Organizational innovation in energy companies: a literature review

Institutional, technological, and competitive change poses a threat to established ways of managing and organizing processes, and activities within the electric utilities sector. These challenges require the ability to innovate organizational structures, human resource management strategies, and leadership competencies to remain at the forefront of complex process and product innovation in different domains, and across different national and global contexts. While the required change exerts a growing pressure on top managers, and Human resource managers more directly, research has not analyzed in detail patterns of organizational innovation, competence development, and their consequences for competitive positioning, and success in the coming years. Our paper is part of a research project that has been launched in partnership with Enel Foundation to fill this gap. The overall project is based on an extensive analysis of the existing literature, coupled with qualitative interviews with key actors in the industry to develop a global survey that will be sent to the most relevant players in the industry. In this paper, we describe what organizational innovation is, and how it has been subject to study. We then move to analyze the existing literature on Electric utilities, and describe some of the key players. Finally, we present our questionnaire and the sampling that will be used in collecting the data.