Investigating the use of innovative dynamic capabilities from a structuration perspective: A study of automotive innovation project

The way in which organisations encounter the environmental, technological and innovative fluctuations in the era of market dynamism provides an opportunity to review their growth, survival and failure. Observers found that the fine line between the success and failure of such organisations essentially pertains to their capacity to manage innovative dynamism in their business environments. As a consequence, organisations realised that the development of dynamic capabilities is crucial for their innovation and technological changes. Dynamic capabilities have been conceptualized as a mechanism for addressing turbulent business environments through assisting organizations to extend, amend and reconfigure existing operational capabilities to fit within these environments. Dynamic capabilities have been theoretically investigated in the last decade with interest in the strategic management field and how to inject new vigor into empirical research. However, none of these studies has considered the role of complementarity between action and structure while developing new innovations or maintaining existing ones and the role played by the innovative dynamic capabilities in either constraining or enabling such complementarity.

As the issues of action and structure are considered to be fundamental research domain in the field of innovation process, this thesis investigates the use of innovative dynamic capabilities in the development of innovation projects from a structuration perspective. I adopt structuration theory as a framework within which to integrate the perspective of dynamic capabilities with innovation as a complementary field, in order to understand how the activities related to the processes of dynamic capabilities are structurally implemented in the development of innovation projects. I also conceptualise two distinct types of innovative dynamic capabilities: protective and destructive. The latter type enables change in the existing innovation projects and their associated rules, facilitates, agents and actions, and the former acts as a constraint to such change. As a consequence, two promising research gaps – the need to investigate empirically dynamic capabilities in a combination with a complementary field and to understand and investigate dynamic capabilities through the dualism between structure and action – are addressed through providing empirical evidence via integrating the findings of a semi-longitudinal case study with this thesis’s theoretical accounts, which are dynamic capabilities, structuration and innovation. Finally, the contributions of the thesis to knowledge and its practical implications, in addition to a summary of its fundamental findings, limitations and suggestions for future research are all presented.