TOWARD EVOLUTIONARY INNOVATION THEORY

Innovations, commercialized by new or old established firms, located at the core of industrial renewal process. The innovation concept has suffered transformations, along with the evolution of the models that try to explain and understand the innovation process. The innovative process corresponds to all activities that generate technological changes and the dynamic interaction between them, not necessarily being novelties. Linier model, Chain-Linked Model and National Innovation Systems (NIS) Approach, are three models that have developed for innovation process. Innovation process can be viewed as evolutionary process. One can recognize some mechanism for innovation evolution. These are grouped into two classes; those that increase configurations variation and those that decrease it. Emergence of knowledge, knowledge flow and recombination are the mechanism to increase variation of configuration. Internal and external selections are the mechanism to selecting. Innovation operators are evolutionary operators that create new combinations of configuration and increase variation. This paper develops an evolutionary cycle in innovation process and extends evolutionary mechanisms of innovation.