Tradition and aesthetics as organisational catalysts for innovation development: an exploratory analysis of practitioners and academics perspectives

Aesthetics and tradition are considered as organisational catalysts for innovation, yet scholarly literature remains fragmented and separated from practitioners’ discourse. This body of work seeks to systematise aesthetics and tradition as catalysts for innovation development while integrating both academic and practitioners perspectives. A combined content and thematic analysis is employed to evaluate scholarly publications retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science whereas Nexis Uni is employed to gather publications from the practitioners side. Various inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied when constructing both academics and practitioners samples. The obtained findings detail a convergence across the two corpora in portraying aesthetics as a driver for experiential differentiation, symbolic meaning and market attention. Conversely, tradition is generally linked with legitimacy, authenticity and identity coherence. However, scholarly literature offers a more granular and theoretically grounded understanding of the learning, recombination and capacity building mechanisms that explain how firms renew capabilities across changing competitive environments, while practitioners underscore the tangible strategies and organisational structures that foster and sustain innovation capability. Additionally, both corpora indicate a variety of contingencies that shape the relationship between aesthetics, tradition and innovation. This manuscript advances our understanding of aesthetics and tradition as organisational catalysts for innovation development while providing valuable insight into their effectiveness.