Information and innovation: a comprehensive representation

Abstract Many approaches in the literature on Management of Technological Innovation disregard explicit treatment of the sources and uses of information during the innovation process. Rather, one-dimensional progressions of events are traced from invention through to final innovation outcome, with selected events cited as having been critical. Even when careful attempts have been made to expand such theories to treat Supply factors and Demand factors independently and explicitly, wide variance from actual innovation outcomes has often resulted. Particularly, successful entrepreneurial start-up firms have appeared to follow different rules than those of major corporations. Earlier theories appear incomplete to describe prospects, predict outcomes, or guide management of technological innovation over the full range of effective approaches. By making Information an explicit dimension added to the familiar Supply-Demand pair, one obtains a three-dimensional frame of reference in which widely differing innovation circumstances may be explicitly represented, since sources of information for resolving uncertainty do differ widely from sources for avoiding negligence. This frame of reference is applied to explain the divergent nature of Apple and Boeing innovation histories, as illustration.