Innovation, Efficiency Cycle, and Strategy Implications

Maier, H. & Haustein, H.-D. (1982). Innovation, Efficiency Cycle, and Strategy Implications. IIASA Research Report (Reprint). IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: RR-82-022. Reprinted from Technological Forecasting and Social Change; 17 [1980] [1982]

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Abstract

Innovation research is now in its third stage, in which most attention is given to the efficiency cycle of industries. The five stages of this efficiency cycle (takeoff, rapid growth, maturation, saturation, and crisis) are very important for the firm's strategy and national innovation policy.

Innovation policy should take into account societal goals and objectives. A Social Opportunity Analysis (SOA) is especially important for determining future innovation fields, identifying new alternatives for structural change, and solving problems facing national economies and the entire world economy.

This report tries to identify the universal and global challenges facing national innovation policy and firm strategy in many countries. Their conclusion is that we need a relationship between innovation policy and firm strategy that is able to give innovations a more concrete orientation toward human needs; to create social control procedures for unintentional, indirect, or delayed disadvantages to technology; to secure the interlinkage between technological and social innovation; and to contribute significantly to solving global problems. In this context we discuss the tasks critical to improving the relationship between national innovation policy and firm strategy:

1. Consideration of the different roles of basic, improvement and pseudo-innovations. 2. Information about future fields of innovation. 3. Exploration of the different side effects of innovation. 4. A strengthening of the scientific and educational infrastructure for innovation. 5. Improvement in the abilities of firms and society to deal in new circumstances and situations by developing new procedures of social organizational innovative learning. 6. The realization that government actions concerning innovation can cause very different results in the different stages of the innovation process. 7. The global dimension of innovation.

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