Ontological uncertainty and innovation
By David A. Lane, R. Maxfield. 2005
307 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract.This paper explores the relationship between uncertainty and innovation. It distinguishes three kinds of uncertainty: truth uncertainty, semantic uncertainty, and ontological uncertainty, the latter of which is particularly important for innovation processes. The paper then develops some implications of ontological uncertainty for innovation processes at three levels of organization, by means of three theories: a narrative theory of action at the level of individual economic actors; the theory of generative relationships at the meso-level of agent interaction; and the theory of scaffolding structures at the macro-level of market systems. These theories are illustrated by means of examples drawn from a prospective study on the emergence of a new market system around a technology for distributed control.
Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db91d9e169e5798b28a436b53a4808bd605d4ccc
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In Management Science and Operations Research
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- A philosophical basis for hydrological uncertainty (2016, background): “However, in the engineering and science literature, ontological uncertainty refers to properties of the system under study, not properties of the researcher’s choice of philosophy (e.g. Walker et al. 2003, Lane and Maxfield 2005, Brugnach et al. 2008).”
- Economic Emergence: an Evolutionary Economic Perspective (2012, background): “Radical, or ontological, uncertainty means lack of knowledge; it means ignorance of the relevant economic data required for decision making (Shackle (1961) and Lane and Maxfield (2005)).”