Is there an app for that? How innovation professionals establish a novel jurisdiction in a law firm

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Daisy Chung

CITY, University of London, UK

Bernard Ramanantsoa room

Abstract:

Organizations routinely manage the demands created by a changing strategic environment by bringing new experts into their ranks. Whether these demands are technical or social in nature, they catalyze the creation of new roles and even functional domains. Prior research suggests that novel organizational jurisdictions (i.e., a new set of tasks and expertise in an organization) need to be established through structural, relational, and institutional efforts. In some cases, the work that these new expert groups perform is linked to that of existing occupations, because they are brought in to absorb tasks that have been deemed strategically outside the scope of these established groups, who become their clients. Surprisingly, prior research has not focused on how these clients participate in co-constructing novel jurisdictions by exercising control over the problems that the experts are meant to solve. In this paper we present an ethnographic study of innovation professionals who were hired by a corporate law firm to help its members think more creatively about their work. We show how the match between a client's control over their problems and the innovation team's expertise helps to explain how these new groups establish their legitimacy in the firms that hire them.