Innovation is perhaps one of the things we most prize and value nowadays. Stripped to its core meaning, innovation is the generation and implementation of ideas that are both new and useful[1]. It is rejecting the default option, while exploring different and better options. This pursuit of “useful novelty” is the main reason why innovation is so important for developing and improving almost all things around us, from processes to services, products, and technologies.

Thanks to innovation, we now have access to countless new things that improve our lives, well-being and productivity. Things like advanced computers and phones, safe traveling around the world and quick access to information via a Google search come to mind. At work and in business, it is mainly thanks to innovation that we discover new and more effective ways to make a product or deliver quality service. Can you imagine the amount of innovation it took to get us to a point where we can dispatch our bags before a flight, in a record time while also guaranteeing our flight safety? It is impressive when you think about it.

We could continue listing the benefits of innovation but let’s end with this: The World Economic Forum[2] considers that being able to innovate is the third most important skill to have in 2022 (only after complex problem solving and critical thinking). The McKinsey Global Institute[3] states that innovative skills will be amongst the most demanded skills in 2030.

But when thinking about innovation we developed this habit of only seeing the benefits. It improves our performance, it enhances our ability to adapt to change, and it enhances our well-being and longevity. However, innovation is not risk-free. Innovation can also be a risky and largely unpredictable endeavor that may or may not lead to the outcomes you desire[4]. And only when we fully understand and learn how to manage the risks of innovation can we enjoy its benefits. With that in mind, let’s look at the five core risks of innovation and see what you can do to minimize their emergence, while harvesting the benefits of innovation.

First risk of innovation: To end up with conflict and dissatisfaction

Innovation challenges the status quo and calls into question the assumptions others hold about how things should be done. So, every time you present a new idea at work you are fundamentally challenging what your colleagues or bosses think and do. This can be great since it gives everyone the opportunity to improve things. However, it can also be seen as implying that everyone is wrong and you know best.

When we follow some sort of procedure or routine for a long time, we become committed to that way of doing things, even when there are more effective ways available or to be discovered. Instead of allocating our energy to continuously improve, we become rigid, defensive and protective of our routines. We even start searching for information that supports our view on something. We all have, at least to some meaningful degree, this tendency for preferring familiar practices. This natural tendency inclines us to react negatively to new ideas and to even clash with those presenting them[5].

Try to recall the last time you learned something new at work or in your private life. Probably it took you some time to master that new practice or tool, and in many instances you even felt insecure and stressed wondering “Am I ever going to be skilled at this?” This is another reason people resist innovation at work – to avoid the stress and insecurity around mastering something new, particularly when you have demanding key performance indicators to achieve[6]. If asked, most of us would say that we value and endorse innovation and the innovative efforts of others. In reality, we might only endorse innovation when it is aligned with our self-interest (for example, when there is no insecurity associated and no additional work or adjustment required).

Political motivations are another source of clashes in innovation. With almost every innovation comes a change in the power structures around you[7]. For example, a colleague who is the current performance star may lose that position with the innovation you propose. If your colleague values status, is envious of you, or is highly competitive, expect a clash after presenting your innovative idea.

In the same vein, when you support a colleague’s innovation you are publically attributing value and competence to that colleague[8]. That attribution of value has the potential to give your colleague a competitive advantage. Please be honest with yourself on this question: If you and a peer are applying to the same position and there is only one slot, are you going to support his/her innovations? Research indicates that innovation suffers from many political biases. For example, we may use innovation in a self-serving manner (we favor our innovative ideas over the ideas of others, even when they are superior to ours).

Political motivations aside, if you present an innovative idea, you probably believe it is a good one. And guess what, your colleagues will also think their ideas have more merit than yours. Because we frequently become overly committed and attached to the idea we come up with and work so hard on, we end up rejecting others’ ideas and defending ours. Studies[9] [10] show that the more important our work is for us, the more reasons we find to defend our positions and the more we clash with others during innovation. How many times have you seen co-workers clashing over small things? The reality, however, is that every new idea to improve things is just that; one idea amongst many others with potential to work.

One of the risks of innovation is conflict and dissatisfaction due to opposing ideas.

How to minimize this risk of innovation

It would be an overstatement to claim that innovation always leads to enhanced conflict and dissatisfaction. However, not only it is possible, but also happens frequently. Research indicates a few things you can do to minimize the emergence of conflict and dissatisfaction due to innovation. For example, self-affirmations tend to reduce your defensiveness towards innovation. To self-affirm, identify a positive value or attribute about yourself and think about why it is important for you. This exercise gives you some personal ground, stability and confidence to face the uncertainty of innovation and your natural tendency to resist it.

Another exercise is to simply look around. Does your organization have a culture where it is safe to participate and to try out new things? Is your supervisor usually supportive of innovative efforts? By making an honest assessment of your environment, you can turn your anxiety into excitement (if it is safe to innovate) or into delight (for having an accurate assessment on the risks of innovation in a given time and context).

Second risk of innovation: To end up working with people that are not on the same page as you are

We all develop implicit theories about the world that surrounds us. Innovation appears to not escape this[11]. In one way or another, when you think about innovation an image pops up in your mind. It can be an image of a small step in a stair, of something radically new, or of something useful people can use right away. You can picture a scientist, an artist, a writer, a programmer, or even a brand.

These mental representations of what innovation is influence how you innovate, your approach to the innovative process, and your reactions to innovation. For example, if you picture innovation as a small step you might focus on creating something incrementally new and particularly useful. In contrast, if you see innovation as something completely new, you may focus your efforts on creating something radically different from what currently exists.

By definition, in order for something to be considered innovative it has to be both new and useful. Most training professionals and academics agree on this definition. However, because almost every one of us has a unique representation of what innovation is, it is easy to find ourselves thinking everyone is working on the same page, when in reality we are not even reading the same book. Let us illustrate this with a musical example. A few years ago, in a small live concert for garage bands, someone in the crowd screamed “You are out of tune!” to the guitar players. One of them replied “We are in tune!”, showing signs of confusion. The person in the crowd patiently replied “In tune with each other!” In this case, they were both in tune but to different scales, and the end result was dissonance.

When you think about it, the different meanings of innovation are easy to spot when you try to innovate with others. Have you ever been in a meeting where someone was systematically presenting new ideas that were barely related to the topic and marginally useful? You might have thought “Well, despite the self-image you may have, you are not being innovative but rather ‘annoyative’ to everyone in the room”. It might be the case that the other person was looking at you thinking: “What an inflexible square, who does not appreciate the effort I am making to come up with this”. You were both innovating, but to say that you were unproductively on different pages is an understatement.

Although each person has a unique representation of what innovation is, those representations are partially influenced by our culture[12]. For example, while the Chinese tend to value a bit more the utility aspect of innovation, Americans and Europeans tend to value slightly more the novelty aspect. One of the reasons for this is that people coming from different cultures hold slightly different values and, thus, mental representations of innovation. Large scale studies showed that while Americans and Europeans value a bit more their individuality and want to stand out (hence their focus on novelty); the Chinese value a tad more the community they belong to (hence their focus on utility).

We usually explore these differences in training sessions with people from different cultures. It is always interesting to ask what innovation is in these sessions. Overall, the answers we get from European and American participants are usually focused on the novelty side of innovation. In contrast, those from Chinese and Japanese participants lean more towards utility, although some focus on novelty is also present. While the answers are different, the insight is always the same: Attributing different meanings to innovation is a risk for the success of any innovative endeavor.

How to minimize this risk of innovation

So, if these discrepancies in the meaning of innovation occur all the time, what can you do to minimize this risk? Without a clear understanding of what innovation is, trying to innovate can quickly become frustrating. Knowing that innovation may have different meanings and clarifying those meanings is a crucial starting point, before trying to innovate or asking for innovative ideas. A clear understanding of the goals for the innovation effort also puts everyone on the same page. Whether that page is to come with something radically new, or to solve a small issue, be sure that everyone has a clear picture of what is being asked.

Finally, pay close attention to the things surrounding you and your colleagues. For example, in places that reward innovation we tend to focus more on making novel ideas work and not so much on making useful ideas work[13]. The main reason for this is that a reward for innovation tends to activate the novelty facet of innovation we all have to some extent. So, every time you experience a push in one direction of innovation (utility or novelty), pause for a second and try to bring to your awareness which thing in your environment is pushing you in that direction.

Third risk of innovation: To be successful at one step of innovation but fail at the others

Innovation entails three main steps: idea generation, idea promotion, and idea implementation.

Innovation entails multiple steps[4]. You start with a novel and useful idea (that is, creativity). Next, you feel confident that you can promote that idea and gather the necessary support to implement it (that is, idea promotion). Later, you become familiar with what you are implementing and you make the necessary adjustments for it to work (that is, innovation implementation). Innovation thus requires a myriad of competencies that only a few of us entirely master. After being able to come up with an idea and sharing it with others (without clashing with them), you have to engage in sales and politics to make sure you gather support for it (from colleagues and supervisors), and find time to become proficient at it and to use it consistently.

Let’s look at a mundane example to see how hard it is to manage all steps of innovation. You decide that it is a good idea to go to the gym. This is a creative idea since you never went to the gym (new) and it will improve your health (useful). You talk to your significant other about your idea. Knowing that your significant other prefers to exercise outdoors for free, you prepare a powerful pitch to sell the idea. You manage to now have a partner in the gym and even get a discount for a two-person membership. “Great, I have innovated!” you may say. However, a few weeks later, problems start popping up. You never manage to go to the gym together. The accountability and support you expected from your partner is not there. In addition to that, one of your colleagues at work came up with a new sales idea and now you have to do overtime to become proficient with that skill. You end up visiting the gym once a month, at best. What happened here? You succeeded in multiple steps of innovation but not in its final stage of implementation. What is the end result? You end up not using that innovative effort consistently, and thus you did not actually innovate.

Ironically, those in decision-making positions (who can promote innovation or block it), tend to become judgmental of innovative ideas and biased against it[14]. The reason for this bias is that we are all influenced by our roles and we modify our behavior to meet the responsibilities we associate with those roles. For example, your behavior probably changes depending on whether you are making difficult budget allocation decisions at work or having lunch with your significant other. Managerial and leadership positions come associated with a set of responsibilities, such as ensuring that a decision is going to benefit the business and not harm it.

So, when we think about it, we can empathize with the manager that rejects an innovative idea. After all, it is something new, it has an unknown output, and it is going to challenge something that is working reasonably well at the moment. In a nutshell, by adopting the responsibilities of a role, managers become risk averse and look for proven paths to success. The problem is that a risk averse and judgmental environment creates filters in our minds that block us from coming up with innovative ideas and push us towards established paths of success.

Interestingly, however, managers and leaders who adopt this risk adverse role can benefit innovation in different ways. While this behavior is detrimental for coming up with ideas, it can be helpful in selecting one idea for implementation[15]. At the end of the day, there may be many good innovative ideas on the table, but budget for implementing only a few, if not just one. Since managers and leaders have access to unique information about your company, they are in a privileged position to assess whether an idea will be successful and well accepted or not. Also, knowing that your idea will go through the filter of a manager also pushes you further. For example, you can anticipate multiple concerns your boss might have and improve your idea to the point that it is implementable.

How to minimize this risk of innovation

To minimize the risk of being successful at one step of innovation but to fail at the others, it is critical to look at innovation as a multiple-step process that requires an extensive array of skills. Being good at combining different sources of information to create something new (that is, creativity) is not enough to succeed at innovation. You also have to develop, among many other, resilience, perspective taking, negotiation, sales, and political skills. If you pair these skills with a clear understanding of the parameters used to assess innovation success, you are in a privileged position to succeed at innovation.

Let me illustrate this point with a personal example. One of my former supervisors was extremely risk averse and rejected almost all things I suggested at work. It was frustrating, to be honest. After quite a few corridor chats with senior staff, I learned that he loved two things: data and to be the one coming up with the innovative ideas. You probably guessed it right; I stopped coming up with ideas to solve problems. I started compiling and bringing data (all sorts of graphs and tables); and he ended coming up with the innovations himself. In this case, I had to engage in perspective taking, politics, and sales strategies to pursue innovation at work. In your case, try to identify which innovation steps you are overlooking and the skills you have to put in place to minimize the risk of failure.

Fourth risk of innovation: To end up with irrelevant or harmful innovations

Innovating is expensive. It requires a substantial time allocation to figure things out, supervisors have to be trained to support and recognize innovative efforts, and the associated budgets easily derail due to unexpected roadblocks. Despite such high investment, many innovations fail to produce a positive return[16]. So the question is: Why is innovation so risky for performance and economic return?

Control

While the answer is not simple, it gravitates around your rather low level of control over the outputs of innovation. For example, you typically have little control over the accuracy of your forecast of customers’ demands. Although everything may look well on paper, customers can be either not interested in your innovation or not ready for it. Take the case of IBM Simon Personal Communicator, which is considered to be the first Smartphone[17]. With a touchscreen and multiple apps, it was considered a major innovation when it was released in August 1994. However, after selling only 50.000 units in 6 months, the device was discontinued in February 1995. One of the reasons for this innovation failure was that in 1994 most people were not ready to embrace this type of technology. That is, IBM’s predictions of customer demand and of customer readiness failed.

Complementary innovations

Another example of reduced control over innovation outputs comes from your access to complementary innovation. Although you may introduce and commercialize something innovative (that is, something new and that people actually need), the surrounding market of complementary innovations may not be ready to support your product or service. Another reason for the failure of IBM Simon was that the battery lasted for only 1 hour, and some of the functionalities were difficult to use (for example, email access through Simon was slightly technical). Although time proved that we wanted something around the lines of Simon, in 1994 the supporting technology on battery life and user interface had not yet caught up. Simon ended up being a product ahead of its time that was not supported by surrounding innovations.

Imitation

Even if you manage to correctly forecast customer demand and find complementary support for your innovation, you may still have very limited control over the output because competitors may start imitating your innovation. For example, your competitors can find cheaper ways to produce your innovation and end up selling more than you (not to mention with higher profit margins than you). Also, if you come up with the innovation first, your competitors will be able to bypass multiple expensive roadblocks you had to face and deal with. So, by innovating, you may create more bills and competition for yourself or your business than you already had before innovating.

While there are legal mechanisms to protect your innovations (things like intellectual propriety laws and patents) they can be expensive for most of us and are not unbeatable. For example, by patenting an innovation you disclose multiple details of your innovation that others can use. Given that not all countries follow similarly strict patent laws, a registered patent can work as a starting point for imitation without compensation.

One of the risks of innovation is imitation without compensation.

Context

Finally, innovation is risky for performance because your context largely defines whether innovation has beneficial or detrimental consequences[18]. For example, large scale studies[19] show that the value of smaller firms depends more on innovation than the value of larger ones. These studies also show that innovation tends to only increase the profitability of firms that intensively advertise it. Understanding and managing all the contextual subtleties that define whether innovation is beneficial or irrelevant can be a daunting task. You may find yourself having an advertisement budget not big enough to achieve your goals, or overlooking the value of advertisement to drive sales out of innovation. You may even find yourself emulating what other successful innovators did, just to find out that their approach does not work today or in your business sector.

How to manage these innovation risks while promoting performance

At this point you are probably asking: “How can I manage the risks of innovation to drive performance?” Although there is no foolproof solution, small adjustments can change your probability of success at innovation. Let us illustrate this point with an exercise. To keep things simple let’s say there are only 4 risks to account for: accurate customer forecasts; complementary innovations supportive of yours; reasonable competition and funds to protect your innovations; and a fair understanding of how things work in your context. Let’s say that you are really good at managing two of these risks (let’s say that you have a 71% probability of managing two risks). However, you are still developing yourself on the other two (a 30% probability of managing the other two risks seems realistic). Keep in mind that we are being generous, as most of us do not master the skills to succeed at innovation at these probability levels. Because these 4 things interplay with each other, in this case your probability of succeeding at innovation could be as low as 5% (for example, 71% x 30% x 30% x 71% = 5%). And this is just taking into account the risks of innovation for your (or your business) performance.

However, you can change your likelihood of success at innovation by, for example, improving your skills or associating with people who have a complementary set of skills. If you do that, you now may have, let’s say, 71% probability of managing each risk. Again, these risks interplay with each other, so the probability of succeeding at innovation would be 25% (71% x 71% x 71% x 71% = 25%).

This value of 25% may seem unimpressive, but it is substantial when you think about it. Let’s apply these probabilities to creating an innovative business. In the first case, for every 20 trials you would have 1 successful new business (5% probability). It is daunting, just to think about it. However, in the second case, for every 4 trials you would get 1 successful new business (25% probability). Not bad for an innovative business endeavor!

Fifth risk of innovation: To end up dealing with some serious side effects of innovation

Risks of innovation: Innovating is demanding and can leave us with limited resources to manage our work and life.

Not only innovation is risky for performance, but in some cases may leave you with unexpected but serious side effects to deal with.

Reduced capacity to regulate and control our behavior

To come up with innovative ideas you have to consider and harmonize opposing perspectives, you have to connect information that looks disconnected on the surface, and you have to question your assumptions on the best way to solve an issue. Overall, to be creative you need to be cognitively flexible. This is demanding and can leave you with limited resources to properly manage other aspects of your work and life. For example, there is research showing that creativity might lead you to overeat, to cheat and steal at work[20], and to spend less time with your significant other[21]. With a limited set of resources comes a limited capacity to identify problems in our behavior, to resist temptations, and to be at our best behavior.

Also, while innovating we develop the habit of looking at things flexibly. This habit does not stay within the scope of innovation. It spreads into other facets of your life and work, including to your considerations of how ethical your behavior is. Looking at issues from different angles is great to come up with something new; but it is also a greatly useful tool to reframe unethical behavior as acceptable. When you put together mental exhaustion, the habit of looking at things with flexibility, and the innovation approach of questioning rules, you put yourself at risk of engaging in questionable or illegal behavior.

So, one of the side effects of innovation is a reduction in your capacity to regulate and control your behavior. If you have a job that requires innovation you may harm your health and engage in unethical behaviors. If you are a manager or a business owner incentivizing innovation, you may end up with a boom in questionable behavior in your team or business.

Disruptions in effective routines

Another side-effect of innovation is to witness unexpected disruptions in effective routines you have in place. Most things in life and work function as intricate systems. When you change something in a system, either an avalanche of unexpected changes occur or you make intentional adjustments to accommodate that change. Nevertheless, you have to allocate substantial resources to manage things up. For example, getting used to an innovation takes time; managers can get distracted from their key performance goals because they are helping supervisees coping with the innovation; and the sales team can lose momentum and overlook business opportunities because they are putting their energy into mastering the new innovation. These side effects only get worse when companies start innovating all the time. For example, a necessary adjustment for one innovation may be incompatible with a necessary adjustment for another innovation.

Creation of additional competition

Innovation can also leave you with the side effect of additional competition[16]. A successful innovation can give you a competitive advantage over other businesses, or people for that matter. After all, that is one of the main goals of innovation. However, when you innovate and gain a competitive advantage, you change the market and put pressure on your competitors to also innovate, if they want to survive. In turn, your competitors’ innovations will pressure you to innovate again. In this never ending race, both you and your competitors are learning from past mistakes and raising the bars of innovation. There are benefits to this, from technological breakthroughs to accessing previous innovations at a reduced price.

But the pressure to succeed at the innovation race puts substantial pressure on those racing and on those associated with the racers. For example, tech companies compete so intensely and put so much pressure on those around them that side effects popup frequently. Companies go bankrupt for ceding to the pressure of introducing a new innovation before having profited from the previous one. Clients become overloaded with all the new stuff coming up, and stop buying. In the hope of accessing competitors’ innovations, companies hire key employees from direct competitors, creating unsustainable inflations in some professions. Workers bend to the pressure and hurt themselves out of despair – in 2018 there was a wave of concern over the number of suicides in Chinese tech factories[22].

The cold hard truth is that the side effects of the competition associated with innovation are serious and extremely hard to manage.

Exercise

Let’s do an exercise together. Think about an innovative idea that you had but which failed. It can be a challenging endeavor, like building a business, or a simple one, like telling your boss to lead meetings differently. If you don’t mind sharing, please post the reasons for your failure below and the side effects you faced. It might help one of us identifying risks ahead and making a plan to anticipate them.

Conclusion

There are multiple risks associated with innovation that we need to look at before innovating. You may end up clashing with others, working with people that are not on the same page as you are, failing at one of the innovation steps, not having economic returns on your innovation, and facing the negative side effects of successful innovations.  All in all, the numbers of cost-benefit analyses on innovation do not always add up.

So why bother to innovate? To simplify things, because innovation is the source of many of the great things we now have and love. And, very likely, it will be the source of many other great things we will have and love.

The point is not to discard innovation, but to be aware that many things can go wrong when innovating. Developing and implementing a new idea can be a risky, controversial and unpredictable endeavor that may or may not produce the returns you expect. Also, innovation is only one path towards performance. It is an important one, but not the only one. It has its place, but it is risky to overstate its role.

So the conclusion is rather simple. Prepare yourself for innovation by being aware of its risks. Although it is tempting to just rely on innovation, it is likely more effective to innovate after you spend some energy examining and preparing for the risks of your innovative efforts. Being aware that innovation is a double-edge sword is critical to link your innovative ideas to your sustained success. Innovation is not a foolproof trail to success, but rather the conscious risk of trying to build something new and useful.

As always, thank you for investing your time with Managing Life at Work. It has been a pleasure to share this information with you. See you all in the next post (do not forget to subscribe to our newsletter or to bookmark us). Until then, keep translating your innovative efforts into lasting benefits.

References and further reading

  1. ^ Anderson, N., Potočnik, K., and Zhou, J. (2014). “Innovation and creativity in organizations: A state-of-the-science review, prospective commentary, and guiding framework.” Journal of Management, 40, 1297-1333.
  2. ^ Leopold, T. A., Ratcheva, V. S., and Zahidi, S. (2018). The future of jobs report. World Economic Forum.
  3. ^ Bughin, J., Hazan, E., Lund, S., Dahlström, P., Wiesinger, A., and Subramaniam, A. (2018). Skill shift: Automation and the future of the workforce. McKinsey Global Institute.
  4. ^ a b Kanter, R. M. (1988). “When a thousand flowers bloom: Structural, collective, and social conditions for innovation in organizations.“, in B. M. Staw and L. L. Cummings, (eds.), Research in organizational behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 169-211.
  5. ^ Janssen, O., Van De Vliert, E., and West, M. A. (2004). “The bright and dark sides of individual and group innovation: A special issue introduction.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25, 129-145.
  6. ^ González-Romá, V., and Hernández, A. (2016). “Uncovering the dark side of innovation: The influence of the number of innovations on work teams’ satisfaction and performance.” European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 25, 570-582.
  7. ^ Baer, M. (2012). “Putting creativity to work: The implementation of creative ideas in organizations.” Academy of Management Journal, 55, 1102-1119.
  8. ^ Menon, T., Thompson, L., and Choi, H.-S. (2006). “Tainted knowledge vs. tempting knowledge: People avoid knowledge from internal rivals and seek knowledge from external rivals.” Management Science, 52, 1129-1144.
  9. ^ Janssen, O. (2003). “Innovative behaviour and job involvement at the price of conflict and less satisfactory relations with co-workers.” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 76, 347-364.
  10. ^ Zhang, Y., Zhang, J., Forest, J., and Chen, C. (2018). “The negative and positive aspects of employees’ innovative behavior: Role of goals of employees and supervisors.” Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1871.
  11. ^ Loewenstein, J., and Mueller, J. (2016). “Implicit theories of creative ideas: How culture guides creative assessments.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 2, 320-348.
  12. ^ Leung, K., and Wang, J. (2015). “A cross-cultural analysis of creativity.“, in C. E. Shalley, M. A. Hitt, and J. Zhou, (eds.), The Oxford handbook of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 261-278.
  13. ^ Sue-Chan, C., and Hempel, P. S. (2016). “The creativity-performance relationship: How rewarding creativity moderates the expression of creativity.” Human Resource Management, 55, 637-653.
  14. ^ Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., Loewenstein, J., and Deal, J. J. (2018). “Reframing the decision-maker’s dilemma: Towards a social context model of creative idea recognition.” Academy of Management Journal, 61, 94-110.
  15. ^ Keum, D. D., and See, K. E. (2017). “The influence of hierarchy on idea generation and selection in the innovation process.” Organization Science, 28, 653-669.
  16. ^ a b Khessina, O. M., Goncalo, J. A., and Krause, V. (2018). “It’s time to sober up: The direct costs, side effects and long-term consequences of creativity and innovation.” Research in Organizational Behavior, 38, 107-135.
  17. ^ Wikipedia. “IBM Simon“. Accessed in September 2019.
  18. ^ Hughes, M., Rigtering, J. P. C., Covin, J. G., Bouncken, R. B., and Kraus, S. (2018). “Innovative behaviour, trust and perceived workplace performance.” British Journal of Management, 29, 750-768.
  19. ^ Rubera, G., and Kirca, A. H. (2012). “Firm innovativeness and its performance outcomes: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration.” Journal of Marketing, 76, 130-147.
  20. ^ Gino, F., and Ariely, D. (2012). “The dark side of creativity: Original thinkers can be more dishonest.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 445-459.
  21. ^ Harrison, S. H., and Wagner, D. T. (2016). “Spilling outside the box: The effects of individuals’ creative behaviors at work on time spent with their spouses at home.” Academy of Management Journal, 59, 841-859.
  22. ^ Fullerton, J. (2018). “Suicide at Chinese iPhone factory reignites concern over working conditions“. The Telegraph. Accessed in September 2019.