Abstract
The innovation process is consists of the creative and diffusion process broadly. The creative process focuses on the internal product development process and work flow improvement. The diffusion process focuses on the external activities, which are to diffuse the product onto the market widely and get the economical value as the result. There are many researches for individual innovation process, however, few researches for the comprehensive innovation process, which is to see the creative and diffusion process as a consistent process and discuss them comprehensively. In this paper, the possibility to study the comprehensive innovation process by using Actor-Network Theory will make clear by the case analysis for the innovation process of a personal computer peripheral device in Japan. As the results, the usefulness of ANT was verified for the investigation of comprehensive innovation process first. Secondly, the following hypothesis was derived. Innovation is not something that can be reduced to a single primary factor, such as a new technology, an organization, or a market, but that it requires the expansion of a network consisting of all of these elements, transition by means of this expansion, and translations that make the manufacturer an obligatory passage point in the network.
