Product Innovation as a Result of Knowledge Development Processes in Organisations

The main purpose of this chapter is to conduct a theoretical analysis of how product innovation is influenced by the process of knowledge management, and to show that it is necessary to complete the entire process in order to develop incremental as well as radical innovations. Other studies have associated different knowledge development processes with different types of product innovation by specifically linking radical innovation with exploration processes, and incremental innovation with exploitation processes. We differ from this point of view, since we consider both processes as being necessary to the development of the two kinds of innovations.