Firms navigating through innovation spaces: A conceptualization of how firms search and perceive technological, market and productive opportunities globally

Journal article, 2016

This paper focuses upon how to help explain how and why firms differential abilities to ‘navigate’ through three dimensions of innovation spaces influence their ability to recognize opportunities, and therefore, in longer run, be able to compete and generate aggregate economic growth. This paper is an initial step in developing this understanding. This paper therefore uses elements of existing theoretical and empirical understanding in a new combination, in order to propose a new synthetic conceptualisation of the innovation process in firms as the navigation of a complex space involving different types of opportunities. Empirically, these topics are increasingly important to both firms and economies, due to the globalization of all types of business activities – from research and development through production, service and customers.Globalization thus also requires a more complex theoretical understanding of how such interdependencies and interrelatedness affect firms, and the observation that firms struggle with search and opportunities on a global scale prompted this line of research to better conceptualize the processes.