Revisiting Absorptive Capacity with a Design Perspective

Pascal Le Masson (), Patrick Cogez (), Yacine Felk and Benoit Weil ()
Additional contact information
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
Patrick Cogez: ST-CROLLES - STMicroelectronics [Crolles]
Yacine Felk: 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: We examine how teams working on radical innovation develop a novel type of absorptive capacity (AC) to make use of external knowledge. In the setting of the semiconductor industry we compare AC in incremental innovation and AC in radical innovation, relying on the most recent theory of design reasoning. We are led to propose a framework of how radical innovation teams leverage external knowledge using a specific type of AC. AC in incremental innovation can be described as 'epistemic absorptive capacity' (EAC), based on a stable set of design rules to address pre-identified problems; AC in radical innovation, which we label 'conceptual absorptive capacity' (CAC), is based on 'refined visions' with three facets: 1 'rule-breaking', to move from known to out-of-the-box 2 'hook building', to overcome cognitive crises by linking the unknown to multiple cognitive references 3 'milieu stimulation', to support the creation of new knowledge in the milieu.

Keywords: absorptive capacity; radical innovation; design theory; conceptive absorptive capacity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00870353v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in International Journal of Knowledge Management Studies, 2012, 5 (1/2), pp.10-44. ⟨10.1504/IJKMS.2012.051939⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00870353v1/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-00870353

DOI: 10.1504/IJKMS.2012.051939

Access Statistics for this paper

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