The fog of innovation: Innovativeness and deviance in developing new clinical testing equipment

Maria Höyssä and Sampsa Hyysalo

Research Policy, 2009, vol. 38, issue 6, 984-993

Abstract: Even when innovators know they are working with a potential breakthrough innovation, they face formidable difficulties in assessing the exact ways it will be innovative as well as deviant in regard to extant systems, business and practices. This finding emerges from our case study that spans the 40-year history of an ongoing and by now potentially radical innovation in automated and miniaturized liquid processing. We analyze the changes in the system-to-be and its relationship to its future contexts throughout this period and show how the developers were able to reliably predict technical compatibility, the outcome, the interface points and effects towards the intended environment only some distance ahead. This 'fog of innovation' presents a management challenge not duly met by instruments available in innovation literature.

Keywords: Discontinuous; innovation; Innovativeness; Innovation; process; Clinical; testing; Case; study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048-7333(09)00043-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:respol:v:38:y:2009:i:6:p:984-993

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().