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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE FOR INNOVATION 189

very partial view. It helps, then, to unpack three core activities when we think
about innovation.

• Invention – the generation of ideas
• Diffusion – the spread of ideas
• Implementation – the application of ideas in practice.

It is the interweaving of these activities that constitutes innovation, as we can
see in the Medico example where the success of the invention relied on its
uptake and further development by communities of medical professionals. You
would not say that a new idea that never actually got used (implemented)
was really an innovation (it may even be called ‘a mistake’). For example, the
Sinclair C5, despite being cheap (it sold for around £400), quickly became a
commercial disaster and an object of ridicule, with only around 12,000 being
sold. Moreover, these three activities interweave over time in often quite
unpredictable, even bizarre, ways. As research on the spread of management
fashions shows us, the efficiency of the invention or idea is often not what
drives uptake (Abrahamson, 1996; Scarbrough and Swan, 2001). For example,
the vitamin C cure for scurvy was known about decades before it was actually
used. Another example is the now familiar Qwerty layout on the computer
keyboard. This was originally invented when mechanical typewriters used letter
‘hammers’ that would get stuck together if the keys were arranged in a, more
logical, alphabetical order. The diffusion of this type of keyboard resulted
in it becoming deeply embedded into the practices of many social groups
across the globe, including typists and manufacturers as well as teachers and
educationalists. This means that, despite the fact that alternative designs might
be a lot more efficient today and easier to learn, the Qwerty continues to be the
design standard (Rogers, 1995).
The Medico case shows that innovation is, more often than not, highly political
and ‘the purpose’ of innovation is actually several purposes in one (e.g. marketing/
diffusing and at the same time co-creating the new brachytherapy product/service).
In knowledge terms, innovation combines both purposes of exploration (i.e. inventing
new knowledge) and exploitation (i.e. reusing existing knowledge in new contexts –
March, 1991). Figure 9.1 shows schematically how the knowledge processes –
creating, sharing and integrating, and codifying and connecting – considered
throughout the earlier chapters in this book all, then, come to bear to a greater or
lesser extent in the three core activities (Invention, Implementation and Diffusion)
entailed when the purpose is innovation (as depicted by the dotted line).

Types of innovation
Traditionally, writers on innovation have made a distinction between ‘prod-
uct’ and ‘process’ innovation (or ‘technical’ and ‘administrative’ innova-
tion – Damanpour, 1987). Broadly speaking, product innovation involves
the application of knowledge to the development of tangible new products or

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