Improvisation is an important firm competence in product innovation as firms increasingly face inherent uncertainty in new product development (NPD) process and frequent jolts in the external environment. While there is some empirical and conceptual work on the value of improvisation for several new product outcomes, there is lack of empirical research on the antecedents of improvisation in innovation studies. We attempt to address this gap by studying the role of team variation and team convergence traits in the occurrence of improvisation in a sample of 118 NPD teams from manufacturing firms.

The nature of NPD is conducive to SMEs improvising at all stages of the process. This has the potential to create new knowledge, which, if retained and harnessed, can then be applied at higher strategic levels within the firm. This paper examines this phenomenon, through a preliminary qualitative study.