Innovation management and organizational learning: a discursive approach

This paper deals with how to design innovative organizations through theoretical and managerial insights. The theoretical framework is based on the structuration theory, with a focus on language and conversations within and across innovation projects. As a setting for the theoretical model, two case studies are presented and discussed: the first analyses an innovation project’s structuration through conversations via e‐mails. The second is an action research whose purpose is to design a project‐oriented organization to improve the innovation capability of an industrial firm. These two field studies lead to a final appraisal of the relevance of a discursive approach to better understand innovation processes and their contribution to organizational learning.