This paper studies the productive role of innovation in organisations. Using the post-structuralist insight that innovation is an open concept that can become performative, we shift the emphasis from analysing innovations themselves to analysing how the concept of innovation affects the organisational practices through which it acquires meaning. Deploying this framework, we studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a failure. The subsequent dramatisation of this failure resulted in a new version of this innovation unit that strengthened established actors and institutions within the organisation. Our study shows how the use of the concept of innovation in an organisation can both stimulate and hamper its innovativeness. Addressing this paradox requires sensitivity to the concept's productive role and evaluations of innovation that look beyond accomplished results.

本文研究了创新在组织中的生产性作用。利用后结构主义者的见解，即创新是一个可以变为执行性的开放概念，我们将重点从分析创新本身转移到分析创新概念如何影响通过其获得意义的组织实践。部署此框架后，我们研究了公司旅游运营商TUI内部创新部门的发展。我们发现参与者以不同的方式解释了创新，并且最初认为创新部门是失败的。此失败的后续戏剧化表现出该创新部门的新版本，该创新部门加强了组织内已建立的参与者和机构。我们的研究表明，在组织中使用创新概念如何能够激发和阻碍创新。解决这一悖论，需要对概念的生产性作用和对创新的评估保持敏感，而超越了已取得的成果。