Can innovation and compliance go together?

This essay aims to identify the points of congruence and divergence between the need for coexistence of compliance and innovation in companies. This essay discusses how innovation interferes with economic dynamics, and how compliance can be used to control and limit innovation. We identified factors that influence the highest level of compliance and that favor the innovative capabilities of companies. The joint analysis of these factors allowed the elaboration of eight theoretical propositions that connect compliance and innovation, being such coexistence is not an option for companies, but a necessity, exposing an antagonistic and symbiotic relationship between the two themes. We believe that this essay enriches the existing literature by connecting several research that, in a first analysis, do not establish a connection. We propose a conceptual framework with propositions to be empirically tested by future studies. In addition, we were able to expose that compliance has been a neglected term in academic research, requiring further studies on how organizations can benefit from it. We point out the various nuances of possibilities that the symbiotic relationship between compliance and innovation can give rise to. Companies that have innovative processes or partnerships for this purpose must implement compliance in their governance structure, but horizontally, defining people or sectors responsible for carrying out internal and external compliance in an active position, in the various stages of building innovation: development, testing and production. Managers should be aware that compliance should not be so rigid as to restrict freedom, self-direction and promote excessively high costs.