The Role of Management Controls in New Product Development: Codifying a Collective Source of Creativity

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of Management Controls (MCs) in mediating and stimulating creative processes. Adopting a knowledge codification perspective, it demonstrates how actors create multiple MCs that open different ‘spaces’ serving distinctive functions, while also being interrelated in the creative co-creation process. A ‘core MC’ creates space for recognizing, localizing, and developing new connections between items of knowledge, culminating in a new shared understanding of NPD, i.e. a synthesis; a ‘supplementary MC’ stimulates actions and interactions on the micro-level that can challenge existing knowledge structures and cause-and-effect relationships, potentially resulting in the creation of an antithesis. Therefore, we elaborate on how MCs themselves can serve as a collective resource of creativity. Additionally, we add to the debate concerning the aspects determining the assessment of controls as enabling, arguing that the design characteristics of a single MC do not determine its enabling assessment, but rather it is the dynamic material nexus that MCs form and their fluid interplay that determine their assessment. Finally, our insights allow us to contribute to the relational view of knowledge objects such as MCs by evidencing a transition of an epistemic into a technical object caused by mutual interaction.