estimates) and projects are executed as
planned. Various tools and techniques are employed to reduce risks and uncertainty and by
efforts to control and manage projects within time, cost and quality constraints.

Projects versus Operations

While project management is often treated as a management discipline in its own right (Morris,
1994; Morris et al., 2011), it is also part of the broader discipline of operations management,
where it applies to the unique, one-off production stage end of a spectrum from low to high-vol-
ume operations producing standardized products and services for mass markets (Wheelwright
and Clark, 1992; Browning, 2017). Project management textbooks, by contrast, often draw a
sharp distinction or dichotomy between unique, discrete and non-repetitive projects and stand-
ardized, ongoing and routine operations. Until recently, projects were often considered to be the
“antithesis of repetition” and ideally suited for achieving innovation and change (Pinto, 2010,
25–27). Despite recognizing that some projects contain “repetitive elements” (PMI, 2008, 5)
and that “the process by which it is delivered is often repeated over time” (Maylor, 2005, 5),
most scholars and professional bodies emphasized that this element of repetitiveness does not
undermine the “fundamental uniqueness of project work” (PMI, 2008, 5).
Perhaps because projects are defined in a singular way as entirely novel and unique, the lit-
erature rarely distinguishes between projects based on their degree of novelty (a core attribute
of innovation) and associated uncertainty. In practice, however, innovation undertaken by pro-
jects varies considerably from largely predictable and known incremental changes or adjust-
ments to products and services at one end of a spectrum to far-reaching radical changes and
breakthrough innovations that are new to the world at the other end. As the degree of novelty

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8 Handbook on innovation and project management

increases, projects become increasingly uncertain, particularly but not only during the “front-
end” planning phase when they involve fuzzy, ill-defined customer requirements, unknown
technological possibilities and many other contingencies that cannot be foreseen at the outset
and may disrupt carefully prepared plans during execution. Different types of project organi-
zations and processes are, therefore, required to match varying degrees of innovation.
As we will see below, several scholars have suggested that traditional project management
structures, processes and techniques designed for stability and predictability are unable to
deal with increasingly novel, changing and unpredictable projects (Pich et al., 2002; Loch
et al., 2006; Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). Revisiting the historical origins of project management,
Lenfle and Loch (2010) challenge the underlying assumption of the discipline that the control,
phased-based standardized model was developed and widely used on the Manhattan, Atlas,
Apollo and other systems. They show that these projects had to be flexible and adaptive to
deal with unforeseeable uncertainties and developed many techniques (not considered in tra-
ditional project management) to experiment and test alternative solutions, such as the parallel
development of new technologies and experiential learning from the feedback gained during
project execution.

Project Management Embraces Theory

Over the past few decades, there have been several attempts to import theories from other dis-
ciplines to develop a more rigorous understanding of project management (Söderlund, 2011).
Although innovation may not always take centre stage, this work is important because it pro-
vides conceptual background for several chapters in this Handbook and research seeking to
build bridges between project management and innovation.
In the 1980s, some prominent scholars working inside the discipline began to criticize the
traditional model of project management for an almost obsessive focus on execution and failure
to consider the key strategic conditions – including technological and organizational innova-
tion – shaping how projects are successfully planned and delivered in different organizational
and institutional contexts (Morris and Hough, 1987). Morris (1994) advocated the need for a
new paradigm – the “management of projects” – to understand how projects are managed in
their entirety from front-end definition, through execution to commission, start-up and opera-
tions. Morris (1994 and 2013) suggested that innovation and organization theory (e.g. Burns
and Stalker, 1961) provide useful frameworks for identifying how project organizations are
configured in various ways to address different technological and market environments. Many
other leading scholars have since attempted to reinvigorate the field of project management
by developing a broader, more theoretically informed view of the subject (Morris et al., 2011),
striving for greater disciplinary recognition for scholarly research by improving the quality of
academic journals particularly the International Journal of Project Management and Project
Management Journal.
In the 1990s, a growing number of scholars working outside the discipline have become
increasingly interested in understanding how projects are organized, but widely dissatisfied
with how they are conceptualized in the traditional project management literature. In what is
now known as “project studies” (Geraldi and Söderlund, 2018), this research first emerged in
Scandinavia and France when scholars drew upon organization theory to provide new insights
and perspectives on how organizations work together in “temporary” projects and how pro-
jects are embedded in “permanent” organizations (Midler, 1993; Giard and Midler, 1993;

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 Introduction 9

Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Jolivet and Navarre, 1996). Concerned with understanding how
projects evolve in different contexts, project studies emphasize that projects both shape and
are shaped by the wider development of organizations, globalization, networks, fields, indus-
tries and societies. This work recognizes that “no project is an island” (Engwall, 2003): what
happens inside a project must be understood in its broader organizational context and in rela-
tion to past, current and future projects.
Project studies have grown and diversified since the late 1990s to encompass other disci-
plines such as economic geography (Grabher, 2001) and perspectives such as network theory
(Manning and Sydow, 2011; Manning, 2017) and institutional theory (Söderlund and Sydow ,
2019). This is particularly evident in research exploring the link between projects and innova-
tion (e.g. Midler, 1995; Lindkvist et al., 1998; Hobday, 2000; Gann and Salter, 2000; Lenfle,
2016), organizational learning (Lundin and Midler, 1998; Brady and Davies, 2004), experi-
mentation (Gillier and Lenfle, 2019; Ben Mahmoud-Jouini and Midler, 2020), design theory
(Lenfle, 2016), and digitally enabled project delivery models (Whyte, 2019). Several seminal
contributions on the dilemmas and challenges of temporary organizing can be found in two
special issues of Organization Studies (Sydow et al., 2004; Bakker et al., 2016).
Since the early 2000s, scholars applied various theoretical perspectives to understand the
novel governance, organizational and institutional arrangements for managing increasingly
large-scale, global megaprojects and their role as vehicles for transformational change. First,
a study of 60 complex and uncertain “large-engineering projects” (e.g. offshore oil platforms,
hydroelectric dams and subways) around the world found that front-end strategizing, new forms
of governance and careful risk management contributed more to successful outcomes than con-
ventional execution-oriented project management (Miller and Lessard, 2000). Second, a grow-
ing body of research on “megaprojects” that cost US$1 billion or more – including “Big Science”
R&D projects (e.g. the Large Hadron Collider) behind breakthroughs in science and radical tech-
nological innovation – has found that such projects are frequently late and over budget because
of inadequate front-end planning and behavioural bias, primarily due to unrealistic assumptions
and overly optimistic expectations about initial budgets and schedules (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003;
Flyvbjerg, 2014, 2017) but also political tensions about partial goals (Jimoh et al., 2022). Third,
another stream of research examines the range of traditional and new institutional arrange-
ments for “global projects” (e.g. energy and transportation infrastructure) and how stakeholder
alignment and political conflicts are addressed when various parties become involved in large,
temporary cross-national, public–private partnerships (Scott et al., 2011; Levitt et al., 2019).
Despite efforts to rethink the foundations of the discipline, the development and adoption of
new theories have been slow and erratic (Huff, 2016). Many project management professionals
and academics teaching the subject in business schools and engineering departments continue
to promote the standardized model and fail to distinguish between projects according to their
degree of innovation and uncertainty and ignore the context which shapes their development.
Project management associations, in particular, tend to adhere to the normative view of how a
project ought to be managed (as described in various bodies of knowledge), rather than the man-
ifold ways in which they actually occur and are managed in different contexts around the world.

Project Novelty, Complexity and Flexibility

The classic view of “how projects ought to be managed in general” was, however, flawed
almost from the outset. In the study that is often cited as coining the term “stage gate process”

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10 Handbook on innovation and project management

(see next section), Cooper (1983, 5) conceded early on that “the new product manager is …
faced with the complex task of managing a highly uncertain endeavor where many things
must be done properly and a single miscue can spell disaster”. This statement is compatible
with the view that projects represent “bundles” of challenges that do not all pull in the same
direction. Despite recognizing that different challenge configurations must be treated differ-
ently, the stage-gate blueprint ended up being used as a single standard process for handling
projects. But work in the early 21st century clearly spread the realization (rediscovering what
the RAND analysts knew in the 1950s; see Lenfle and Loch, 2010) that different projects
require different processes (e.g., Shenhar and Dvir, 2007; Loch et al., 2006).
This is illustrated in Figure 1.2, which shows that the demands on project management
flexibility differ depending on the extent of the novelty of the territory that the project attends
to (lower horizontal axis) and on the extent of stakeholder demands and complexity (upper
horizontal axis). The increasing novelty of the terrain is associated with decreasing knowledge
and related to uncertainty and unpredictability, which range from risk, where only the mag-
nitudes of known variables “tremble”, to unforeseeable uncertainty where neither risk fac-
tors nor actions can be foreseen. Novelty may stem from customer novelty (including “users”
such as government agencies), technical novelty, regulatory novelty (including sustainability),
system novelty (including integrating existing components with new interdependencies) or
process novelty (including the supply chain).
Novelty implies a demand for flexibility, including the ability to deviate from a plan fixed
at the outset requiring iteration (or plan adjustments), parallel trials or redundancy (e.g. overd-
esign to enable more outcomes, so changes in the terrain can be accommodated). All three
are managerial choices that represent sources of flexibility. Flexibility is required to adjust
not only to unforeseen or unforeseeable events but also to sensitivities and changing desires.

Figure 1.2  Project management flexibility is demanded by novelty and complexity

(dotted line refers to stakeholder complexity and solid line refers to territory)

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 Introduction 11

For example, we may know exactly what different configurations an innovative project aims
to produce, and yet still need to change the plan when stakeholders simply insist on it and
use their bargaining power to force through a change, even if that change results in poor
performance. Stakeholder change management requirements for flexibility in the project are,
therefore, quite different from the implications of uncertainty (the U-shaped dotted curve).
A single stakeholder or small coalition may have sufficient power to force through any sig-
nificant changes, whereas when there are several stakeholders, the priorities and interests of
each entity may play off against each other resulting in a so-called “average” outcome and
less need to change plans. When stakeholders become numerous and influence one another in
unpredictable ways, “taste swings” may occur requiring significant changes and considerable
flexibility for the project to proceed.
Complexity has a similar effect. Indeed, stakeholder involvement in a project may be con-
sidered a special instance of complexity. When complexity is low, participants are more likely
to agree to proposed changes that are easily implemented. As the system becomes complex,
stability is required to prevent the possible cascade of changes that might disrupt a project.
When complexity is very high (a “deeply complex system”), even small changes, wobbles or
overlooked interactions, especially over the long timeframes that highly complex projects
often take, can cause the whole system to shift. When such deep complexity causes uncer-
tainty, flexibility is increasingly necessary to absorb the inevitable, far-reaching changes. As
Figure 1.2 illustrates, when two projects are situated at different positions in this uncertainty-
complexity space, they require different levels of planning and execution flexibility and differ-
ent project processes to be able to respond to the demands of their environments.
Before looking at recent research that bridges the innovation and project management lit-
eratures, let us first consider the ways in which projects have been treated in some of the
classic and influential contributions to the innovation management literature. In describing
innovation research as providing an “outside view of project management”, let us remind
the reader that the separation between the two literatures has never been complete. Even the
earlier-mentioned article that coined the term “stage-gate process”, Cooper (1983) was a study
of product development (innovation), and the most popular product development textbook
(Ulrich and Eppinger, 2012) has a whole chapter on project management as the primary means
of getting product development done.

HOW “PROJECTS” ARE CONCEPTUALIZED IN INNOVATION

STUDIES

Unlike project management, scholars interested in innovation have not been constrained by
the need to create a standardized and universally applicable body of knowledge. Informed by
a variety of theoretical perspectives, the field of innovation studies is concerned with under-
standing the sources and dynamics of innovation (Abernathy and Utterback, 1978; Utterback,
1994) and how organizations implement new combinations of novel ideas, existing knowledge
and routines to achieve successful innovative outcomes (Nelson and Winter, 1982), such as
new products, services, processes, forms of organizing and business models. Firms require
dynamic capabilities to adapt, integrate and recombine internal and external resources, rou-
tines and competencies to manage innovation and keep pace with rapidly changing environ-
ments (Teece, 2009). As knowledge is imperfectly shared over time and geographies and

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12 Handbook on innovation and project management

across people, organizations and societies, existing and well-established ideas from one firm
or industry often appear new and creative as they change form and combine with other ideas
to provide innovative solutions to problems found in another firm or industry (Hargadon and
Sutton, 1997).

Diverse Theoretical Foundations of Innovation Studies

The origins of innovation studies (like project management) can be traced back to the 1950s
and 1960s when government-sponsored large-scale projects were established in the United
States to create complex military weapons and defence systems. Economists and social scien-
tists at the RAND Corporation sought to understand how to improve innovation in complex
projects, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and fighter jets, which were highly uncer-
tain in cost, time, quality and operational outcomes (Klein and Meckling, 1958). RAND stud-
ies identified the uncertainties associated with innovative projects and discrepancies between
estimated and actual costs and time spent on projects (Peck and Scherer, 1962).
The connection between innovation and project organizations became the focus of research
for scholars working in a variety of fields from the early 1960s, such as organizational
theory (Burns and Stalker, 1961), industrial economics (Freeman, 1974), product develop-
ment (Cooper, 1985), operations management (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992), entrepreneur-
ship (Kanter, 1990), strategy (Christensen, 1997) and organizational design (O’Reilly and
Tushman, 2004). Despite working in different disciplines and on different topics, all of these
contributions share the view that selecting, organizing and managing projects is the key to
successful innovation.
Scholars responsible for developing contingency theory in the 1960s challenged the pre-
vailing view that there is “one best way to organize” applicable to all industries (Woodward,
1965) and suggested that innovative project-based organizations require “organic” or “ad hoc”
structures to deal with novel, uncertain, complex and fast-changing environments (Burns and
Stalker, 1961; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967). Innovation is a core task performed in projects by
producers of novel or highly customized products, services or events (e.g. aerospace, defence,
telecoms, construction, advertising, film-making, consulting and complex capital goods)
(Woodward, 1965; Hobday, 1998, 2000). Everything these project-based organizations do
either internally for themselves (e.g. NASA) or for external customers (e.g. IBM) is accom-
plished through projects (Mintzberg, 1979).

Project Uncertainty and the Innovation Process

In his work on industrial innovation, Freeman (1974) emphasized that one of the main dif-
ficulties facing firms is managing the risks and uncertainties associated with R&D and inno-
vation projects. Following Knight’s (1921) classic distinction, Freeman (1974) suggested that
innovation involves projects ranging from truly uncertain (unmeasurable uncertainty) to less
risky (or measurable uncertainty) and more predictable ones. Subsequent research has shown
that traditional risk management and contingency planning may work well for stable projects
facing foreseeable uncertainties, whereas prototype testing, pilot plant production, iterative
learning from experience and parallel trials with alternative technologies may be required for
highly innovative projects facing unforeseeable uncertainties (Abernathy and Rosenbloom,
1969; Pich et al., 2002; Loch et al., 2006).

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 Introduction 13

A portfolio approach helps firms select projects by offsetting a few large, uncertain invest-
ments in radical innovation against a large number of less risky endeavours (Cooper et al.,
1997; Kock et al., 2015). Bottom-up, small-scale and unofficial innovation projects are some-
times undertaken by adventurous people and teams that deliberately circumvent strict port-
folio evaluation criteria. Firms often engage in “bootlegging” by tacitly accepting or even
encouraging under-the-table, covert innovative projects, which might not be undertaken
because they involve such a high degree of uncertainty (Schön, 1963; Freeman and Soete,
1997; Augsdörfer, 2005; Criscuolo et al., 2014).
Building on NASA’s approach to project planning in the 1960s, Cooper (1985) suggested
that the process of taking a new idea from concept to implementation resembles a funnel
with a series of stage gates in a project life cycle from the “fuzzy” conceptual, ideation phase
through product definition and development to testing, launch and production (Cooper, 1985;
Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 1987). In recent years, many large firms have shifted from a closed
model of innovation where the product development funnel is largely in-house to a more
open model formed with multiple parties in inter-organizational projects – such as Proctor &
Gamble, Intel, Google and Netflix – which leverage internal and external sources of ideas to
create innovative solutions to well-formulated problems (Chesbrough, 2003; Dahlander and
Gann, 2010; Chesbrough et al., 2014).
Innovative projects often fail to make it across “the valley of death” when they move from
the creative, uncertain front-end stage of R&D into what is often the more rigid, risk-averse
product development stage (Midler, 2019b). In the pharmaceutical industry, for example, drugs
that make a real impact on diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, depend
on nourishing exploratory, scientific research and development in laboratories and then help-
ing promising projects move across through a stringent regulatory process into clinical trials
and large-scale production.

Revolutionizing New Product Development

Pioneering research showed how product development was revolutionized by new lean devel-
opment approaches established by Japanese car manufacturers (e.g. Toyota and Honda) in
the 1970s and 1980s (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992; Clark and Fujimoto, 1991; Womack
et al., 1990). Japanese firms in electronic consumer goods industries (e.g. Fuji and Canon)
introduced the “overlay” approach for developing new products in overlapping or concurrent
phases (Takeuchi and Nonaka, 1986; Clark and Fujimoto, 1991; Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995;
Terwiesch and Loch, 1999), combining flexibility in product design with the acceleration in
pace offered by lean development. Using the overlay approach, product development teams
absorb new information and engage in iterative, trial-and-error learning and adaptive pro-
cess to narrow down the number of design alternatives they have to consider. In more recent
research, Edmondson (1999, 2012) suggests flexible product development projects engage in a
process of “teaming” to deal with uncertainties facing innovative projects, with leaders who
build the “psychological safety” required to tolerate the failures that come with experimenta-
tion and embrace the conflict that often arises when diverse groups of people with different
priorities and values work together.
The typology of innovation projects developed by Wheelwright and Clark (1992) is still
influential and widely used to understand how innovation is managed in fast-paced, uncer-
tain and globally competitive markets (Shenhar and Dvir, 2007; Midler, 2019a). Derivative,

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14 Handbook on innovation and project management

platform and breakthrough projects are distinguished according to the degree of novelty in
products and processes on a continuum from incremental to radical innovation. At the incre-
mental end of the spectrum, derivative projects undertake cost reductions or minor adjust-
ments to existing products or processes. On the other end, breakthrough projects are highly
uncertain because they create radically new processes or untried products, leading to revolu-
tionary improvements in productivity (e.g. Toyota’s just-in-time system of manufacturing) or
the creation of entirely new markets (e.g. the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2007). Situated
in the middle, platform projects create new processes or products for customers in existing
markets, such as each new generation of iPhone.
Wheelwright and Clark’s (1992) four-part classification of team structures – functional,
lightweight, heavyweight and autonomous – has also profoundly shaped how contemporary
scholars understand the types of organization required for innovative projects (e.g. Hobday,
2000; Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). An autonomous team structure, for example, is set up to deal
with unforeseeable uncertainties associated with breakthrough projects, such as integrating
new technologies and anticipating unknown user needs and future operational requirements.
Keeping the structure separate poses less of a threat to the mainstream business and pro-
vides the autonomy needed to develop the new technology without becoming overly con-
strained by established fiefdoms, formal plans, board approval or bureaucratic procedures that
might constrain efforts to change direction. A heavyweight project manager has full control
of resources and people from different functional groups working in permanently co-located
integrated teams for the duration of the project. For example, pioneered by Lockheed Martin,
the American aerospace and defence manufacturer, so-called “Skunkworks” project organ-
izations were established as autonomous structures to develop high-technology systems in
the utmost secrecy, such as the U-2 spy plane and F-117 Stealth Fighter, far removed from
the mainstream organization and the influence of established routines, rules and procedures
which might otherwise inhibit innovation (Rich and Janos, 1994).

Contrasting Types of Innovative Projects

Many well-known scholars have suggested that contrasting types of innovative projects are
required for existing or new markets. Kanter (1990) argued that “mainstream projects” make
enhancements (derivative) to existing products or create new ones (platform) for customers
with stable preferences and predictable requirements in established markets. Firms are suc-
cessful in mainstream projects because they depend on proven technologies and listen to
their customers before developing new and improved products or services. Projects can be
carefully planned and schedules developed before action is taken because firms have a his-
tory and experience base in the market, providing fairly accurate data for predictions about
future market requirements. However, ongoing investments and commitments designed to
keep mainstream projects flowing also make it difficult to change direction when products
become obsolete or markets stagnate and decline.
Firms launch “newstream projects” to imagine new possibilities and create the (break-
through) innovation needed to change direction and open up entirely new markets. Because
firms have little or no experience in the new offering and there are no existing customers
to listen to, forecasts about customer needs are impossible to produce, project schedules
are unrealistic and costs are likely to overrun. Action must be taken during the front end
before plans are developed to recognize dimly perceived opportunities and tasks adjusted

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 Introduction 15

to address unforeseen circumstances while the project is underway. Existing knowledge is

applied where possible, but new ideas are often nurtured and developed through random and
intuitive insights. The purpose of the project is clarified through experimentation to discover
“what is possible and what might be possible” (Huff, 2016, 14). Flexibility, speed and multiple
approaches undertaken in parallel are required to make sense of evolving customer require-
ments and poorly understood technologies (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995; Loch et al., 2001).
For example, Apple was a successful computer and music software firm when it entered the
established mobile industry dominated by a few large, well-established manufacturers. To
mitigate the immense uncertainty associated with its breakthrough innovation, Apple secretly
developed two phones in parallel, one based on the iPod nano (code name P1) and the other
multi-touch phone based on a tablet (P2). After a few months of testing prototype phones, the
more uncertain but potentially promising multi-touch P2 was selected and introduced in 2007
(Kahney, 2014).
Christensen (1997) makes a similar distinction between types of technological projects.
Whereas “sustaining technologies” require projects to improve the performance of products
and services valued by existing customers, “disruptive technologies” ultimately promise to
open new and rapidly growing markets, although they may not be valued by customers in the
near term. Christensen (1997) identified the electric vehicle as the car industry’s disruptive
technology and recommended that General Motors establish a small, separate project-based
organization to nurture, develop and commercialize the new technology. However, the indus-
try was eventually disrupted when Tesla, a start-up from outside the industry, established a
small project team with its own office in Elon Musk’s SpaceX factory to develop and com-
mercialize the Model S electric car.
Building on March’s (1991) well-known distinction between exploration and exploitation,
O’Reilly and Tushman (2004) suggest that firms need ambidextrous organizational designs
(often based on effective portfolio management) to “exploit” current projects (e.g. deriva-
tive and platform) for existing customers markets while launching breakthrough projects
to “explore” new technologies and open up new market opportunities (Raisch et al., 2009;
Tushman et al., 2010). The most effective breakthrough projects share resources with the
mainstream organization and are tightly integrated with mainstream organization, but are
geographically and organizationally separate to ensure that the freedom required to develop
and implement new ideas is not constrained by established organizational priorities and pro-
cedures. For example, Apple’s product development remained inside the organization but was
established as a small team of talented designers with the autonomy of an outside consultancy
firm to select and work on multiple breakthrough projects.
Incorporating these contributions and more recent insights, innovation management
emerged as the distinct discipline and fairly coherent field of management research with a
growing number of textbooks offering theoretical insights and practical guidance on how
innovative projects can be more successfully managed (e.g. Tidd et al., 2001; Dodgson et al.,
2008; Schilling, 2020). Significant work on innovative projects has appeared in a range of
management journals such as California Management Review (e.g. Clark and Wheelwright,
1992), Organization Science (e.g. Hoegl and Gemünden, 2001), Research Policy (e.g. Hobday,
2000) and Journal of Product Innovation Management (e.g. Edmondson and Nembhard,
2009). In recent years, research has expanded beyond traditional classifications of innovative
projects based on product/process, incremental/radical, open/closed and sustaining/disruptive
dichotomies to include business model innovation, service innovation, platforms, ecosystems

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16 Handbook on innovation and project management

and sharing economy platforms (e.g. crowdsourcing). We now consider efforts to explore the
synergies between the fields of innovation and project management.

RESEARCH BRIDGING INNOVATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

As we have seen, project management and innovation studies have common roots in American
defence and aerospace projects of the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, both were perceived
to be strongly interrelated domains (Lenfle and Loch, 2010) and contemporaries may have
been surprised to discover many years later that project management and innovation studies
became increasingly specialized disciplines, following largely self-contained trajectories of
scholarly and practical development.

Joint Roots and Contrasting Trajectories

An important study of weapons systems projects in the early 1960s conducted by RAND
researchers identified two contrasting models for identifying and managing the uncertainties
surrounding highly innovative projects (Klein and Meckling, 1958), which would characterize
an ideological divide between project management and innovation studies lasting for dec-
ades (Brady and Hobday, 2011; Davies, 2014; Davies et al., 2018). Widely practised in project
management, the “optimizing model” assumes that rational planning, formal processes and
analytical techniques applied at the start of the project are able to predict future conditions
and reach a decision about the optimal end product from a range of alternatives. Influential in
innovation studies, the “adaptive model” recognizes that innovative projects are fundamen-
tally uncertain, because unexpected situations may arise that cannot be fully known at the
outset, such as new technologies, strategic factors and a changing operational environment.
The adaptive model emphasizes the importance of intuitive judgement, informal processes
and learning gained from trial-and-error experience and the need to experiment, test and
evaluate alternatives before selecting the preferred solution.
Despite sharing the same roots, over the subsequent years, the two disciplines failed to rec-
ognize each other’s contribution to a shared research agenda and there was little incentive to
overcome the fragmentation of research by learning from each other and integrating the differ-
ent bodies of knowledge (Davies et al., 2018). Researchers specializing in project management
were stimulated by the urgent need to provide firms in many industries with practical guid-
ance based on standardized bodies of knowledge. As we have seen, scholars working inside
and outside the discipline eventually became dissatisfied with project management’s focus on
execution-oriented practical knowledge and initiated new streams of theoretical research to
move beyond the optimizing model, such as the management of projects paradigm and project
studies. While innovation studies emerged from a variety of disciplines and theoretical per-
spectives, many researchers shared a common interest in understanding how different types of
innovative projects are organized to deal with varying degrees of uncertainty. By the 1990s,
innovation management had emerged as a specialized body of theoretical and practical knowl-
edge published in textbooks (e.g. Tidd et al., 2001) and handbooks (e.g. Dodgson et al., 2014).
Although the two disciplines became increasingly isolated from each other, project man-
agement and innovation studies are considered neighbouring disciplines because they often
refer to the same concepts (projects, innovation, novelty and uncertainty) and have overlapping

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 Introduction 17

empirical domains (e.g. R&D and new product development) and topical interests (e.g. the
climate emergency grand challenge) (Davies et al., 2018). In recent years, scholars work-
ing in the two disciplines have slowly begun to acknowledge each other’s contributions and
recognize the benefits of importing, exporting and sharing theories and concepts to promote
the inter-disciplinary collaborative research needed to tackle changing empirical realities and
societal challenges (Davies et al., 2018). For example, a special issue in 2016 of the Project
Management Journal was produced to showcase research bridging the two domains and inte-
grating theory and practice (Midler et al., 2016). The Project Management Journal also pub-
lished a special issue on exploratory projects (Lenfle et al., 2019). The Journal of Operations
Management has published articles on innovation and project management since its founda-
tion in 1980 but created a new department for Innovation and Project Management in 2019 in
recognition of the growing importance of both domains and the connections between them
(Mishra and Browning, 2020).

Reconnecting and Developing Domains of Knowledge

In the early 2000s, two early and significant contributions attempted to create a new synthesis
and integrated framework for innovation and project management research.
An evolutionary approach for coping with the uncertainty surrounding innovative projects
is developed by Loch, DeMeyer and Pich in Managing the Unknown (2006) and other arti-
cles (e.g. Pich et al., 2002; Loch and Sommer, 2019). Following an “instructionist” approach,
traditional project management is sufficient as long as task scheduling, risk management
and contingency planning can trigger the actions needed to deal with foreseeable events and
predictable future conditions. Different strategies are required, however, when projects face
unforeseeable uncertainties including “learning” to conduct new planning and change direc-
tion when the project is underway and “selectionism” to identify the best candidate from
multiple solutions explored in parallel (e.g. Lenfle, 2011).
A contingency model grounded in innovation theory is developed by Shenhar and Divir in
their book Reinventing Project Management (2007) and various articles (e.g. Shenhar, 2001)
to move beyond the conventional one-size-fits approach. Projects vary depending on where
they are positioned in a diamond model comprising four different dimensions: system com-
plexity, technological uncertainty, market novelty and pace. The model identifies the right
approach required to manage the particular mix of variables facing each project.
As we will see in this Handbook, an increasing number of scholars are now conducting
research on these overlapping domains, revisiting existing concepts, introducing new the-
oretical perspectives and challenging our current understanding. In Figure 1.3, we include
an important third domain to capture how other disciplines (e.g. organization studies, insti-
tutional theory and strategy) and the field of project studies are increasingly connected to
research on innovation and project management. Here we highlight four streams of well-
established research crossing the domains.
First, research on R&D and new product development has evolved to deal with the more
dynamic and innovative projects of the 21st century, such as the new forms of concurrent
product development projects driven by deadlines (Lindkvist et al., 1998; Midler, 2019b), the
exploratory nature of research-intensive technology projects (Lenfle, 2008, 2016), the role of
dynamic capabilities in selecting and sharing innovative design features across multiple prod-
ucts (Maniak and Midler, 2014; Maniak et al., 2014), managing projects to achieve disruptive

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18 Handbook on innovation and project management

Other disciplines
(e.g. strategy) &
fields (e.g.
project studies)

Project Innovation
Management Management

Figure 1.3  Overlapping domains of knowledge

innovation (von Pechmann et al., 2015) and the role of ambidexterity in project management
(Turner et al., 2014). Hatchuel and Weil’s (2009) research on design theory and creative collec-
tive action, emphasizing the dialectic between the exploration of breakthroughs concepts and
construction of new knowledge, provides a valuable conceptual framework for understanding
exploration projects (Lenfle, 2016) and cross-project learning (Maniak and Midler, 2014).
Second, research on organizational capabilities, routines and learning in projects has shown
that innovation requires project-based organizations or firms (Hobday, 2000; Gann and Salter,
2000; Whitley, 2006); how vanguard projects are launched to explore changing market condi-
tions and innovative opportunities (Brady and Davies, 2004; Lenfle, 2008); and how project
capabilities are honed, developed and exploited by transferring knowledge and learning from
one project to the next (Lundin and Midler, 1998; Lundin et al., 2015; Prencipe and Tell, 2001;
Söderlund, 2005; Davies and Brady, 2016) to obtain “economies of repetition” (Davies and
Brady, 2000). Organizations may follow two action trajectories (based on contrasting degrees
of repetitiveness) by performing routines to get repetitive things done or pursuing “creative
projects” to achieve new things through innovation (Obstfeld, 2012).
Third, research suggests that organizations responsible for complex projects build or acquire
capabilities in systems integration to coordinate the design, production and integration of com-
ponent parts of the product or system architecture (Hobday, 1998; Brusoni and Prencipe, 2001;
Prencipe et al., 2001; Davies et al., 2009; Tuertscher et al., 2014; Whyte and Davies, 2021).
Modular product platforms based on standardized design interfaces and interoperable “plug and
play” components may help to minimize the risks of integration (Sosa et al., 2004; Von Pechmann
et al., 2015) and facilitate the coordination of interdependent organizations (Jacobides et al.,
2018) involved in each project. Apple, Amazon and Google, for example, have developed digital
platforms of interchangeable modules that can be updated and transferred from one project to
the next. Platform strategies have recently migrated from digital to more traditional industries,
such as automotive, shipping, construction and space exploration. For example, whereas NASA
has traditionally treated each rocket launch as a one-off, bespoke project, SpaceX treats each
rocket as a platform of interoperable component technologies that can be reused and replicated
at lower cost across multiple projects (Ansar and Flyvbjerg, 2022).

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 Introduction 19

Fourth, research has explored how innovation has been applied to plan, design and exe-
cute megaprojects. Flexible architectures, modular designs and integrated project teams
provide the adaptability required to accommodate evolving requirements (Gil and Tether,
2011) and unexpected interdependencies (Tee et al., 2018). The innovative potential of a
megaproject may be enhanced by developing the absorptive capacity to incorporate new
and evolving technologies (Gil et al., 2012) and dynamic capabilities required to balance the
need for stability and change in a large, complex megaproject (Davies et al., 2016; Davies
et al., 2017). In a collaboration between researchers and practitioners, an open innovation
strategy and digital platform were developed and applied to introduce new ideas, technolo-
gies, materials and practices while London’s Crossrail railway megaproject was underway
(Davies et al., 2014). Research also identifies some of the new delivery models (Davies
et al., 2019) and simple rules for innovation in megaprojects required to limit goal tensions
and politics (Jimoh et al., 2022) and to address unforeseeable uncertainties and opportuni-
ties to improve performance (Davies et al., 2017).

INNOVATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT: INTEGRATED

RESEARCH THEMES AND PERSPECTIVES

In developing the idea and our ambition for the Handbook, we were mindful of the need to
encourage the authors to develop and apply new theoretical perspectives to integrate research
on innovation and project management, cross-fertilize ideas between the two domains and
offer practical guidance on how to manage innovative projects in real-world settings. The
chapters were carefully selected because the authors have made significant scholarly contri-
butions that traverse the two domains and are highly committed to developing a new, more
integrated research agenda. The Handbook is divided into four parts to account for the variety
of perspectives, conceptual contributions and case studies with practical examples of how
innovative projects are organized and managed. Some chapters are relevant to all parts of the
Handbook and are allocated according to their primary contribution.

Part I: Converging and Integrating

The chapters in the first part, following this chapter, consider the convergence of innovation,
project management and closely related disciplines and discuss integrated perspectives, mod-
els and frameworks that straddle the different domains.

• The intersection between research on innovation studies and project studies has cross-
fertilized and generated many new theoretical ideas, concepts and frameworks. However,
important cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research in these overlapping domains
can be extended further by a meta-theoretical framework and new research agenda pro-
posed by Geraldi and Söderlund (Chapter 2).
• Georget and Maniak (Chapter 3) examine the evolution of two distinct disciplines
– corporate entrepreneurship and project management – and consider how each con-
ceptualizes the role of innovation in the organization and strategy of the firm. Despite
some differences in approach, there are many similarities between the two disci-
plines and opportunities for cross-fertilization leading to a more integrated model of
innovation.

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20 Handbook on innovation and project management

• While scholars in the separate research communities interested in projects and innova-
tion have not always engaged in a fruitful interaction, Holzmann and Shenhar (Chapter 4)
suggest that they are actually addressing two sides of the same process: developing and
implementing new ideas. They present an integrated theoretical and practical model
for examining the processes, contingencies and strategies of this combined innovation/
project effort.
• In a review of the literature, Lewis, Harrison and Roehrich (Chapter 5) focus on one key
concept – the fuzzy “front-end” of projects or the innovation process – which appears
extensively in research on innovation and project management. The chapter explores
opportunities for the two domains to share insights about how to conceptualize the front
end and identifies promising avenues for future research.
• Tillement, Garcias and Charue-Duboc (Chapter 6) explore how the concepts of explora-
tion and exploitation are used differently in the literatures on innovation management and
project management. A case study of the first French Generation IV nuclear reactor illus-
trates how the dynamics of “exploration and exploitation” are entangled in some large-
scale “hybrid projects”. The case identifies the tensions associated with this entanglement
and how the “identity” of the project was disputed by major stakeholders (managers and
government) leading to its eventual postponement.
• In their study of the internationalization of innovation projects in multinational corpora-
tions (MNCs), Midler and BenMahmoud-Jouini (Chapter 7) seek to bridge two streams
of distinct but complementary research on global innovation management (GIM) and
global innovative projects (GIP). Whereas GIM emphasizes the innovation strategy, capa-
bilities and organization of the MNC’s spatially dispersed local-global activities, GIP
addresses the management of innovative global projects. The two approaches are com-
plementary and mutually supportive because the global innovation strategy of the MNC
is implemented through projects and innovation projects play a reciprocal role in defining
the innovation strategy and the dynamics of an MNC’s organization.

Part II: Building and Extending

The second part of the Handbook includes chapters that build on and extend existing con-
cepts, frameworks and ideas that have already developed connections between innovation and
project management research.

• “Lineage management” and “ambidexterity” examined by Maniak and Midler (Chapter 8)

are two recent strategies to manage innovative projects and overcome the limitations of
multi-project management methodologies, project portfolio management and common
product platforms introduced in the 1990s. Lineage management involves creating dis-
ruptive offers by progressively capitalizing on a series of projects generated by a trajec-
tory of innovations and adapting to take advantage of learning accumulated along the
way. Ambidexterity strategies are used to manage innovative projects by “exploring”,
developing and accelerating breakthrough innovations, while “exploiting” committed
project resources.
• In a review of research on “exploratory projects”, Lenfle (Chapter 9) identifies how pro-
ject management has neglected to fully account for how projects are organized and man-
aged to tackle “unknown unknowns”. A future research agenda for exploratory projects is

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 Introduction 21

proposed outlining the need for new case studies, management tools and methods design,
governance and portfolio management, and a theory of agency for projects facing unfore-
seeable uncertainties.
• Building on prior research on novel projects facing unforeseeable uncertainties, Loch,
Sommer and Jiang (Chapter 10) consider two automotive projects – rapid manufactur-
ing and flying vehicle projects – combining new and evolving technologies and applying
them to new uses and markets. The cases illustrate that a “Project Learning Process”
for novel projects must be identified at the outset as a valuable activity in its own right,
but that it will accomplish nothing unless accompanied by a long-term vision, which is
agreed upon and authorized by top management.
• In their study of “project portfolio management”, Kock and Gemünden (Chapter 11)
emphasize that portfolio management for innovation projects is challenging because
firms pursue several and often conflicting goals in uncertain markets. A decision-making
model is proposed to identify success factors for the different groups of stakeholders
involved in innovation projects with varying degrees of innovativeness (derivative, plat-
form and breakthrough) and contingent on various interdependencies between projects
and the environment.
• Van Den Ende and Blindenbach-Driessen (Chapter 12) show how “project-based organi-
zations” have advantages over mass production firms because they are less focused on
improving operational efficiency and more equipped to perform organization-driven pro-
active and client-driven responsive innovation. As an alternative to relying on an innovation
manager to develop, select and organize innovative projects, firms can achieve “ambidex-
terity” by establishing a separate unit in a project-based organization to undertake explora-
tory, proactive radical innovation, sheltered from the demands of operational units.

Part III: Importing and Cross-Fertilizing

The third part of the Handbook includes chapters that have imported theories, concepts and
frameworks from outside the domains of innovation and project management to cross-fertilize
ideas and stimulate new thinking.

• Building on the concepts of “collaboration” and “trust” developed by scholars working

outside the domains of innovation and project management, Noorderhaven (Chapter 13)
discusses how trust can stimulate positive outcomes by enabling collaboration between
participants in innovative projects. Because trust and collaboration are so closely con-
nected and it is difficult to ascertain which comes first, Noorderhaven suggests they are
best conceived as mutually reinforcing and together form a “positive spiralling effect” on
the performance of innovative projects.
• In an ambitious and creative effort to draw upon theories of culture found in anthro-
pology, organizational theory and evolutionary biology, Loch, Kavadias and Sommer
(Chapter 14) develop a “cultural evolution model”. While partially codified, project man-
agement practices are socially learned evolving bodies of knowledge or culture. The
model is used to show how the ambidexterity required to balance innovative and routine
projects is not simply determined by high-level managerial goals but may evolve cultur-
ally in a dynamic interactive process of top-down strategy and bottom-up project learning
and evolutionary pressures.

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22 Handbook on innovation and project management

• Informed by case study examples of international development, film production and event
organizing, Manning and Vavilov (Chapter 15) identify how the challenges of “social
innovation” (ideas, methods and practices that address social problems and large-scale,
societal grand challenges) may be stimulated and mitigated by three dimensions of pro-
ject-based organizing: project entrepreneurship (individual), project capabilities (organi-
zational) and project networks (inter-organizational).
• Drawing upon recent literature on project ecologies and innovation ecosystems, MacAulay,
Davies and Dodgson (Chapter 16) introduce the concept of “project innovation ecosys-
tems” to explain a new approach to creating and capturing value through innovation in
large, complex projects. A case study of London’s Crossrail railway infrastructure pro-
ject identified how a “meta-organization” was established to orchestrate innovation and
reveals how research on project innovation ecosystems can inform the study of innovation
and project management.
• Hooge and Lenfle (Chapter 17) consider how the concept of “value management” has
been applied since the 1960s to model the benefits whilst minimizing the costs of innova-
tive projects for customers. The process of constructing value for new product develop-
ment has been enriched in recent years by a variety of new tools to help both project and
strategic managers evaluate the future benefits of not-yet-existing products and services.
As societies face climate change, biodiversity decline and other challenges, models of
value management going beyond conventional monetary measures of performance (profit
and technological abundance) are needed to address the generative, desirable and attrac-
tive value of the unknown.
• In a fascinating in-depth empirical study of Italian opera (an example of a creative
industry) where each show is a project, Cancellieri, Cattani and Ferriani (Chapter 18)
argue that opera houses face the challenge of demonstrating that each production must
be “familiar” (satisfying the expectation of audiences), whilst demonstrating “novelty”
(provoking surprises to entertain audiences). Pursuing a “robust design strategy” allows
the opera houses to reconcile novelty and familiarity, a tension which may apply to new
product development in many other industries where organizations have to both preserve
and deviate from a traditional product design, such as Volkswagen’s New Beetle.

Part IV: Cases and Contexts

The fourth part of the Handbook includes chapters that consider how our understanding of
innovation and project management can be developed further by investigating rich case stud-
ies and new contexts to illuminate novel processes and practices and provide many valuable
insights for new lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry.

• Johnson (Chapter 19) provides an in-depth historical analysis of how systems engineering
has been overlooked and often ignored, but has always been and remains one of the core
capabilities developing in tandem with project management to manage large, complex
technological projects. Since its origins in the weapons systems projects of the Second
World War and the Cold War, systems engineering has evolved to incorporate computer-
based modelling and simulation techniques now used to develop today’s complex tech-
nological innovations.

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 Introduction 23

• Davis and Pinto (Chapter 20) consider how the agile methodology which originated in
the software industry around 20 years ago has become widely adopted by other project-
based organizations to drive innovation. In contrast to the traditional sequential waterfall
approach to project management, agile offers flexibility, mutual problem-solving and cus-
tomer-focused innovative solutions. Organizations must overcome significant challenges
when transitioning from waterfall to agile and recognize that while agile has worked well
in some industries with frequently changing requirements, it is no “silver bullet remedy”
for project failure.
• In an interesting case study of the Italian Civil Protection Department, Cacciatori and
Prencipe (Chapter 21) identify how “project capabilities” were developed to handle major
public events, focusing on the celebration in Rome of the Jubilee of the Catholic Church
in 2000. Social networks and artefacts formed in this vanguard project helped develop
project capabilities for future events. The authors identify a promising avenue for future
research exploring the micro-foundations of project capabilities.
• Illustrated by a programme of research on the UK construction industry, Whyte, Mosca
and Zhou (Chapter 22) examine how project-based firms deploy digital information, tech-
nologies and platforms to create new sources of innovation and competitive advantage.
They suggest that project capabilities are enhanced by the development of digitally ena-
bled product platforms used to manage a large portfolio of projects and extended supply
chains including manufacturers of modular components.
• Since the Second World War, “Big Science” projects have been major contributors to
industrial innovation and economic growth. In an in-depth case study of fusion power,
Dodgson and Gann (Chapter 23) show how highly ambitious large-scale science projects
stimulate far-reaching innovation upstream and downstream in industries, including the
development of new data and digital technologies, complex manufacturing and large-
scale construction capabilities.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH

The chapters in this book provide an important benchmark for research on innovation
and project management and offer numerous ideas and suggestions about interesting
empirical contexts for further study, as well as importing new theories (e.g. practice, neo-
institutional and cultural theories) and developing novel conceptual insights and methodo-
logical approaches. Despite these and some important early contributions, we are aware that
research connecting and transcending the domains is still evolving so we now offer some
new, exciting directions for empirical and theoretical work that might serve as a guide for
future research.

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Platforms

The first direction research might consider is the impact of disruptive digital technological
innovation on the process of managing projects. Dramatic improvements in software and data
analytics afforded by artificial intelligence (AI) provide more accurate, complex and reliable
information and opportunities for machine learning. As studies of firms such as Amazon,
Airbnb, Uber and Netflix have shown, AI changes the way organizations gather and use data,

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24 Handbook on innovation and project management

react to new information, make strategic decisions and execute interrelated operational tasks
(Iansiti and Lakhani, 2020). Amazon, for example, has redesigned its entire organization,
evolving from highly specialized functional units supported by disconnected IT systems, into
a modular, distributed structure integrated by a common AI platform. Organizations with
AI-enabled architectures deploy small, agile project teams with the data science, engineer-
ing and product development capabilities needed to integrate data across functional silos and
establish new digital connections between networks of organizations working in open, dis-
tributed innovation projects. It will be interesting to discover how AI capabilities are used to
design new flexible, project-based organizational architectures, integrate tasks across tem-
porary and permanent organizational boundaries, adapt and respond in real time to unfore-
seen events and provide more sophisticated predictions about opportunities, risks and future
conditions. Using AI and digital technologies to coordinate across boundaries in spatially
dispersed projects may be particularly challenging, however, because recent research suggests
that remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic has not produced the improvements in col-
laboration that many expected (Yang et al., 2021).

Complex Innovation Ecologies and Ecosystems

The second direction research might consider is how projects form part of an ecology of
knowledge, capabilities and resources dispersed across many entities (Grabher, 2001; von
Pechman et al., 2015) and ecosystems of distinct, but interrelated organizations (Adner
and Kapoor, 2010; Jacobides et al., 2018) involved in the coordination of complex techno-
logical systems (Tuertscher et al., 2014) and inter-organizational projects (Malherbe, 2022).
Dougherty (2011, 2016, 2017), for example, suggests that the ecology of a complex innovation
system encompasses the entire public and private organizations and agencies with the knowl-
edge capabilities to support multiple innovation projects (Dougherty, 2011). The ecology is
orchestrated to discover emerging innovations by generating new products and services, inte-
grating knowledge, strategically framing innovation for the long term and enabling appropri-
ate forms of governance. Projects play a central role in this ecology-wide innovation process.
Project innovators search, select and combine elements of emerging solutions, and project
work “is very hands-on, concrete, embodied, iterative, and multi-functional, but occurs in
large networks because emergent knowledge is noisy, fragmented and far flung” (Dougherty,
2016, 14). For example, the development of the Oxford AstraZeneca (Gilbert and Green, 2021)
and Pfizer BioNTech (Boural, 2021) vaccines for COVID-19 at an unprecedently rapid pace
demonstrated that multifaceted uncertainties can be overcome when project teams, connect-
ing people working in many different countries, organizations and agencies, persist with inno-
vation work as problems evolve.

Tackling Grand Challenges

The third broad direction for research is how innovative projects will be organized to tackle
the grand challenges facing societies in the 21st century, such as climate change, biodiver-
sity loss, future global pandemics and societal inequality. Complex, highly uncertain and
often global in scale, grand challenges are sometimes defined as “wicked problems” because
they are difficult to define and resistant to simple solutions (Rittel and Webber, 1973) and
“evaluative” because actors have different views about what the problem is and how it can

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 Introduction 25

be solved, and new concerns arise as problems are being tackled (Ferraro et al., 2015). When
conditions are volatile and the future is so unpredictable, organizations are equipped to deal
with grand challenges when they develop a variety of innovative responses to multiple sce-
narios (Augustine et al., 2019). Private, public, not-for-profit and hybrid organizations, for
example, are developing solutions ranging from incremental (e.g. renewable energy) to radi-
cal innovations (e.g. small modular reactors) for climate change adaptation and mitigation
(Howard-Grenville et al., 2014). Developing multiple, radical technological solutions (e.g.
geoengineering) on a global scale may provide a more robust understanding of the distant
future, including opportunities to envision breakthrough innovations and imagine disruptive
alternatives to the status quo (Augustine et al., 2019), but delay immediate action and local-
ized near-term solutions using proven, well-established technologies (Wright et al., 2013).
Resistant to “easy fixes” provided by a single organization, grand challenges require a collec-
tive, multi-actor process of “distributed experimentation” (Ferraro et al., 2015) and ongoing
coordinated and collaborative efforts (Howard-Grenville et al., 2014).
Research is clearly needed to understand the extent to which grand challenges will pre-
cipitate novel forms of project organizing and new types of projects networks, including how
multiple organizations will work together in large, inter-organizational innovation projects
and engage in the participatory approaches needed to solve the urgent, intractable prob-
lems facing societies. In addition to research on innovation ecologies and ecosystems, we
think two promising theoretical frameworks – innovation mission policies and multi-level
transitions – may help scholars understand how innovative projects might be organized to
tackle grand challenges.

Missions and Moonshots

Research might consider the role played by large-scale projects in achieving mission-oriented
innovation policies, such as tackling climate change (Kattel and Mazzucato, 2018; Mazzucato,
2021). Inspired by NASA’s Apollo programme in the 1960s, a mission is a “moonshot” inno-
vation policy to imagine a desirable future, set an ambitious target and galvanize the inno-
vation across public and private sectors required to achieve it (Mazzucato, 2021), such as
the European Green Deal. Defined and led by government, a mission steers and coordinates
cross-sectoral private investment, experimentation and risk-taking innovation. Despite the
analogy with the Apollo programme, however, this policy research provides surprisingly lit-
tle guidance on how projects can be designed and coordinated to achieve a societal mission.
More recent research has attempted to readdress this gap by showing how megaprojects can
be an important policy instrument geared towards shaping the market for a green energy tran-
sition in South Africa (Andreoni et al., 2022).
Several leading scholars claim, however, that the Manhattan and Apollo projects offer inap-
propriate models for guiding innovation policy because the challenges of combating climate
change are quite different and even more daunting than the wartime development of the atomic
bomb or moon landing (Mowery et al., 2010) and because of a fundamental lack of agree-
ment on what should be done (and what sacrifices might be expected from whom). America’s
Manhattan and Apollo projects were funded and centrally managed by government to produce
“big-push” technological solutions for a sole, nationally based customer, in a “closed system”
with little or no interference from external stakeholders (Sayles and Chandler, 1971; Edwards,
1996). Developing climate-change solutions to tackle the open, emergent and pervasive extent

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26 Handbook on innovation and project management

of global warming, by contrast, will require “multiple moonshots” that are decentralized and
systemic in nature to reflect the complexity of the challenge (Mowery et al., 2010). Whereas
the Manhattan and Apollo projects did not require broad market adoption, climate change
innovations will require extensive, often disruptive changes in consumer behaviour and incen-
tives to induce widespread adoption (Hargadon, 2010). Future research might consider how
large portfolios of projects are coordinated to achieve societal missions by generating and
implementing multiple solutions ranging from audacious supply-side breakthroughs to incre-
mental, locally adapted innovations that serve the needs of a great variety of users.

Transitioning to a Sustainable Future

Future research might also explore how innovative projects initiate, enable and implement
transitions to a sustainable future, such as shifting from a reliance on fossil fuels to renew-
able energy (Geels, 2010). Drawing inspiration from evolutionary theories of innovation (e.g.
Nelson and Winter, 1982; Utterback, 1994) and other perspectives, scholars have developed
a multi-level perspective (MLP) comprising niche, regime and landscape levels (Kemp et al.,
1998; Geels, 2004, 2010; Geels and Schot, 2007). At the micro level, technological “niches”
induce change from the bottom up by introducing radical but initially unstable and low-per-
forming innovations, often developed by outsiders or peripheral actors. At the meso level, the
socio-technical “regime” encompasses the actors, organizational networks and institutions
surrounding an established technology. Shared, stable and aligned sets of rules, routines and
regulations direct the behaviour of actors and innovative activities are locked in a trajectory
of incremental improvements (e.g. increasing the fuel efficiency of cars). Radical alternatives
to established regimes are nurtured and developed in protected niches that shield vulnerable,
emerging technologies from direct market pressures, such as sheltered autonomous teams,
skunk works and breakthrough projects within firms (Schot and Geels, 2008). At the macro
level, changes in the “landscape” (macro political economy and cultural patterns) often occur-
ring over decades, such as growing societal awareness and concerns about climate change,
can eventually exert a “top-down” exogenous pressure to change existing regimes or promote
neglected niche technologies (e.g. the world’s first offshore wind power farms introduced in
Denmark in the 1990s).
Transitions occur through interactions within and between levels but often commence when
radical innovations emerge from sheltered niches to challenge an existing dominant design
(e.g. the first electric vehicles) and lead to a far-reaching transformation of the prevailing
socio-technical regime. A transition is brought to a close when the regime stabilizes around
a new constellation of technologies, actors, rules, routines and institutions. Despite providing
helpful insights on sustainability transitions, early MLP research failed to fully grasp the role
of agency (i.e. what actors actually do in projects) in leading transitions (Smith et al., 2005;
Genus and Cole, 2008). Actors participating in niche projects are not necessarily “locked in”
by a selection environment or waiting for exogenous pressures to “unlock them”, but mind-
fully create and navigate pathways to an emergent future (Garud and Gehman, 2012). Future
research might, therefore, benefit from understanding how transitions are activated, enabled
and regenerated by “project-oriented agency” (Lenfle and Söderlund, 2022) and how projects
may encompass niche and regime change. Whereas prior MLP research emphasized how
sheltered niche projects incubate and initiate innovation leading to subsequent regime change,
research might explore how high-visible megaprojects are designed to drive sustainability

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 Introduction 27

transitions by integrating novel technologies, overcoming organizational resistance and imple-

menting new innovation policies (or missions), such as the UK’s net-zero plans for megapro-
jects that will decarbonize the energy sector (Sovacool et al., 2022).

CONCLUSION

The Handbook provides new perspectives and insights on research on traversing innovation
and project management. With 23 chapters from leading scholars, the Handbook highlights
efforts to cross-fertilize ideas from the two domains, share and create new concepts, and bor-
row theories from other disciplines to assist empirical research and develop a more integrated
research agenda. We encourage scholars inspired by the Handbook to engage with practition-
ers and provide them with valuable ideas and the practical guidance needed to solve pressing
real-world problems and grand challenges facing organizations and societies in the coming
years, particularly in developing countries which are poorly addressed in prior literature. Our
ambition has been to produce a scholarly book with practical implications that is a must-read
for anyone embarking on research, practice or study of innovation and project management,
and wants to understand the two domains (as they once were many years ago) as integrated in
theory and practice and closely connected to other disciplines and fields.

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