This study is concerned with the role of research centres in realising universities‟ impact strategy. From the university management‟s perspective, this raises questions about how a university more systematically can organize and manage effective environments to stimulate both academic excellence and societal impact. The analysis draws on experiences from a centre in the area of material sciences with an explicit ambition to generate impact through engaging in research and education activities together with industry. The study aims to build knowledge on what type of impact goals these centres are targeting and what impact mechanisms that are considered important in order to achieve these goals. The results show that the centre has established mechanisms for close-knitted collaborative research, which also create an in-depth understanding among collaborators about areas of application of new materials and the diverse range of research work in the centre. This facilitates translation activities to form more fundamental research questions from industry‟s practical needs. Four areas of impact are identified: 1) tools and methods saving time, money and materials 2) skilled people 3) solutions of theoretical problems; and 4) development of absorptive capacity and science-signalling trough co-publications between industry partners and centre researchers. Conclusions about scope of impact, in the Swedish case, are presented in relation to recent university policy in UK, also discussing key themes of centres as impact creators.

Contemporary high-technology companies are under pressure to deliver short-term profits and to serve the market demands for future innovative solutions. An increased interest for alternative innovations such as new services or business models to be recognized in parallel to new technologies results in that companies are increasingly attempting to engage all their employees in innovation. This requires attention to what ways of working need to be changed in order to better support employees in pursuing both induced and autonomous initiatives i.e. to realize ideas that are aligned to and those that deviate from a company´s existing strategy and operational models. A key challenge is related to understanding how to develop organizational routines; how to make use of management controls to support both types of initiatives despite their different needs and, make the changes in routines and controls become accepted throughout the organization. Surprisingly few studies deal with understanding how managers or assigned employees in companies go about to address these issues.

The overall purpose of this thesis is to increase knowledge on how innovation capabilities are built when involving a broad base of employees in innovation in large and mature organizations. More specifically, this thesis seeks to understand what characterizes organizational routines and what are the consequences from using different types of management controls supporting employees in pursuing both induced and autonomous initiatives. The thesis is made up of four qualitative studies that explore how a planned effort to deliberately involve a broad base of employees in innovation is performed and experienced by actors representing different hierarchical levels and functions in two large and world-leading high-technology companies.

The research shows how involving employees in innovation can be made possible through a conscious and creative design and usage of routines and controls. The thesis shows that an upper management call for an increased number of induced and autonomous initiatives results in the use of diverse approaches to achieve this goal even within the same organization due to personal beliefs and experiences of what innovation needs and due to a bias towards either personnel or action management controls. Further, a strong focus on developing organizational routines to initiate innovation was observed at the expense of routines for selection and development of new initiatives. The studies show also that the outcome is dominated by incremental process improvements and the underlying reason to this result is discussed in this thesis.

Four characteristics were identified that distinguish organizational routines used in settings successfully supporting employees in pursuing both induced and autonomous initiatives : i) routines targeting selection, development and retention in an innovation process, ii) routines were frequently used and were somewhat linked to other routines, iii) routines to support resource owners and/or customers to come in direct contact with innovators to evaluate and develop new ideas in an atmosphere characterized by a mix of playfulness and seriousness were developed and finally iv) a combination of personnel and actions controls were used. Implications for innovation management, organizational routine and management control research are discussed.

Finally, a re-thinking and re-design of the performance management is suggested, taking into consideration the potential in using measurement and goal setting to provide effective means to support both induced and autonomous initiatives. The studies showed that the use of performance measurement can act as a trigger for managers to take actions. In addition, the thesis identified the value in improving the understanding of how result controls, specifically goals, can be formulated and used to stimulate different types of innovative behaviors.

In order to increase their innovation capability, many organizations make the effort to actively change their R&D working practices. In parallel, measurement is an important issue with regard to managing innovation. In this paper, innovation management and measurement theory are combined with empirical investigations of experiences of using measurement as a support to the development of innovation capability in practice. The paper reports results from analysis of measurement data and a semi-structured interview study, encompassing 19 interviews with managers and engineers involved in the current change activities of the case company. The study reveals that various innovation measurement mechanisms are used in different departments in the R&D organization, reflecting the diverse views of what constitutes innovation that dominate in each group, as well as the group's level of involvement in the on-going building of innovation capability - from heavily involved (innovation leaders) to attentiveness from a distance (innovation laggards and progress evaluators). This, together with challenges related to identifying relevant metrics to support both incremental and radical innovation and managing existing reward and goal-setting systems, is seen to have implications on the capability development in the organization requiring attention to how innovation measurement is designed, implemented and used in practice.

Decision-making in early stages of product development affects product success essentially. For this reason, the professional handling and management of decisions in early development stages is necessary. To investigate current decision-making in industry, we conducted an interview study to quantify decision criteria, which decision makers from industry base their decisions on. Dependent on a list of decision criteria from literature, several employees from RandD departments were interviewed and the interviews were analyzed regarding decision criteria. Most important decision criteria are the financial aspect, customer requirements and product-technical feasibility. However, interviewees did not mention a few other criteria, which were mentioned in literature.

This paper presents a framework and process (MINT) to support product development teams that have an ambition to improve their capability to manage both radical and incremental innovation. The driving force for the method was a clearly expressed need from teams to be able to measure and direct and change their own innovation work practice. The paper encompasses a longitudinal collaboration between academia and industry and aims to contribute to the development of a deeper understanding of how to successfully implement design research results in practice as called for by the design research community. The MINT method which is outlined in the paper has been developed and successfully adopted to the need of different teams in several companies. The learning outcome from the research project is analysed and three categories of critical factors which relates to the design, content and implementation process of the method are discussed and compared to relevant innovation and change management literature.