ion "as a process linked to innovation in product, market or technology". He then notes the compatibility of these ideas with Mintzberg's (1990) arguments about organisational culture, which question the ability of managers to discover advantage, but rather see advantage emerging from organisational processes. Innovation "is more the outcome of the capitalist process of creative destruction than the result of a strategic planning process" (Barney 1985). Ability at guessing, learning, and sheer luck appear in such a perspective to be key competitive factors. Ciborra enlarges on these beginnings, by arguing that innovation with strategic potential can be encouraged in two ways. One is to "rely on local information and routine behaviour, ... allowing and even encouraging tinkering [bricolage] by people close to the operational level". The other is to use 'radical learning' to "intentionally challenge and smash established routines" and "forge new competencies". In many ways, this argument appears revolutionary, but in other ways it does not. Some of the themes are detectable in the IS and adjacent management literature, particularly in those areas deriving from the Japanese tradition (Nonaka and Yamanouchi 1989), but also in such papers as McGinnis (1984), Henderson & Treacy (1986), Copeland & McKenney (1988) and Earl (1988), and in the notions of 'organisational transformation', IT-induced business re-configuration (Scott Morton 1991), business process re-design (Davenport & Short 1990), and 'renovating the corporation' (Brown 1991). Research in Strategic Information Systems It is increasingly clear that separating out the effects of IT on such abstract and complex variables as corporate processes and corporate performance, is fraught with difficulties. Conventional empirical research methods (in the sense of the collection of large amounts of data about large populations, followed by statistical analysis in order to test specific hypoth...
