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Making sense of innovation: A future perfect approach

Abstract The idea of this paper is to develop a sensemaking tool that can help managers to generate a more asserted approach to innovation. A tool can be defined as something which is needed to perform an action – like innovation. We see innovation as ‘an improvisational dynamics of “moving to” the future’ (Pye, 2005) and use the concept of future perfect thinking (Weick, 1979, 1995), which has been lately debated in studies of project management (Pitsis, Clegg, Marosszeky, & Rura-Polley, 2003; Winch & Kreiner, 2009), to develop a tool that can reduce the perceived uncertainty of innovation. The key in future perfect thinking is to treat the future as something that has already happened in the past and thereby reducing the perceived open-endedness of the future. We suggest, more particularly, that verbal reflections on future challenges by relevant employees can help state the future as something that has a deeper, more stable and more practical meaning. The sensemaking tool is illustrated in a recent case of software development.