Strategic Momentum: How Experience Shapes Temporal Consistency of Ongoing Innovation

Research on strategic momentum considers how experience with innovation affects firms' subsequent innovativeness. Traditionally the momentum literature has emphasized arguments for an accelerating effect of innovation experience, but recent critiques and contrasting empirical results suggest ambiguity regarding how experience with innovation affects subsequent innovative activity. In this study, we develop arguments for a more expanded view of strategic momentum, examining momentum in the form of temporal consistency of ongoing innovation. This expanded view argues that organizations have incentives for steady-state patterns of innovation in the form of temporal consistency of ongoing innovation. To explore this expanded view of momentum, we examine how experience with innovation facilitates these temporally consistent patterns of innovation, as well as how increasing organizational age may inhibit such consistency. Analyses of generational product innovation in business productivity software highlight the importance of temporal consistency for innovativeness and momentum.