Professor Burt Swanson serves as the area chair for UCLA Anderson's Information Systems area and is the director of the Information Systems Research Program. He recently published an article in MIT Sloan's Management Review magazine called "The Manager’s Guide to IT Innovation Waves."
The piece delves into a dilemma that had faced IT executives for decades: What IT innovations should be adopted? How does a company implement the newest technological innovations?
In the essay, Swanson summarizes some of the best practices he's come across through research conducted at UCLA Anderson and from others. Swanson notes that the spread of innovation has often been likened to an organic response, like a wave or a virus. He writes "Once an individual is infected with an idea, he may in turn, after some period of time, transmit it to others. Such a process can result in an intellectual ‘epidemic.’” Later in the piece, Swanson introduces the concept of the "IT innovation wave machine." He writes:
Think of the IT innovation wave machine as a kind of institutional apparatus that serves to produce waves of innovations as just described. Many largely “invisible hands” are busily at work inside the IT innovation wave machine, and their work has a lot to do with the eventual success or failure of the innovation. From the outside, the wave machine produces waves that carry the innovation through five stages: 1) breaking the surface, 2) sending out ripples, 3) causing a squawk, 4) building the swell and 5) riding the crest.