Handbook of Management Scales/New competence acquisition

Description
A comprehensive set of measures is developed to assess an innovation’s locus, type, and characteristics. The measure described on this page is one of these measures. It is found that the concepts of competence destroying and competence enhancing are composed of two distinct constructs that, although correlated, separately characterize an innovation: new competence acquisition and competence enhancement/destruction. Scales are developed to measure these constructs and show that new competence acquisition and competence enhancing/destroying are different from other innovation characteristics including core/peripheral and incremental/radical, as well as architectural and generational innovation types.

Following the typical process of scale construction, the empirical analysis is divided into four stages:
 * 1) content face validity analysis with expert judges.
 * 2) scale puriﬁcation through exploratory and conﬁrmatory factor analysis.
 * 3) assessment of discriminant and convergent validity through analysis of covariance structures.
 * 4) nomological validity through the analysis of the effect of innovation characteristics on time to introduction and commercial success.

Definition
New competence acquisition concerns the extent to which the innovation requires the ﬁrm to reach beyond its existing experience base to acquire new competences.

Items

 * INNOVATION involved fundamentally new concepts or principles for BUSINESS UNIT.
 * INNOVATION required new skills which BUSINESS UNIT did not possess.
 * INNOVATION required BUSINESS UNIT to develop many new skills.
 * INNOVATION required BUSINESS UNIT to learn from completely new or different knowledge bases.
 * INNOVATION required BUSINESS UNIT to adopt different methods and procedures.
 * INNOVATION required BUSINESS UNIT to carry out a great deal of retraining.

Source

 * Gatignon et al. (2002): A Structural Approach to Assessing Innovation: Construct Development of Innovation Locus, Type, and Characteristics. Management Science, Vol. 48, No. 9, pp. 1103–1122.