Abstract:

Innovations have always played a key role in economics. In the past decades, however, their role has changed substantially. The first Boeing 747 took off in 1969 and still it is the key aircraft carrying passengers over the ocean. On the other hand, developments in IT are accelerating at an incredible speed. The first mobile phones thirty years ago were as large as a brick. Six years ago they were much smaller but they were still just phones. Nowadays a mobile works as a camera, a receiver, a TV, for navigation, as a credit card or a medical diagnostic device. These new phenomena are often described as expressions of the oncoming information society or a new knowledge economics (Hamel & Green, 2007; Senge, 2006; Collison, 2005). Currently, when a paradigmatic change from the industrial to knowledge is taking place, we need to abandon the linear model of the innovation process and start understanding it as a continuum (Bartes, 2009; Muška et al., 2009; Chesbrough et al., 2006).