How firms deal with radical innovation under discontinuity: search practices, innovation context and performance

Management literature has highlighted that under discontinuous conditions incumbents have encountered serious obstacles in identifying, develop and commercialize innovations as traditional and validated 'good' approaches are not adequate, or even counterproductive. It is, therefore, necessary to identify and deploy practices that organisations could apply for enhancing their capacity to manage innovation under such complex environmental conditions. Based on a comprehensive literature review on search practices and on the empirical background of the Discontinuous Innovation Lab - a research network covering around 180 firms in 12 countries - a questionnaire has been submittedto a 500 high tech Italian firm sample. This article analyses in detail the relations between search practices, innovation context (in terms of culture, organizational context) and performance and proposes an interpretative framework.