Creating room for innovation. A business history study of innovation in the Kongsberg Group, 2000 - 2015.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore processes leading to a historical innovation breakthrough in the Kongsberg Group after 2000. To do this, I study the interaction between the company and the market, looking at how internal organizational processes are handled to correspond with shifting external market situations. The focus on organizational processes to explain innovative change is driven by the combination of three factors. First, the results from previous empirical research on the Kongsberg Group. Second, by the directions from international research on innovation in CoPS industries, and third, by recent calls to concentrate more on the underlying microfoundational processes of larger macro-level phenomena. By means of historical methodology, I apply an in-depth, longitudinal perspective, concentrating on three specific product cases from different parts (subsidiaries) of the corporation, each constituting the empirical foundation for a paper. The first paper investigates how the Kongsberg Group and its defense company, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace (KDA), built strategic alliances with US defense companies Hughes and Raytheon from the late-1980s until 2015 to enable the sale of the Norwegian air defense system, Nasams. In the second paper, I examine how a new concept for a remote weapon station (RWS) initially invented elsewhere was adopted by the Kongsberg Group’s mechanical division, Kongsberg Protech, in the early 2000s, and how this new product area grew within the corporation until the Kongsberg Group had become a world-leading supplier of RWS' to armed vehicles. In the third paper I explore a process of strategic renewal in Kongsberg Maritime in the early 2000s, looking at how the company built a strategic concept from its historical capability in systems integration, and how this contributed to unite the organization and increase its competitiveness as a maritime automation systems supplier. The thesis finds that during the early 2000s, the Kongsberg Group managed to create new ‘rooms for innovation’ within its subsidiaries. These new rooms became crucial arenas for innovation because they represented spaces where creative engineering capabilities could meet specific and ongoing market demands within a new and long-term corporate horizon. In the thesis synthesis, I discuss how these findings are connected to theories on dynamic capabilities, and furthermore, what the findings from the three papers add to our existing knowledge of innovation in CoPS industries.

Creating room for innovation. A business history study of innovation in the Kongsberg Group, 2000 - 2015.