Knowledge based innovation : an experiment on incremental technical innovation

Purpose - Innovation within companies seems today mandatory and vital. Within the general framework of Knowledge Based Innovation, which is an approach of innovation related to the strategic capacities of the company, a stimulated creativity for incremental innovation in a high-tech domain is analysed. An experiment in Thales Company was performed to prove operational feasibility and validate theoretical concepts. Design/methodology/approach - The fundamental assumption is to identify knowledge creation to a process of intellectual corpus evolution process, based on Knowledge workers' creativity, inside the organisation but in interaction with their environment. Their creativity is stimulated by the critical analysis of intellectual capital, which leads to the creation of new technologic trajectories in continuity or bifurcation with existing trajectories. Based on a systemic model of intellectual capital, the analysis of the dynamic of knowledge has shown that the increase of value of intellectual capital may be described as an evolutionist process. Findings - An experimental means is set up to validate the assumptions coming from the analysis of intellectual capital, on the process generating new items for the intellectual capital, on the regulation of this process by a community of knowledge workers and by the integration of the results into the value chain of the organization. From a theoretical point of view, it shows that creativity is an evolution process of an existing knowledge capital. A triggering event of that process can be obtained as a cognitive stimulus built from an historical representation of the concerned knowledge capital, which models the technological trajectories of the firm. This process involves, individually and collectively, a set of actors implied in the construction of the knowledge capital, and in its strategic evolution in the firm. From an industrial point of view, the experiment leads to a feasible methodology for stimulated creativity that can be deployed in the company. Research limitations/implications - Main limitation comes from the inventory of Intellectual Corpus, based on individual interviews with experts about their inventive tracks during the past decades. Practical implications - The described experiment represents the experimental part of the research project presently carried over by the author as a PhD candidate, while going on taking care of his technical radar expert activity within his company without any link with Knowledge management. Social implications - Social implication includes emphasis on the projection of experts' inventive tracks onto the Knowledge map of the organization Originality/value - From a theoritical point of view, this paper links Intellectual Corpus and creativity: creation leads to Intellectual property Rights generation. From an empirical point of view, this paper can be seen as a testimony from inside during action research project.