Synthesis of innovation frameworks

The degree of inclusiveness of innovation models have been refined throughout the years (Cagnazzo & Taticchi, 2008), with each generation of model capturing academic and best practice knowledge of the time thereby serving as a foundation for the development of more sophisticated models (Hobday, 2005). As synthesised in Table 3 below, Caggnazzo et al. delineate the strengths and weaknesses of Rothwell’s five first innovation generations.

Table 3: Strengths and weaknesses of innovation generations (Cagnazzo & Taticchi, 2008)

The linear first and second generation models have been widely criticized for their overly simplistic linear, discrete and sequential nature of the innovation process (Forrest, 1991). In response, the third generation of models demonstrate how the various business functions interact during the innovation process in addition to marrying the importance of technology push and market pull dimensions. Nonetheless, the main criticism of third generation models for (Hobday, 2005) is that they do not detail sufficiently mechanisms for interacting with environmental factors. Regarding the fourth and fifth generation models there is a paucity of evidence to demonstrate the impact of these models yet.

IPACSO was presented as a process model, based upon the models described previously. The basis of this model is the Open Innovation Model, largely because that model itself is an evolution of the previous models, and thus entails all aspects of those previous models. With regard to the open nature, the IPACSO core innovation process takes into account the sensitive nature of innovations in the PaCS space, which sometimes precludes the sharing of information with external entities.

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