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A knowledge-based view of firm innovation
Edited by Gregorio Martín-de Castro, Pedro López-Sáez and Miriam Delgado-Verde
1. Introduction
A clear understanding of what an innovation represents is crucial to assess the innovativeness of organizations. Innovativeness can be defined as the capacity of an organization to produce innovations continuously ([42] Galunic and Rodan, 1998) and is considered to entail important organizational outcomes. For example, evidence suggests that the generation of innovations leads to a dominant competitive position ([9] Banbury and Mitchell, 1995; [12] Bates and Flynn, 1995) and that new product innovations serve as a key driver of firm performance ([66] Lee et al. , 2003). Additionally, an organization's capacity to continuously generate innovations is considered a primary source of sustained competitive advantage ([70] Lengnick-Hall, 1992; [93] Porter, 1990). Understanding the innovativeness of organizations is therefore critical to managers, and this requires an accurate specification of what constitutes an innovation.
Innovation as an organizational phenomenon has a long tradition of research and has been studied in many different fields. Perhaps because of its long history, "the term 'innovation' is notoriously ambiguous and lacks either a single definition or measure" ([1] Adams et al. , 2006, p. 22). Part of this ambiguity stems from the complexity of the phenomenon itself, which can be conceptualized in a variety of ways: the introduction of new products or processes ([122] West and Farr, 1990), the innovative activity of organizations ([7] Armour and Teece, 1980; [111] Terziovski, 2010), innovation diffusion ([55] Hoffman and Roman, 1984), innovative capability ([108] Subramaniam and Youndt, 2005) or innovation involvement ([89] Obstfeld, 2005). A consequence of the multiplication of concepts and definitions is that many empirical studies either do not mention a definition for innovation or, if they do, use an established definition that is often unrelated to the operationalization of the construct chosen in the article. This makes the comparison of the results from these studies an arduous task.
This article reviews the literature on innovation and proposes a framework to characterize the different conceptualizations of innovation based on two dimensions. The first dimension relates to the possibility for an innovation to be either a process or the outcome of this process ([118] Van de Ven, 1986; [122] West and Farr, 1990). Innovation as a...