Radical innovations as drivers of breakthroughs: characteristics and properties of the management of technology leading to superior organisational performance in the discovery process of R&D labs

ABSTRACT

An interesting problem in management of technology and economics of innovation is how to explain the sources of some breakthroughs in research organisations. The present study confronts this problem by analysing the main determinant of the discovery of quasi-periodic materials that has generated a scientific paradigm shift in crystallography. The inductive study shows that radical innovations adopted in research labs, used by high-skilled adopters (called lab-oriented radical innovations; e.g. the Transmission Electron Microscopy), support breakthroughs and enhance discovery processes. This evidence substantiates a theoretical framework, which explains the main relations, characteristics, and properties of lab-oriented radical innovations that improve discovery processes and induce the superior organisational performance in advanced scientific fields. R&D management implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical innovation
• paradigm shift
• discovery process
• breakthroughs
• R&D laboratory
• organisational performance
• management of technology
• R&D management

Acknowledgements

This research started in 2011 while I was visiting scholar at the Yale University and Georgia Institute of Technology, and developed in 2015 at the Arizona State University. I am grateful to Dan Shechtman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for fruitful advices in occasion of the Distinguished Lecture ‘Quasi-Periodic Materials: Crystal Redefined’ (in the Georgia Tech College of Management's LeCraw Auditorium on Thursday, 23 February 2012). I thank Trang Thai (School of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech) and two anonymous referees of the Journal Technological Analysis and Strategic Management for constructive suggestions that substantially helped the development of this article. I also thank the Engineering & Applied Science Library (Yale University) and S. Price Gilbert Library (Georgia Institute of Technology) for scientific materials provided to this research. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mario Coccia is an economist (First Researcher) at the National Research Council of Italy and visiting researcher at the Arizona State University. He has been research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Economics, visiting professor at the Polytechnics of Torino and University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy). He has conducted research work at the Arizona State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, RAND Corporation (Washington, DC), Yale University, UNU-Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (United Nations University-MERIT), University of Maryland (College Park), Bureau d’Économie Théorique et Appliquée (University of Strasbourg), Munk School of Global Affairs (University of Toronto), and Institute for Science and Technology Studies (University of Bielefeld). He has written extensively on Economics of Innovation, Management of Technology, R&D Management, History of Technology, Management, Organisational Behaviour and Strategic Change of Research Labs; his research publications include more than 280 papers in several disciplines.

Notes

1. Bunch and Hellemans (2004, 436) state that: ‘There are enough examples of recent technological developments, such as the transistor or the laser … The development of radio communications is an early example of the direct application of physics’.

2. ‘“normal science” means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice’ (Kuhn 1970, 10, original emphasis).

3. See also other interesting papers for building theories, such as, Di Maggio (1995), Sutton and Staw (1995), Weick (1995), Van de Ven (1989), Whetten (1989) and Ireland (2011).

4. Cf. Pauling (1985) for the critique of these scientific achievements.

5. Scopus is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles as well as patent databases. It is owned by Elsevier.

6. This argument is underlined by Shechtman in the lecture and in a personal oral communication in occasion of this speech held at the GaTech in 2012.

7. Cf. Coccia and Cadario (2014) for the negative effects of the Organizational (un)learning.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Italian CNR.