Structuring Innovation from Tech Startup Founding Stories: The Communicative Constitution of Innovation

Abstract

Innovation serves as the impetus in organizing tech startups, which are said to have a penchant for disrupting big business. Against the backdrop of the Innovative Startup Act (RA 1137) incentivizing innovation in the Philippines, this dissertation conducted narrative interviews with ten Filipino founders of tech startup companies. Subscribing to the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) approach, the study hinged on the premise that “organization is structured like a narrative” (Cooren, 2000: 58). The study looked at how innovation is perceived, articulated, and materialized in the founding stories of tech startups, which in turn shed light on how innovation structures—and simultaneously get structured by—the tech startup organization. This is demonstrated in eight identified themes including “the story of a vision for innovation”, “the story of recognizing and overcoming threats to the innovation”, and “the story of innovation as a series of trials and pivots”, each of which has a representative narrative schema that plotted the structure of the founding story. A metanarrative of innovation has also been proposed and further cast into an actantial model, highlighting the trajectory that innovation goes through and thus revealing its common characteristics in the tech startup organization. Innovation is improvised and accomplished in communication as well as materialized and made meaningful by the processes within the (narrative) structure. From the context of tech startups as the organization of innovation, the study theorizes on the “communicative constitution of innovation”.