The fog of innovation: Innovativeness and deviance in developing new clinical testing equipment

Even when innovators know they are working with a potential breakthrough innovation, they face formidable difficulties in assessing the exact ways it will be innovative as well as deviant in regard to extant systems, business and practices. This finding emerges from our case study that spans the 40-year history of an ongoing and by now potentially radical innovation in automated and miniaturized liquid processing. We analyze the changes in the system-to-be and its relationship to its future contexts throughout this period and show how the developers were able to reliably predict technical compatibility, the outcome, the interface points and effects towards the intended environment only some distance ahead. This ‘fog of innovation’ presents a management challenge not duly met by instruments available in innovation literature.