Exploring radical innovation search practices

Abstract

This paper focuses on the practices and techniques that can be used at the front end of innovation to search for radical or discontinuous new product ideas. It addresses a gap in the literature by using empirical, survey data to identify the dimensions of a firm’s capability to search for new ideas for radical or discontinuous innovation. To do this a review of the literature on the front end of innovation was conducted and used to develop an understanding of how to search for radical new product ideas. From this a questionnaire was developed for the assessment of practices adopted by firms when dealing with the challenges of the search phase of radical innovation. However, there has to date been no thorough attempt to investigate its factorial solution. The purpose of the present study is therefore to investigate the factorial solution, that is, to reduce multiple items to a lesser number of underlying factors that represent the dimensions of searching for radical new ideas. The results from Irish and Italian samples identify 5 dimensions of the search capability that can be used to search for radical new product ideas.