ABSTRACT
Conventional theories on innovation have tried to explain the technological trajectory of firms, stressing the discontinuities existing in the firm innovation process (Tushmann and Anderson, 1986; D’Aveni, 1994). As highlighted over the years by the Schumpeterian tradition, radical innovations emerge erratically by chance when dynamic entrepreneurs, exploring new market opportunities, introduce ‘new combinations’ moving the entire economic system far from equilibrium (Schumpeter, 1934, 1947). This process, described in an imaginative mode by Schumpeter himself, has been termed ‘creative destruction’, where new technologies and new methods of production displace the old modus operandi in the economy. Schumpeter never discussed in his writings the interplay between discontinuities and continuities in firms’ innovation activity, despite it being obvious that a great deal of technological change and product improvements consist of marginal and incremental innovations (Arrow, 1962; Malerba, 1992; Freeman, 1994). It was the innovation literature of the 1980s and 1990s, focused prevalently on basic radical inventions and innovations, which provided a standard definition of invention and innovation (Clark et al., 1984, who elaborated on Jewkes et al., 1958). The innovation literature was integrated with the Usher (1955) theory of inventions, which distinguishes ‘acts of insights’ and ‘acts of skills’, separating the inventive activity into four stages: the perception of a problem, the setting of the analysis, the primary act of insight and the critical revision. At the time, innovation literature disregarded the impact of all novelties arising from what Usher (1955) was defining as ‘acts of skills’, being the consequence of the skilled activities of engineers and technicians undertaken within the environment of established processes. But Usher himself would have agreed. He argued clearly that the results of those acts do not constitute any invention. As Johnson (1975) clarifies:
[t]o some extent the distinction between the two finds its legal embodiment in patent laws, where obviousness is a ground of exclusion from patentability. Acts of skills will be normally obvious in the sense that they will usually be apparent to those who are skilled in the art’ (Johnson, 1975: 30).
