Fostering Market Knowledge Use in Innovation:

Is market knowledge useful in generating innovation and why are some companies able to use market knowledge to generate innovation more than others? This article presents in-depth data on four companies facing the challenge of continuous innovation in different industrial settings and shows how companies rely on the use of internal knowledge brokers to: (a) absorb market knowledge; (b) drive knowledge sharing, and (c) favor the process of innovation. The empirical analysis allows us to make a detailed taxonomy of brokers that might achieve different objectives for firms bent on innovation.