International and external knowledge in concept generation process

Integration of Knowledge has been outlined as being critical for developing and sustaining a competitive advantage and specifically in the case of innovation processes. Within the literature on innovation management, three types of knowledge integration were highlighted as the main drivers to develop innovative products: the integration of several functional knowledge (Clark and Wheelwright, 1991), the integration of external knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal 1999, Henderson and Cockburn, 1994) and the systems integration (Davies and Brady 2000, Prencipe 2003) or components knowledge integration highlighted by Henderson and Clark (1990) in their conceptualisation of architectural innovation. However, though conceptually crucial, this process of knowledge integration is very complex to study and little is known at a micro-level about the factors that favor it, the hurdles, the micro-processes of interaction that enable knowledge integration. We intend to address this gap. We will focus on one specific phase of the innovation process: the concept generation. In this phase, the various types of knowledge integration outlined can be present and thus can be studied. In addition, a growing literature points out the stakes of this very early phase of new product development processes (Cooper, 1997, 2002; Khurana, 1997; Kim and Wilemon, 2002; Lenfle and Midler, 2003; Söderlund, 2004) and especially when the firm is pursuing radical innovation (Reid and de Brentani, 2004). However, unlike the new product literature, the concept generation literature (Seidel, 2007; Hatchuel and Weil 2003) does not specifically focus on the role of the knowledge integration in this phase. We intend thus to highlight knowledge integration practices along the concept generation processes targeting radical innovation contributing by this way to both, the integration knowledge stream of literature and the concept generation one. We will address the following questions: how does a firm generate concepts leading to radical innovation while relying on its internal knowledge distributed in the firm as well as on external knowledge notably that of the customers? What organizational setting is appropriate to this knowledge integration? What are the artefacts used in this knowledge integration?