Organizational Innovation in the context of Contingency Theories of Management

In last blog we began our discussion on organizational innovation and also mentioned about the 3 classifications of the study one could do. In today's blog we look at the first category of the classification the one relating organizational structure to innovation and specifically the group of theories under "contingency theories"

The contingency theory generally argues that the most appropriate structure for the organization would be the one that best fits the operating contingency in terms of scale of operation, technology, or environment. Mintzberg is one of the most noted of the contingency theorist and we have already discussed him in this earlier blog. We have also discussed about the Mechanistic and Organic models in this blog. 

Just to summarize and complete the discussion relating organizations it could be said that Organic structures would be a more fluid set of arrangement, adapting to conditions of rapid change and innovation. It would be interesting to note that both mechanistic and organic structures can coexist in different parts of the same organization depending on the demand from the functional sub-environment. We could also call such structures as "ambidextrous structures".

In the next blog we move on to the next class of theories - Industrial Economics and see how they relate to organizational innovation.