Sourcing Innovation: probing Technology Readiness Levels with a design framework

Fabien Jean (), Pascal Le Masson () and Benoit Weil ()
Additional contact information
Fabien Jean: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Pascal Le Masson: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Benoit Weil: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Supplier-buyer exchanges are well addressed in literature except in the case of unknown objects. Sourcing Innovation, i.e. the process of finding external sources of innovation and then bringing those innovations into the firm should transform incoming unknown objects to ascribe them value. Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) have formalised the unknown in supplier-buyer exchanges in many industries for forty years but there is no evidence that they enable that transformation. We then use design theories, i.e. the Technology-Environment framework, to probe TRL through analysing ten cases combining documents analyses and longitudinal studies. We found that TRL avoid fixating on a low mature technology and are not an obstacle at genericity; however they fixate when the buyer waits a certain TRL prior exploring the new technology value. Finally TRL are unable to guide designers towards generativity notably because they embrace a definition of Environment focused on the prototyping method.

Keywords: supplier-buyer exchanges; Technology-Environment framework; design theory; innovation theory; fixation; generativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino and nep-sbm
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01249946v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in SIG Innovation EURAM. In-between event Innovation Theory and the (re)foundations of Management, Nov 2015, Paris, France

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01249946v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01249946

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().