External Funding
Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF/FSE), 2017-2022
Project: Controlling Innovation in Complex Organizations
Many organizations increasingly delegate innovation to lower organizational levels rather than relying on a central R&D function. This creates a major coordination problem: local innovation efforts are interdependent, and their aggregate effects determine whether adaptation succeeds at the system level.
This project examined how management control systems can shape these distributed innovation processes. Two core questions guided the work:
- How do local innovation responses to control systems aggregate into organization-level outcomes?
- How should control systems themselves adapt when environments change?
By combining organization science with management accounting and control theory, the project contributes to understanding how firms can balance experimentation, coordination, and strategic direction under complexity.