International Journal of Innovation Management

In honour of the late Keith Pavitt, we introduce this Special Issue of International Journal of Innovation Management. We discuss the impact of Pavitt's work in technology and innovation on the management field. He showed empirically a number of core principles of technological change and knowledge, and how these affected managerial and organisational tasks. His influence is indicated by his publication channels, citations to his work and the other authors with whom he was cited. Pavitt had signalled several themes for future research in the management of technology and innovation. This introduction explains how the articles of this special issue make contributions to all these ongoing research agendas.

The term "disruptive technology" as coined by Christensen (1997, The Innovator's Dilemma; How New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business School Press) refers to a new technology having lower cost and performance measured by traditional criteria, but having higher ancillary performance. Christensen finds that disruptive technologies may enter and expand emerging market niches, improving with time and ultimately attacking established products in their traditional markets. This conception, while useful, is also limiting in several important ways.

By emphasising only "attack from below" Christensen ignores other discontinuous patterns of change, which may be of equal or greater importance (Utterback, 1994, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation. Harvard Business School Press; Acee, 2001, SM Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Further, the true importance of disruptive technology, even in Christensen's conception of it is not that it may displace established products. Rather, it is a powerful means for enlarging and broadening markets and providing new functionality.

In Christensen's theory of disruptive technology, the establishment of a new market segment acts to channel the new product to the leading edge of the market or the early adopters. Once the innovation reaches the early to late majority of users it begins to compete with the established product in its traditional market. Here we present an alternative scenario in which a higher performing and higher priced innovation is introduced into the most demanding established market segments and later moves towards the mass market.

The evolution of the fuel injection technology for diesel engines initiated and repeatedly innovated since 1922 by Robert Bosch GmbH of Stuttgart, Germany, is used to illustrate the management and policy adaptations necessary to carry out repeated innovations as technologies move through different innovation patterns — transformation (first-of-a-kind), transition (major redesign) and normal (incremental) — and as they evolve from simple to complex. Special attention is given to the role of cooperative alliances in the innovation, knowledge management and decision-making associated with the development of the diesel injection technology. As the technology has become ever more complex, the Bosch innovation activities have manifested a process of co-evolution between a continuously adapting network of supplier and user organisations and diesel injection technology that has occurred as part of an ever-changing environment (e.g., market, public policy).

Among Keith Pavitt's many contributions to the study of innovation is the proposition that physical proximity is advantageous for innovative activities that involve highly complex technological knowledge. But chip design, a process that creates the greatest value in the electronics industry and that requires highly complex knowledge, is experiencing a massive dispersion to leading Asian electronics exporting countries. To explain why chip design is moving to Asia, the paper draws on interviews with 60 companies and 15 research institutions that are doing leading-edge chip design in Asia.

I demonstrate that "pull" and "policy" factors explain what attracts design to particular locations. But to get to the root causes that shift the balance in favour of geographical decentralisation, I examine "push" factors, i.e., changes in design methodology ("system-on-chip design") and organisation ("vertical specialisation" within global design networks). The resultant increase in knowledge mobility explains why chip design — which in Pavitt's framework is not supposed to move — is moving from the traditional centres to a few new specialised design clusters in Asia.

This paper addresses a key interest in Keith Pavitt's later work; the organisational arrangements for co-ordinating technological knowledge. It also concurs with Pavitt's insistence on the constraints on managerial agency and his nihilistic amusement at frustrated plans. The paper considers Pavitt's conceptualisation of knowledge bases as technical disciplines and argues that there is an inconspicuous sub-level of specialised knowledge base associated with tools, products, project experience and requirements that may hamper the intents of higher-level organisation design.

Two contrasting case studies are analysed of organisations attempting to manage transitions that are aimed at improving co-ordination processes. The first has moved from organisation around functional disciplines to product-based, cross-functional teams, while the second has done the reverse. The paper reviews the effects of these opposing organizational solutions on the processes of knowledge integration within the firms, the effects on communities of practice and the ways in which the systems have developed and adapted in response to the reorganisations. The paper challenges some of the simplistic prescriptions offered in the literature and provides further fuel for the debates over organisation design and the knowledge integration task.

This paper is a first attempt to systematically explore the main characteristics of videogames and the particular problems encountered in their development. As an example of an emerging creative industry, videogames are an instance of what we term interactive experiential products. Our study is based on 65 project reports, which were used to examine how the product's interactive nature created certain characteristics in the product's development processes. We find that videogame development displays experiential processes similar to those used in other products which embody "experiential" development processes, such as frequent milestones and testing, multiple design iterations, multifunctional teams and strong project leadership. We also show that there are some subtleties or peculiarities that are specific to games even within these characteristics, such as more complex concurrent development, pipelining and integration issues. Some characteristics are more unique to videogame development, such as "feature creep" and "feature iteration". In general, this results from the complex combination of technology, (creative) game design and (artistic) content within videogames, which causes complexity and uncertainty in the development process. At one extreme, videogames may suffer from not being subject to a full testing cycle until near the end of the project, and given the high uncertainty of consumer's receptivity to the product, this makes for a difficult development situation. While the use of more rational development processes (such as formal software development practices from software engineering) could help with these issues, new thinking can also be done in the future about whether new and more appropriate product development models can be developed to address the needs of videogame development.