The Impacts of Innovation

For an organization, innovation is the occasion for both risks and opportunities. The risks are obvious—the innovation may fail and the organization's investment in it thereby will be wasted. Much of the study of innovation has been about the nature of these risks and the probability of failure. This article discusses the failure of an innovation and analyzes its causes, but it goes further in considering the opportunities for organizational development that innovations provide. This way it weaves together three threads of organizational research: the studies of innovation, implementation, and organizational learning. This is done via an analysis of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's (MBTA) experience with a new, technologically advanced, rapid transit vehicle—the Boeing-Vertol Standard Light-Rail Vehicle.