The Knowledge Innovation Matrix (KIM): A Clarifying Lens for Innovation

Quo Vadis, Innovation? Innovation drives economic growth and improves living conditions throughout the world. This statement has been debated, analysed, and largely accepted since it was originally proposed by Joseph Schumpeter in his classic 1942 text, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Recent economic upheavals in the form of a worldwide recession have led to a deepening concern that innovation has become stagnant (Cowen 2011). While the debate rages on the current state of the innovation economy, a bright spotlight is being thrown on the topic of innovation. Difficult questions are being asked: * What does innovation mean and how does it relate to terms such as invention, novelty, creativity, knowledge, and impact? * How do human cognitive abilities in creativity and collaboration enable innovation? Can these abilities be developed through training to enhance innovation outputs? * How do we define effective innovation processes and what are the innovative artifacts produced? * How do we measure innovation success and how do we learn from innovation successes/failures? * Who are the innovation stakeholders and how are their interests reflected in innovation processes and goals? We see tremendous worldwide interest throughout industry, government, and academia to understand the answers to these questions and to get the innovation economy up to full speed. However, we believe progress is being stymied by the lack of a clear understanding of what we believe to be the essence of innovation--a contribution to human knowledge that addresses some need. In other words, a true innovation must advance human knowledge in a form that improves the human condition. Our goal in this paper is to propose a unifying innovation framework, the Knowledge Innovation Matrix (KIM), which provides a new clarity to innovation research, practice, and management. This lens will allow innovation stakeholders to better understand, manage, and improve innovation processes to achieve industrial, governmental, and academic goals. Our work on the Knowledge Innovation Matrix began because of the authors' interests in facilitating methods in academia that would encourage more systematic and rigorous work in applied fields, such as Information Technology (Gregor & Hevner, 2013). We also have clear interests in promoting innovation in industry as evidenced by our work on projects such as those found in Berndt, Hevner, and Studnicki (2003) and Gregor, Imran, and Turner (2013). However, it became obvious to us that in shifting across disciplinary boundaries we encountered areas in which understandings of innovation and applied research were quite different, having dissimilar and sometimes incompatible meanings and measurements of success. We had previously developed a framework to assist researchers in positioning knowledge contributions so that the significance and novelty of the contribution could be better recognized via academic publication (Gregor & Hevner 2013). Our insight was that this framework could be modified and extended so that it could provide a guide to understanding the impact of knowledge contributions and real-world outcomes in innovation for a broader audience. Unifying the Innovation Landscape The territory covered by the term innovation is immense. The human actors in this landscape are many and varied, including managers, inventors, creative employees, entrepreneurs, university researchers, and policy makers. With such large coverage it is not surprising that it is hard to rise above one's immediate surroundings and take a global view of the innovation landscape. All players concede that innovation is of vital importance to organizations, economies, and to society as a whole. "Virtually all of the economic growth that has occurred since the eighteenth century is ultimately attributable to innovation" (Baumol, 2002). Today innovative activities are strongly linked to business performance in innovation leaders such as Apple, Google, and Adidas (Innovaro, 2008). …