Taking Advantage of Emergence
Productively Innovating in Complex Innovation Systems
Deborah Dougherty
Reviews and Awards
"Professor Dougherty's Taking Advantage of Emergence is an outstanding addition to the literature on innovation. It combines a highly innovative theoretical framework with rich empirical analysis of modern innovation. It is rare to find a book that combines academic insight with such a clear articulation of ideas that is presented in a way that can be readily accessed by non-academics. The book is both rich and fascinating, and also an enjoyable read. Professor Dougherty avoids simplistic easy answers, but offers something much more valuable a framework for understanding how innovation emerges and how that emergence can be managed. I know of no other book that provides such an overview of the cutting edge of our field." - Paul Nightingale, Professor of Strategy, University of Sussex
"In this book, Deborah Dougherty offers a deeply pragmatic roadmap for addressing our most challenging social and technical problems through new modes of thinking and organizing. Complexity often seems like a curse, because it foils traditional methods of understanding. Through her extensive fieldwork and intensive scholarship, Dougherty has found an alternative: by enabling emergence, we enable discovery, and discovery provides the way forward." - Brian T. Pentland, Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University
"This book is a brilliant epitome of what Debra Doughertys scholarship is best known: empirical richness and conceptual depth. Generating new knowledge in complex innovation systems, such as the making of new drugs, is hugely important both practically and theoretically. Doughertys sophisticated research not only sheds light on complex innovation but gives us a sophisticated vocabulary to better understand it. Her emphasis on the emergent character of innovation, on collective learning, and on abductive reasoning, to mention a few concepts, illuminates her rich empirical material. She writes for both scholars and practitioners, and this gives the book a freshness which is not always discernible in purely scholastic texts." - Haridimos Tsoukas, The Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management, University of Cyprus
