Richard Normann Lecture 2019

The Richard Normann Lecture 2019 will be delivered by Andrew H. Van de Ven, Professor Emeritus in the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota.
He will review some of the seminal ideas of Richard Normann that stimulated subsequent theory and practice of organisational innovation and change. These ideas include temporal processes of change, knowledge development, growth stages, social learning, entrepreneurial leadership, and situational organising.

Based on a career of real-world observations, Richard Normann (1977) pointed out that in practice these ideas are often manifestations of highly uncertain and dialectical processes that are socially constructed through webs of communication and interaction among many stakeholders. As a consequence, processes of organisational innovation, learning, and designing deal centrally with problems of control, resolving dilemmas, and designing ‘scaffolds’ (or tools) for managing complex organisational processes (Normann, 2001). One central research implication of Normann’s seminal ideas is that managers cannot control the innovation journey; instead they need to learn to maneuver the obstacles encountered along the journey.

About the speaker
Andrew H. Van de Ven is Professor Emeritus in the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1972, and taught at Kent State Univ. and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before that. He teaches courses on the management of innovation and change, organizational behavior, and engaged scholarship research methods.
Van de Ven’s books and journal articles over the years have dealt with the Nominal Group Technique, organization design and assessment, inter-organizational relationships, organizational innovation and change, and engaged scholarship research methods. He is co-author of 13 books, including: The Innovation Journey (1999, 2008), Organization Change and Innovation Processes (2000), Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation (2004, and a 2nd edition that he and Scott Poole are now editing), Engaged Scholarship (2007, which won the 2008 Terry best book award from the Academy of Management), and Managing Knowledge Integration across Boundaries (2017), all published by Oxford Univ. Press. During 2000-2001 Van de Ven was President of the Academy of Management, was founding editor of Academy of Management Discoveries (2013-2017), and is now deputy editor of Management and Organization Review.