ABSTRACT
Economic innovation is valued in most societies as a means of securing a more productive industry and the material wellbeing which derives from it. But macroeconomic prescriptions for innovation-led economic growth have tended to ignore those facets of new product development which are bound up with the strategic and marketing-oriented competences which determine the performance and effectiveness of companies. Theoretical assumptions which relate innovation and growth, like prescriptions for state intervention in the innovative process, are generally based upon a definition of innovation which casts it as invariably discontinuous. But innovation is a process which includes continuous as well as discontinuous product development. Effective innovation occurs, moreover, as a function of corporate managements’ perceptions of and responses to their strategic needs for innovation. Consideration of how best to stimulate innovation by extra-industrial means should await the empirical determination of the circumstances under which managers value innovation, their purposes in doing so, and the steps they take to ensure success.
