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Case Study: Innovation Trauma and Resilience 75

position and shape the product so that it would fit within the current spon-
soring business unit’s strategy. Thus more stability in the management
structure would have likely given a sense of being (more) in control to the
team, something that would have likely eliminated some potential for
emotional hardship (Bandura, 1977).

ABOUT THE CASE STUDY

Some years ago, Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar, then a director at Sun’s HR
Labs, and I (with the help of Sun’s CTO Greg Papadopoulos) identified the
Sun Ray as a “potential radical innovation” within Sun, a product that was
outside of Sun’s existing portfolio, that had the potential to shift industry
paradigms, and yet had not lived up to sales forecasts. Thus we were inter-
ested in the Sun Ray both as a success story—its ability as a radical idea to
survive into a product and to continue as a Sun product throughout a dra-
matic economic downturn—as well as its failure to live up to expectations.
We hoped to understand the factors that enabled the Sun Ray’s stubborn
survival as well as the factors that prevented it from becoming “the next
Java” (a common catchphrase at Sun).
To understand the Sun Ray’s story, we interviewed—often multiple
times—nearly 40 people central to that story. We took careful notes of the
interviews, which were analyzed with the help of volunteer research assis-
tants from Sun’s HR organization. Indeed, we were confident after these
interviews that we had spoken with every person who played a significant
role in shaping the Sun Ray into what it has become today. We also com-
piled nearly 300 documents, from internal memos to market analyses to
press releases to meeting minutes. These documents helped us sort out fact
from fiction as conflicting tales emerged from the interviews in workshops
to which we invited our most dedicated research assistants to participate in
the triangulation of data. In all, our fact finding spanned nearly a year,
including the validation of the facts in the case write-up with every inter-
view participant. Finally, we studied the case through different interpreta-
tive lenses to gain a richer picture (March, Sproull, & Tamuz, 1991), and
we wrote an analysis of the study through each perspective (Moldenhauer-
Salazar & Välikangas, 2008).