This section explores the development of the 7Ps model with an academic lens.  It is relevant for students and scholars of Innovation Management, as the 7Ps Model contains the 4Ps Model, which has been highly cited in academic journal articles.

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David L. Francis devised the 4Ps Model while researching for his doctoral dissertation. He writes…

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"During the late 1990s, while researching the distinctive components of organisational innovation for my PhD, I developed metaphors for innovation's role in enterprises. I drew on a sociological tradition that had been central to my undergraduate studies as a sociologist in the 1960s. Let me explain. At that time, Structural Functionalism was widely used as an overarching conceptual framework in sociology. In brief, it argued that sociologists needed to specialise in identifying and describing the factors that either help society be 'healthy' (these were 'functions') or have the opposite effect and are 'dysfunctional'. The work of one of my teachers, Professor Norbert Elias, showed that the interplay of functions and disfunctions was inherently dynamic, like a living stream of creation and destruction.

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Today, Structural Functionalism is seen as a discredited theoretical perspective, but I remain convinced that it is still profoundly valuable in Organisation Development. So the question I asked in my PhD research was, 'What are the shared features of highly innovative organisations that enable beneficial waves of innovation to occur, giving comparative or competitive advantage?'

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Between 1994 and 1998, with research assistance from a UK government department, the Northern Ireland Office, and international consulting organisations, I studied 106 successful innovative organisations and identified 56 distinctive common properties, finding that these functioned differently whether they were directed towards Products (outputs), Processes (how things were done), Position (choices about where to add value) and Paradigm (models of organising).  My PhD, published in 2000, was entitled Assessing and improving innovation capability in organisations and is available online at https://pdfcoffee.com/assessing-and-improving-innovation-capability-in-organisations-pdf-free.html. It has the EThOS ID: uk.bl.ethos.341281.  Below is an extract from my PhD. Five years later, I continued my research career, becoming a Principal Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in Innovation Management CENTRIM) at the University of Brighton, working closely with Professor John Bessant, who was then the director. John and I had the opportunity to test my 4Ps model, and we jointly published an article entitled Targeting Innovation and Implications for Capability Development in March 2005 in Technovation 25(3):171-183. 

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Subsequently, I continued researching the different functions of innovation and the distinct managerial challenges of each, with the opportunity to use the 4Ps model with numerous organisations, especially international organisations, using the resources of Henley Management College in the UK. A 3-year case with FLSmidth & Co, a Danish multinational technology company based in Copenhagen, Denmark, that has almost 11,000 employees worldwide and provides the global mining and cement industries with equipment and services, revealed that the 4Ps model was inadequate, as innovation often had the functions of improving the acquisition and utilisation of resources (Provisioning); methods of connecting with ecosystems and users/customers (Platform) and enhancing generic achievement orientation (Proactivity). Hence, by the 2020s, the 4Ps model had become the 7Ps model!

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The final P (Proactivity) was of particular interest to an organisational sociologist, as research showed that managing innovation initiatives depended on a broader organisational capability that I described as 'requisite agility'. I explored this in an earlier De Gruyter book, Exploiting Agility for Advantage (2020), which examines the interdependencies of innovation and agility, later dubbed 'Innogility'.

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