The Underlying Internal Learning Process of Incremental and Radical Innovations. An Analysis in the Emilia-Romagna Region

Organizational change is nowadays attracting great interest. However, several domains remain to be explored as far as the relationship between innovation and organization is concerned. Within this framework, the paper investigates whether the introduction of incremental and radical innovation underlies different learning processes in terms of decentralized labor organizational practices, different modes of organizing R&D activity and the nature of employees’ competences of innovating firms. The empirical evidence provided points out that incremental innovation seems to be mainly grounded on a problem-solving activity based on learning by doing and learning by using processes, while in the case of radical innovation learning by searching process seems to be at work.