Innovation, Organizational Cognition - definitions

In the last blog, we looked at the Industrial Economics angle of Organizational Innovation. In today's blog, we begin looking at the relation between Organizational Cognition, Learning and Innovation. Since these terms sound too "BIG" for a first time reader, the attempt would be to really set the context in this blog and build on it over the next few.

Let’s begin with the most familiar term - Innovation. While we all intuitively we all understand "innovation", management theorists like to define it as "a process of bringing new, problem-solving, idea to use" some also look at it as "non routine, significant, and discontinuous organizational change that embodies new ideas that is not consistent with the current concept of the organization's business". Innovative output is a product of prior accumulation of knowledge that enables innovators to assimilate and exploit new knowledge - hence organizational learning and cognition begin to play a significant role.

"Cognition" or "Cognitive" refers to the idea that individuals develop, mental models, belief systems, and knowledge structures that they use to perceive, construct, and make sense of their worlds and to make decisions about what actions to take - I refer here to another theorist Weick and also to Walsh. One could also extend this analysis to the level of group and organizations and we would find out how organizations & groups would behave. 

Organizations develop collective mental models and interpretive schemes which influence the decisions the organization takes as well as the actions it performs. - We could call this Organizational cognition. It however differs from Individual cognition in terms of the social dimension. 

Hence we would talk about socio-cognitive connected, and understand how it accounts for the social processes in the formation of collective cognition and knowledge structures.