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Case Study: Innovation Trauma and Resilience 73

Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996; Westman & Etzion, 1995). The exceptional
experience of Sun’s famed engineering department’s not delivering in the
case of the JavaStation was transferred to the perceptions of the Sun Ray as
untrustworthy: guilty by association. It is important to shape the perceptu-
al context of an innovation in such a way that such contagion does not
readily occur.

TREATING INNOVATION TRAUMA
(AND BUILDING RESILIENCE)

What can organizations do, then, to treat traumatic experiences from inno-
vation failure so as to maximize learning for future projects? How to build
resilience from experience?
First, related literature from organizational change indicates that indi-
viduals need time and opportunity to disengage from past experiences
(Nadler, 1988). Directly moving the remnants of the JavaStation group into
the Sun Ray project allowed no time for dealing with innovation trauma
and loaded the Sun Ray group with unnecessary emotional baggage. By the
same token, the Sun Ray team should probably have done more to disasso-
ciate itself from the legacy of the JavaStation team—an act that became
difficult after the merger of the two teams but that could still have been
possible due to the different technology platforms and large turnover in the
composition of the team.
Second, postmortem workshops on the underlying causes can help cre-
ate a common understanding of the course of events that led to the failure.
This, in turn, may assist individuals’ rationalization of what happened and
why. Often the cause of the failure is not straightforward (Bartunek,
Gordon, & Weathersby, 1983), as in the case of the Sun Ray, thus adding
to the complexity of the experience. Was it the nature of the product (tech-
nology?) that caused the innovation not to live up to the expectations, or
was the project management at fault in its less-than-optimal market devel-
opment? Or was it simply too late to upset Microsoft’s monopoly? What
should (or could) have been done differently? (As Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar
of Sun’s HR Labs and I conducted our interview research on the Sun Ray
case, we felt occasionally like therapists helping people to heal a wound and