"Converting Inventions into Innovations in Large Firms: How Inventors at Xerox Navigated the Organizational Filters to Commercialize Their Ideas"

How do large firms innovate? Strategy and innovation scholars view this process as one in which inventors generate new ideas (inventions) and managers turn these ideas into commercial products (innovations). Accordingly, studies of the inventors’ role in the innovation process in large firms focus on the inventors’ efficacy at generating novel ideas. At the same time, evidence suggests that many inventors also take an active role in commercializing their ideas. In this paper, we develop a perspective of the innovation process in large firms in which inventors move beyond their “inventor” role and catalyze their firms’ commercialization efforts for breakthrough inventions. Specifically, we document inventor efforts to convert breakthrough inventions into commercial products by attracting resources to their ideas. Using detailed case studies of how inventors at Xerox worked to commercialize office workstations, personal computers, and laser printers, we demonstrate how this resource-attraction process affects the conversion of inventions into innovations. We show that attracting resources required Xerox inventors to navigate through a series of organizational filters, some embedded vertically in the hierarchy and some horizontally across the different functions, and that inventors’ interaction with these filters affected the commercialization of the inventions. Our findings highlight two approaches deployed by Xerox inventors—searching for organizational filters more favorable to their invention and shaping organizational filters to help promote the commercialization of breakthrough inventions. While searching leverages the heterogeneity of organizational filters in large firms, shaping requires the presence of evaluative uncertainty with respect to the appropriate filters used to evaluate a breakthrough invention.