A Structural Approach to Assessing Innovation: Construct Development of Innovation Locus, Type, and Characteristics

TLDR

The study adopts a structural approach to assess innovation by developing comprehensive measures of its locus, type, and characteristics. The authors develop scales to measure new competence acquisition and competence enhancing/destroying, distinguish them from other innovation characteristics, and estimate their impact on time to introduction and perceived commercial success. The study reveals that competence enhancing/destroying comprise two distinct constructs—new competence acquisition and competence enhancement/destruction—whose dimensions can be evaluated independently with small intercorrelations, and that these structural characteristics differentially influence time to introduction and perceived commercial success, highlighting the importance of locus, type, and characteristics while raising questions about internal versus external competence acquisition.

Abstract

We take a structural approach to assessing innovation. We develop a comprehensive set of measures to assess an innovation's locus, type, and characteristics. We find that the concepts of competence destroying and competence enhancing are composed of two distinct constructs that, although correlated, separately characterize an innovation: new competence acquisition and competence enhancement/destruction. We develop scales to measure these constructs and show that new competence acquisition and competence enhancing/destroying are different from other innovation characteristics including core/peripheral and incremental/radical, as well as architectural and generational innovation types. We show that innovations can be evaluated distinctively on these various dimensions with generally small correlations between them. We estimate the impact these different innovation characteristics and types have on time to introduction and perceived commercial success. Our results indicate the importance of taking a structural approach to describing innovations and to the differential importance of innovation locus, type, and characteristics on innovation outcomes. Our results also raise intriguing questions regarding the locus of competence acquisition (internal vs. external) and both innovation outcomes.