Non-technological innovation research: evaluating the intellectual structure and prospects of an emerging field

•Individual innovation research has provided a foundation for non-technological innovation field, but is relatively disconnected from the creativity literature.•The innovation field in general has shown different patterns of development than non-technological innovation research.•The prospects for further development of the field can be found in bridging the creativity and innovation literatures at the individual level, focusing on microfoundations and taking a multi-level bottom-up approach, connecting the fields of non-technological innovation and innovation management, and consolidating the relationship between management innovation as the dominant stream of research and non-technological innovation as the umbrella concept.

This paper is aimed at enhancing our understanding of theoretical origins, intellectual structure and outlook of non-technological innovation research with the purpose of facilitating further development of an emerging research field. We perform a co-citation analysis of 482 articles addressing non-technological innovation published since 1975 and examine more than 11,000 sources that they drew on to identify key areas of research within the literature. By using a co-citation tie between articles as the unit of analysis, we dynamically trace and visualize the evolution of the intellectual structure of the non-technological innovation research. Based on our findings, we conclude that the prospects for further development of the (emerging) field lie in: (1) bridging the creativity and innovation literatures at the individual level and addressing employee-based non-technological innovations; (2) strengthening the microfoundations and a multi-level (bottom-up) approach; (3) identifying potential avenues for positioning non-technological innovation vis-a-vis the innovation management field and further building connections and; (4) consolidating the relationship between management innovation as the dominant stream of research and non-technological innovation as the umbrella concept.