Managing innovation in multitechnology firms

This chapter identifies two major dimensions of capabilities of firms developing multitechnology products: synchronic systems integration and diachronic systems integration. Within each of these two dimensions, multitechnology firms maintain absorptive capabilities to monitor and identify technological opportunity from external sources and generative capabilities to introduce innovations at the architectural and component levels. The chapter focuses on a firm's generative capabilities and illustrates that a firm's generative capabilities enables it to frame a particular problem, enact an innovative vision, and solve the problem by developing new manufacturing techniques. The triad frame-enact-solve is argued to be the primary feature of a firm's generative capability.