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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
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      Iterative Coordination and Innovation
      22 Jun 2020Working Paper Summaries

      Iterative Coordination and Innovation

      by Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu
      Do Agile methodologies promote innovation? Results of a field experiment with Google show that increasing the frequency and goal orientation of stand-up meetings reinforces integration and value but reduces specialization and novelty in outcomes.
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      Author Abstract

      Agile management practices from the software industry continue to transform the way organizations innovate across industries, yet they remain understudied in the organizations literature. We investigate the widespread Agile practice of iterative coordination: frequent meetings to coordinate individuals on innovation-oriented organizational goals. While the assumed purpose of iterative coordination is to generate innovation, there is limited empirical evidence as to whether this practice actually makes organizations more innovative. With the leading technology firm Google, we embed a field experiment within a hackathon software development competition to identify the effect of iterative coordination on innovation. We find that iterative coordination’s influence on innovation is mixed: while iteratively coordinating firms develop more valuable products, these products are simultaneously less novel. This counterintuitive result highlights a paradox at the heart of iterative coordination—whereas it intends to promote innovation, applying it yields less novelty, a necessary component of innovation. Furthermore, by tracking software code, we find that iteratively coordinating firms favor integration at the cost of specialization to create new knowledge. A follow-on laboratory study documents that increasing the frequency and goal orientation of iterative coordination meetings reinforces value and integration, while reducing novelty and specialization. This article makes three key contributions: refining theoretical understanding of the relationship between goal coordination and innovation; introducing empirical methodology for generating data with hackathons and software code version-tracking; and responding to calls from the literature to study new methods of organizing and whether they offer new insights on organizational innovation.

      Paper Information

      • Full Working Paper Text
      • Working Paper Publication Date: January 2020
      • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #20-121
      • Faculty Unit(s): Strategy
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      Andy Wu
      Andy Wu
      Assistant Professor of Business Administration
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