Pre-emptive radical innovation: building inter-departmental commonknowledge in a short product development cycle

摘要

In the context of radical innovation, the mutual understandingaccrued through longitudinal inter-departmental interactions forcontinuous innovations can become obsolete. In order to maintain a highquality inter-departmental interface, firms have to rebuild interfacecommon knowledge by acquiring and creating knowledge. It is not clearhow such “time pressure” influences the firms' quest ofcritical knowledge for radical innovation. In this article, the authorsdescribe radical innovation development in a long product developmentcycle as preventive innovation; radical product development in acompressed product development cycle is noted as pre-emptive innovation.This paper suggests that companies' choice between preventive orpre-emptive strategy may result in different approaches of commonknowledge building in the context of radical innovation