E‐improvisation: collaborative groupware technology expands the reach and effectiveness of organizational improvisation

Abstract With today's increasing pace of change, managers who are struggling to continuously adapt and survive are turning to an emerging management technique known as organizational improvisation. This field of management science draws from a metaphor based in improvisational theatre and jazz music and is defined as: The ability to spontaneously recombine knowledge, processes and structure in real time, resulting in creative problem solving that is grounded in the realities of the moment. As part of these changes, organizations are working across great distances and in groups that include diverse constituents such as suppliers, partners and customers. The distance separating these team members poses a problem for improvisation as improvisation relies heavily on interpersonal communication between group members. The collaborative wealth of creativity, innovation and productivity flows in part from this real‐time interaction. The increasing distance between group members hampers the effective reach of organizational improvisation. The proposed concept of e‐improvisation suggests that the adoption of groupware collaborative software, in particular a peer‐to‐peer offering called Groove, can extend the reach of improvisation and enhance its effectiveness. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.