Visioning for innovation - how firms inject knowledge about the future into innovative activities

Developing radical or disruptive innovations requires the meshing of actual sophisticated technological and market knowledge with visions about the future. Both, knowledge reuse (exploitation) and the search for new knowledge (exploration) in order to create new products are taking place in an ambiguous world and require certain types of sense-making dynamics to be successfully executed. This paper presents a conceptual framework of visioning for innovation as a dynamic capability for sustained product innovation from which hypotheses are inferred. We carry out a pilot survey to gain preliminary evidence on the validity of the hypotheses and the framework proposed.