Knowledge Management and Path Dependancy
‘KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
PRACTICES’ AND PATH-DEPENDENCY
IN INNOVATION*
CRIC, The University of Manchester
Professor Rod Coombs & Richard Hull
CRIC Discussion Paper No 2
June 1997
Published by:
Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition
The University of Manchester
Tom Lupton Suite
University Precinct Centre
Oxford Road, Manchester
M13 9QH
*The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the
ESRC through its ‘Research Programme on Innovation’ for the work on which this paper is based.
1. INTRODUCTION
An increasing number of researchers and commentators have recently been turning their attention to 'knowledge management'1, and particularly the role of knowledge management in innovation2. It seems that there are two major underlying influences which are at work in these discussions, and that they have both complementary and contradictory features.
The first of these influences can be seen as 'internal' to innovation research and it is the literature which synthesises the received findings of 'innovation studies' into an evolutionary economics perspective on technical change. The central feature of this work for our purposes is its weaving together of the observed path dependency of innovation, with the firmspecificity of the routines which generate innovation. For example, Metcalfe & de Liso3 elaborate the idea that a business unit will have a specific 'normal design configuration', a shared mental framework of fundamental design concepts relating to specific technologies, providing the 'operational route' to specific artefacts. Thus the perspective in this literature links knowledge to innovation by focusing on firm-specific routines which stabilise certain bodies of knowledge, embed them in the shared understandings within the firm, and provide templates for deploying that knowledge to produce innovations which have a distinctive organisational 'signature'.
The second underlying influence in the 'knowledge
PRACTICES’ AND PATH-DEPENDENCY
IN INNOVATION*
CRIC, The University of Manchester
Professor Rod Coombs & Richard Hull
CRIC Discussion Paper No 2
June 1997
Published by:
Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition
The University of Manchester
Tom Lupton Suite
University Precinct Centre
Oxford Road, Manchester
M13 9QH
*The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the
ESRC through its ‘Research Programme on Innovation’ for the work on which this paper is based.
1. INTRODUCTION
An increasing number of researchers and commentators have recently been turning their attention to 'knowledge management'1, and particularly the role of knowledge management in innovation2. It seems that there are two major underlying influences which are at work in these discussions, and that they have both complementary and contradictory features.
The first of these influences can be seen as 'internal' to innovation research and it is the literature which synthesises the received findings of 'innovation studies' into an evolutionary economics perspective on technical change. The central feature of this work for our purposes is its weaving together of the observed path dependency of innovation, with the firmspecificity of the routines which generate innovation. For example, Metcalfe & de Liso3 elaborate the idea that a business unit will have a specific 'normal design configuration', a shared mental framework of fundamental design concepts relating to specific technologies, providing the 'operational route' to specific artefacts. Thus the perspective in this literature links knowledge to innovation by focusing on firm-specific routines which stabilise certain bodies of knowledge, embed them in the shared understandings within the firm, and provide templates for deploying that knowledge to produce innovations which have a distinctive organisational 'signature'.
The second underlying influence in the 'knowledge