The (R)Evolution of New Product Innovation

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Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the management and engineering literatures on new product innovation conceive it as evolving by some form of biological evolutionary mechanism: punctuated equilibrium, neo-Lamarckian genetic transfer or neo-Darwinian natural selection. These accounts hold out the possibility of `best practice' models based on particular views of time and progress that are too limiting to adequately explain radical innovation in terms of a process rather than the `final' product. I then turn to the works of Henri Bergson to consider how these may help us to consider the processual quality of innovation.