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Innovation has been a significant and widely studied topic in strategy and management research for decades, yet certain crucial phenomena and related theoretical questions remain unexamined, creating opportunities to explore new frontiers in innovation studies. This symposium brings together a unique set of papers that explore new perspectives on understanding various aspects of innovation, providing implications for both future research and practice. Specifically, the first paper differentiates between research and development to discern the distinct impacts of organizational structure on R&D: centralization of development is related to reduced duplication of development effort; however, the likelihood that a given invention being commercialized is lower in centralized development compared to decentralized development. The second paper proposes managerial prosocial preferences, specifically the inclination to avoid harming employees, as a negative antecedent to firm investment in automation and AI innovation. The third paper studies the fast-growing call for firms' environmental innovations and delves into a paradox concerning the effect of institutional pressures—normative institutional pressures incentivize firms to innovate, but they also motivate them to shift focus toward short-term "brown" innovations, rather than long-term "green" innovations. The last study moves beyond the conventional binary choice between trade secret and patent protection, investigating vagueness as a novel patenting strategy in response to the desire to withhold technological information. As a set, these papers offer fresh insights into understanding the creation, adoption, commercialization, and protection of innovation, shedding new light on expanding the frontier of innovation research. Innovation and Commercialization as a Function of the Organization Structure of Development Author: Jiho Yang; Imperial College Business School Author: Paola Criscuolo; Imperial College London Author: Brian Silverman; U. of Toronto Managerial Prosocial Preferences and Automation Innovation Author: Dongil Daniel Keum; Columbia Business School Institutional Pressures Promote Short-Termism in Environmental Innovation Author: Raffaele Conti; ESSEC Business School Author: Marcin Kacperczyk; Imperial College London Trade Secrets and Vagueness in Patent Applications Author: Yang Liu; Fordham U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant theory on autonomy and creativity predicts that autonomy in deciding how to solve a given problem improves creativity by fostering intrinsic motivation. In this study, we explore a less-studied type of autonomy, that is, autonomy in selecting problems and how it influences the creative performance of corporate inventors. Drawing on the literature on creative problem solving and research on cognitive overload associated with autonomy, we hypothesize that autonomous inventions (i.e., outcomes of inventive activities that inventors autonomously initiated and set problems for) are associated with lower problem formulation complexity than inventions resulting from formal R&D projects for which problems are more defined ex-ante, and lower problem formulation complexity in turn relates to lower quality of inventions. We also suggest that the negative relationship between autonomous inventions and problem formulation complexity is moderated by inventors' domain expertise and their efforts in searching for previous problems and solutions. Leveraging a unique dataset consisting of the descriptions of problems by corporate inventors of a firm, we found evidence supporting the hypotheses. Contributions to the literature on job design, creativity, and problem formulation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]