Reconceptualizing Innovation as a Social and Knowledge-Based Phenomenon

This paper contributes to the innovation literature by re-examining both the outcome and process perspective of organizational innovation from a knowledge-based perspective. First, we reconceptualize innovation as a duplicable, new and useful knowledge outcome. Building on the notion that knowledge is inherently social in nature, we then develop a model of organizational innovation as a process of knowledge creation and recombination that results from a complex interplay of both knowledge substantiation and social substantiation processes.