The interest in the technological innovation process from a business management perspective continues in response to the large number of technological innovations that have fueled unprecedented economic growth. Economists and sociologists have put forth models of the process with various factors; internal and external to the innovating organization. The cognitive perspective has not been addressed in these models implicitly assuming that such a perspective manifests itself in various organizational routines.

Intellectual capital research promises an organization a rich source of concepts and mechanisms that can be leveraged to create and sustain competitive advantage. Intellectual capital conceptualized as consisting of human, structural and relational capital components, is proposed as the source of all innovation related activities. These three components move along the ideation, incubation and the demonstration stages of innovation projects to create intellectual property in the form of new products, new processes, patents and more importantly, organizational learning when documented. As most innovation projects involve a high degree of uncertainty, complexity and serendipity, absorptive capacity and reliance on intuition are introduced to account for these factors.

The exploratory nature of this paper’s enquiry necessitated a qualitative research approach with the technological innovation project as the unit of analysis. The grounded theory approach focusing on the technological innovation phenomenon tracked the antecedents, the outputs, the outcomes, the context, and the different stages of the technological innovation project. Seven projects in two R&D intensive companies from India were selected for conducting the case studies. Executives involved in the technological innovations in these firms were interviewed and the data recorded, transcribed and electronically documented. Atlas-TI5 software was used for qualitative data analysis which included content analysis, pattern generation and generating networks as prescribed by grounded theory.

This paper discusses a postmodern perspective of the technological innovation process with a grounded theory framework. Organizational factors such as intellectual capital and absorptive capacity along with an individual construct; reliance on intuition, have been put forth to explain the enigmatic process. The authors contend that the organizational constructs emphasized in literature are necessary to generate innovative activity but are not sufficient. This paper promises senior managers insights into the design and management of technologically innovative organizations by providing managerial interventions at the strategic and operational levels.