Bypassing managerial cognitive inertia: Innovation cognition in-the-making

The role managerial cognition plays in strategic renewal has been studied by prior literature. We build on this research but going beyond management, we examine cognition among non-managers (here: innovation program participants) as they self-appoint themselves as change agents to solve business challenges in real-time. As expected, we found managerial cognition initially resistant to open ideation. Nevertheless, we found the program participants expanding their organizational cognition in relation to innovation. They did not directly challenge the managerial cognition but addressed issues that allowed them to separate problem definition and the search for solutions while circulating the solutions and their related cognition across the business units. Our study contributes with an empirical examination of how participants in an organization expand and circulate non-managerial cognition related to innovation and renewal, in interaction with management but without being cognitively caged or dominated. We theorize a process of developing such innovation cognition-at-large and consider its manifestations at different levels of, and across, the organization.