Feedback Loops as Dynamic Processes of Organizational Knowledge Creation in the Context of the Innovations’ Front‐end

Feedback loops are instrumental in the organizational knowledge creation (OKC) process across the highly uncertain and dynamic innovation's front‐end. Therefore, managers should be aware of how these loops unfold, how to recognize meaningful patterns and how to steer them towards planned and emergent outcomes. Easy to say, difficult to practise! This empirical paper focuses on knowledge–conceptualization – the new knowledge's generation‐crystallization journey – and develops a unique model of feedback loops as dynamic processes of OKC in the context of the innovations’ front‐end. Using ten qualitatively studied innovations, the authors identify five front‐end OKC stages (generation, evaluation, expansion, refinement and crystallization) and pattern these based on their overlaps to explore the associated feedback loops. This model distinctively illustrates increasing–decreasing, diverging–converging and frequent negative‐cum‐positive loops, and illuminates the complex and rich patterns of loops not captured before.