“Fresh Blood” Innovation and the Dilemma of Personal Involvement

Abstract

“Fresh blood”, executive succession by outsiders, is widely used to enhance innovation. While it is quite clear that a nominee's competence is crucial to innovation, the exact causality is only partially understood. An anthropological study of the behaviours of a complete outsider and an industry‐insider suggests they followed different strategies for taking charge. The complete outsider had meagre local knowhow, and relevant competence in industry‐problems, making self‐exposure difficult, preventing active personal involvement, and led to a failure in building trust. Without trust, a vicious circle of mutual suspicions prevented openness and sincerity, crucial to successful use of intangible assets for innovation. A spiral of conflict and efforts at coercion on both sides emerged, causing conservatism. The other outsider with some local knowhow was unafraid of self‐exposure, got involved, created mutual trust, and succeeded. Thus a lack of specialized locally‐relevant competence could explain the failure of a gifted complete outsider to innovate, in a situation in which a less talented industry‐insider proved a successful leader of innovation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.