Forbidden Fruit

It is a general observation that increasingly uncertain dynamics govern company's technological environment. The creation of valuable innovative investment opportunities becomes more and more a necessity for the survival of industrial firms. In contrary to the development of new products or processes, the initial impulse relies very much on individual people with unusual ideas. For the first time in business research, this book looks in detail on the controversial research method 'bootlegging', also called covert research which is carried out in corporate R&D laboratories. It tells about researchers who experiment and develop their ideas under cover and hidden from management. Conspiratory projects up to a size of over half a million pounds were found during Peter Augsdorfer's ingenious research work which provided the basis for this book. Fifty-seven companies in England, France, and Germany contributed to this research. Over one-hundred-and-fifty managers and researchers were interviewed, partly under difficult circumstances. They quantified important figures about number of bootleg researchers, their time consumption, and how they create slack. Thus, the book vividly demonstrates the inventiveness of corporate entrepreneurial spirits. The author argues that covert research is an absolutely common phenomenon in corporate organisations and its positive effects should not be belittled. The contrary is the case, it can generate new products and processes, or improvements of the firm's existing technologies. Not only is the output of covert research profitable, but bootlegging also exercises researchers' creative learning capabilities and thus stocks technological competence building. All in all, it can be considered as an organisational self-regulating element in the corporate search for organisational correctness and creative chaos. In fact, Peter Augsdorfer uses bootlegging as a catalyst to investigate some main tensions surrounding the generation of innovative ideas. This includes conflicts concerning the strategy, corporate funding mechanisms, the top-down / bottom up dualism, the decisions processes, and individualism. In this sense, the book provides important new lessons in technology management for both corporate practice and academia.