Reinvention and “Frame Flexibility”

Adopting a radical innovation creates pressure for leaders to reframe their mental models while they also sustain their organization's existing capabilities and product category variants. Yet at key junctures in a product class and during technological change, a concrete definition of the firm’s innovation boundaries and identity can hold a firm hostage to its past.

Professor Raffaelli has theorized that successful innovation adoption is in part due to the top management team’s "frame flexibility", i.e., the capability to cognitively expand an innovation’s categorical boundaries and to cast the innovation as emotionally-resonant with the organization’s identity, competencies, and competitive boundaries. A flexible cognitive frame – coupled with emotional framing – helps leaders and organization members become emotionally engaged in transformation efforts and, in turn, adopt multiple radical innovations over time. When asked to innovate, perhaps there is no more important role for leaders than to expand their cognitive frame and to infuse these expanded frames with emotion.