BALANCING CAPABILITY BUILDING FOR RADICAL AND INCREMENTAL INNOVATIONS

This paper explores the kind of learning that creates capabilities needed in incremental and radical innovation development. The empirical evidence is based on four innovation-related development projects, implemented through enterprise-student team collaboration. It seems that the richness of innovation and learning processes affects the diverseness of developed capabilities. The goal of innovation development drives learning and capability building, while improved capabilities help adopt challenging goals that stimulate a new level of learning. The process emphasising analysis, planning and analytical knowledge creates capabilities resulting in incremental inventions. The innovation process that focuses on experimentation and utilisation of other knowledge types facilitates capability building resulting in inventions that are radical in nature. These two process types are not contrary but complementary options to develop solutions to satisfy the expressed and unexpressed needs of customers. This paper presents views on how to interconnect these processes characterised by divergent rhythms.