Abstract
Ironically, our understandings of innovation appear to become increasingly vague, as “innovation” has been one of the most powerful buzz words. Currently, the concept of innovation is likely to be misunderstood just as “something new” or “something good”. Since Schumpeter first defined innovation as new combination, there has been substantial accumulation of innovation research. Despite the rich literature on innovation, not only Schumpeter but also many followers did not pay much attention into the core of the definition of innovation. We will go back to the basics of innovation research in order to reexamine the essence of innovation, and to derive theoretical and practical implications for managing innovation in modern competitive environment. Redefining innovation as “system redefinition”, we will present an analytical framework of innovation to explore its discontinuous nature of new combination.
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- 1.
“V-shaped Recovery Neglects Technology: Will Sony Repeat Nissan’s Mistakes?” WEDGE (September 2007 issue)
- 2.
Fujimura (2004) characterizes a product as consisting of the similar three layers, and analyzes impacts of product modularization.
- 3.
As we discuss later, this way of characterizing innovation is similar to that of Abernathy and Clark (1985).
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Kusunoki, K., Aoshima, Y. (2010). Redefining Innovation as System Re-Definition. In: Itami, H., Kusunoki, K., Numagami, T., Takeishi, A. (eds) Dynamics of Knowledge, Corporate Systems and Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04480-9_3
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