Pre-emptive radical innovation: building inter-departmental common knowledge in a short product development cycle

In the context of radical innovation, the mutual understanding accrued through longitudinal inter-departmental interactions for continuous innovations can become obsolete. In order to maintain a high quality inter-departmental interface, firms have to rebuild interface common knowledge by acquiring and creating knowledge. It is not clear how such “time pressure” influences the firms´ quest of critical knowledge for radical innovation. In this article, the authors describe radical innovation development in a long product development cycle as preventive innovation; radical product development in a compressed product development cycle is noted as pre-emptive innovation. This paper suggests that companies´ choice between preventive or pre-emptive strategy may result in different approaches of common knowledge building in the context of radical innovation