Diagrammatic Models of Innovation
An example of the effort to condense and simplify understanding of innovation is the effort to build a general model of the innovation process in diagrammatic form. A model is a simplified representation of a more complex reality and its object is to make that reality more readily understood in its essential features so that it can be used – to educate, or to instruct policy.
Forrest has reviewed many of the diagrammatic ‘box and line’ models of the innovation process and her review makes apparent the bewildering variety within even this modelling format (Forrest 1991). Some of this variety derives from the degree of complexity of models. Rather like the technology complex, the more complex models were the result of authors adding more elements of the innovation process to improve what we might call the representational coverage of the models – at the cost, of course, of the simplicity which is the object of this kind of modelling process (compare, for example, the models in Figure 1 and Figure 2). Forrest observed that not even these complex models were complete, in that it remained possible to think of further elements that one should include in a model (Forrest 1991). Her ‘minimum list’ of such elements included:
A definite pre-analysis and pre-evaluation stage, definitive feedback loops, both internally within the firm and externally with the environment; the industry and life stage of the organ isation within the industry; a recognition or the environmental variables – not only the marketing and technological, but the socio-cultural and political environmental variables and the internal environment (culture) of the firm; and the important dimensions of time and cost/resource commitment. (Forrest 1991: 450)
This begins to resemble the list of the technology complex, with the added complication that the modelling form is burdened with the object of representing a definite set of stages or functions and their causal relation to each other, usually by means of arrows. The more complex models modify any strong causal connections, for example by having arrows point in both directions to represent reciprocal or iterative influence of functions, or by many of the functions or stages being interlinked by arrows to show that innovation does not necessarily proceed in neat, ordered stages.
It may not be surprising that Forrest concludes by questioning whether this pursuit of a truly general innovation model is possible given the complexity and variety of the innovation process. Yet she does not dismiss outright the utility of this kind of modelling process – instead she urges management to create their own technology or industry-contingent innovation models. So the pursuit of a diagrammatic representation in a particular innovation context may be a useful aid to clarifying thought, but Forrest warns that one should be wary of any particular ‘model’ being taken too seriously and applied too rigidly as a guide to action out of the context in which it was created.
Reference:
Howells, J. (2005). The management of innovation and technology: the shaping of technology and institutions of the market economy. Sage.