MetaTOC stay on top of your field, easily

Journal of Product Innovation Management

Impact factor: 1.572 5-Year impact factor: 3.111 Print ISSN: 0737-6782 Online ISSN: 1540-5885 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)

Subjects: Business, Management

Most recent papers:

  • Successive Open Innovation Contests and Incentives: Winner‐Take‐All or Multiple Prizes?
    Reto Hofstetter, John Z. Zhang, Andreas Herrmann.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 12, 2017
    Open innovation contests are a popular way to tap into the creativity of customers. Many firms host multiple, successive open innovation contests in response to different, creative challenges they face. To encourage customers to participate and make an effort in such contests, they offer monetary rewards of varying sizes. Although prior research has investigated the optimal reward design for one‐time contests, little is known about how the rewards offered in a contest can influence individuals’ ongoing level of participation and their creative effort in subsequent contests. Receiving a reward is a form of positive competence feedback that influences individuals’ feelings of competence and intrinsic motivation. Based on cognitive evaluation theory, we argue that these feelings can persist after a contest ends, influencing positively participation and creative efforts in later contests. Our online experiment and also our analysis of the data from an actual open innovation platform show that individuals tend to cease participating in subsequent contests, significantly reducing the size of the crowd over time. Receiving a reward and positive competence feedback alleviates this tendency. Therefore, offering more prizes motivates more high‐performing individuals to participate again and to put in more creative effort, which in turn raise the average quality as well as the best quality in subsequent contests. These findings suggest that in successive open innovation contests, multiple rewards not only encourage greater participation, but also promote better quality outcomes. Thus, firms are well advised to expand the positive reward feedback in contests, as doing so will help them to maintain a sizable and motivated crowd of contestants.
    October 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12424   open full text
  • Social Functions of Anger: A Competitive Mediation Model of New Product Reviews.
    Yazhen Xiao, Haisu Zhang, Daniel Cervone.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 11, 2017
    Negative online product reviews generated by current users can influence potential adopters' new product evaluation and set up diffusion barriers. Integrating the social functions of emotion theory with the innovation diffusion context, this research proposes that the emotional intensity expressed in angry online reviews influences potential adopters' new product evaluation through two competitive routes (i.e., in an opposite direction): perceived problem seriousness in the review and perceived rationality of the reviewer, thus establishing two simultaneous mediations in the conceptual framework. Furthermore, this research suggests that the two mediations are moderated by product innovativeness. This investigation was completed in three experiments with consumers recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Study 1 manipulated anger intensity in two levels expressed in a single negative review, using a smartphone as the reviewed new product. Study 2 employed a multi‐review setting, including negative, neutral, and positive reviews, using an E‐reader as the reviewed new product. The multi‐review setting was also adopted in Study 3, where three levels of anger were manipulated. Three studies adopted an incrementally versus really new product version to manipulate innovativeness. Combined findings of the three studies support the proposed dual mediation processes. In addition, results show that the mediation effect of problem seriousness in the review is stronger for a really new product than an incrementally new product. This research extends the underpinning of innovation diffusion literature and provides managerial implications for new product launch management. First, it identifies that anger intensity expressed in a new product review socially influences a potential adopter's concurrent appraisals of the reviewed product and the reviewer. The two appraisal routes mediate the impact of anger intensity on new product evaluation in opposite directions. Second, the research explores and identifies which mediation route is more influential on new product evaluation when product innovativeness varies.
    October 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12425   open full text
  • Turning the Sword: How NPD Teams Cope with Front‐End Tensions.
    Constantine Andriopoulos, Manto Gotsi, Marianne W. Lewis, Amy E. Ingram.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. September 18, 2017
    Front‐end new product development (NPD) is fraught with tensions that fuel and inhibit innovation. According to paradox theory, tensions pose a double‐edged sword, sparking learning and creativity or anxiety and counterproductive responses. NPD teams' shared understandings—how they think about (cognition) and approach (motivation) tensions—turn the sword. Existing literature examines innovation tensions and their management. Yet scholars call for deeper dives, seeking research that unpacks cognitive and motivational drivers underlying how NPD teams cope with tensions. This paper responds, presenting a four‐year inductive study of five NPD consultancies. Across cases, findings explicate the roles of paradoxical cognitive frames and regulatory motivational focus. Across firms, the front‐end NPD teams framed tensions paradoxically. Three frames—guided freefall, benevolent dictatorship, and cohesive diversity—helped teams develop shared understandings of tensions as paradoxical, posing competing yet interdependent demands. Teams varied, however, in their regulatory focus, influencing how they applied the frames to approach tensions. In the most innovative case, teams applied a promotion focus, energized to explore tensions in search of more creative alternatives and synergies. In less innovative cases, teams applied a prevention focus, motivated to avoid risk and loss. Together, paradoxical frames and regulatory focus shaped teams' coping behaviors and resulting innovation. Resulting theory posits the interplay among cognitive, motivational, and behavioral drivers of innovation. Results offer three contributions. First, this study extends understanding of antecedents to team innovation and front‐end NPD. Second, findings deepen insights into team cognition and paradoxical frames. Last, the theoretical framework explicates how cognitive‐motivational interactions enable coping behaviors that foster innovation. The conclusion poses managerial and research implications. Building from paradox theory this study suggests means to foster shared paradoxical frames and promotion focus in NPD teams. Further, study limitations highlight opportunities to extend its generalizability and elaborate underlying drivers of innovation. Practitioner Points Paradoxical frames and a promotion focus help teams at the front end of NPD cope with tensions and fuel virtuous cycles of innovation. Training front‐end NPD leaders and team members in paradoxical thinking will help them frame competing demands as synergistic and tap into the energizing potential of tensions. Positive messaging about NPD tensions that emphasizes gain, risk, and movement over cautiousness and vigilance, aids adoption of a promotion focus—motivation that helps further mobilize front‐end innovation.
    September 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12423   open full text
  • Takin' Care of Business Models: The Impact of Business Model Evaluation on Front‐End Success.
    Stefan Schrauder, Alexander Kock, Christian V. Baccarella, Kai‐Ingo Voigt.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 28, 2017
    In recent years, the discussion about business models has garnered increasing attention in practice and research. It is argued that thinking about business model alternatives supports managers, entrepreneurs, or R&D groups in, for instance, developing technological ideas into successful new businesses. Due to a business model's holistic perspective on ideas, it aims to understand not only what kind of value can be created for customers with a certain project but also how this value can be captured and what the corresponding value architecture looks like. Although existing research argues that technological development and business model development should go hand in hand, a quantitative examination of the actual benefits of business model evaluation in the technology‐driven front end of innovation has yet to be performed. This study relates business model evaluation to dimensions of front‐end success and examines environmental turbulence as a moderating variable. Hypotheses are tested by applying structural equation modeling on a set of 151 R&D groups. Results indicate that the extent of business model evaluation in R&D groups' early innovation phases positively relates to front‐end effectiveness and efficiency. Further findings reveal that environmental turbulence increases the strength of these relationships, indicating the stronger relevance of business model evaluation in more turbulent environments.
    August 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12411   open full text
  • Categorization and Willingness to Pay for New Products: The Role of Category Cues as Value Anchors.
    Bram Kuijken, Gerda Gemser, Nachoem M. Wijnberg.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 24, 2017
    This study focuses on textual category cues and their influence on consumers' willingness to pay for new products. It examines whether an anchoring effect occurs when consumers are provided with textual category cues that refer consumers toward a particular product category. This article argues that consumers' willingness to pay for a product under consideration will tend toward the average price of products in the category in which it is positioned. This average price acts as a reference point that influences consumers' willingness to pay. We hypothesize that the more innovative the product is, the less certain the consumer is about its properties. Therefore, the proposed anchoring mechanism will influence consumers' willingness to pay strongly when the product is radically innovative, while the willingness to pay for an incrementally innovative product will not be affected by the proposed anchoring mechanism. Our hypotheses are tested by means of four experiments using online auctions in which consumers actually pay when they win an auction. The findings provide support for the role of category cues as “semantic anchors.” More specifically, giving the cues of categories in which the products had higher average monetary value compared to cues of categories in which the average monetary value was lower, resulted in an increased consumers' willingness to pay for radically new products. As expected, this effect was not found in the case of incrementally new products. The article concludes with theoretical and managerial implications.
    August 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12414   open full text
  • Governing Collaborative New Product Development: Toward a Configurational Perspective on the Role of Contracts.
    Erwin Hofman, Dries Faems, Stephanie C. Schleimer.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 24, 2017
    This study inductively explores the interplay among different contractual functions and their impact on project performance in collaborative new product development (NPD) projects. Applying a configurational perspective, contracts are conceptualized as bundles of different functions. In line with the notion of discriminating alignment, an explicit distinction is made between different contextual settings in terms of innovation objectives (i.e., incremental versus radical) and relational embeddedness (i.e., presence versus absence of prior collaboration) in the exploration of the project performance implications of different contractual configurations. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses on a sample of 125 collaborative NPD projects helped to generate propositions on the interplay between different contractual functions across different contextual settings. The results indicate that the contractual coordination function is an important function in achieving high project performance in collaborative NPD projects. However, the research findings demonstrate that it is not a sufficient condition and needs to be complemented with discrete safeguarding functions depending on the particular context. Together, these findings provide new insights into how particular combinations of contractual functions can help address the core governance challenges of collaborative NPD. They also point to the relevance of applying a configurational perspective to the study of the role of contracts in management research. Finally, they provide practitioners with specific recommendations concerning the design of contracts for collaborative NPD projects.
    August 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12412   open full text
  • Moderating Ideation in Web‐Enabled Ideation Systems.
    Michela Beretta, Jennie Björk, Mats Magnusson.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 21, 2017
    While organizations increasingly implement web‐enabled ideation systems to access the collective intelligence of their distributed employees, recent studies show that most attempts to use these systems underperform or fail. This article draws on a qualitative case study of the Ericsson system “Idea Boxes” to explore a novel approach to manage ideation based on the use of the moderator role. The aim of this study is to understand to what extent and how the introduction of moderators can contribute to a better management of web‐enabled ideation systems and to overcome the shortcomings commonly associated with their use. The contribution of this study to innovation literature is threefold. First, it develops a conceptual framework that gives insights into the practices implemented by moderators to manage ideation, namely: (1) formulating an ideation strategy, (2) combining means for community building, and (3) formalizing the ideation process. It focuses on unfolding their key complementarities. Second, this study relates these practices to the shortcomings of web‐enabled ideation systems with respect to the sourcing, filtering, and handling of employees' ideas. It discusses how the identified practices can help organizations address these shortcomings by stimulating sustained employee participation, increasing the quality and fit of the ideas generated, and ensuring their efficient selection and integration. Third, this article compares moderators to other innovation roles discussed in the new product development literature with the aim of broadening the future research agenda toward an investigation of emerging organizational roles having limited formal authority to manage innovation. The findings of this study provide valuable guidelines to managers to implement more sophisticated approaches for a better management of the ideation process through web‐enabled ideation tools.
    August 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12413   open full text
  • When Team Identity Helps Innovation and When It Hurts: Team Identity and Its Relationship to Team and Cross‐Team Innovative Behavior.
    Robert C. Litchfield, Zahide Karakitapoğlu‐Aygün, Lale Gumusluoglu, Matthew Carter, Giles Hirst.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 13, 2017
    Although the success of team‐based organizations requires innovative behavior within and across teams, little research has considered how to foster both types of activity. This is problematic as strong team attachments such as team identification may have mixed effects on team innovative behavior, and may even negatively impact cross‐team innovative behavior. The present research explains these mixed effects through intra‐ and intergroup aspects of social identity theory and the concept of team reflexivity. Effects of team identification on team innovative behavior were expected to be contingent upon team reflexivity, such that team identification would be positively related to team innovative behavior only when team reflexivity was high. Where a team's innovative behavior involves working across team boundaries with other teams, i.e., cross‐team innovative behavior, this interaction between team identification and reflexivity was further expected to be qualified by perceived interdependence with another team. In a sample of 61 Turkish research and development (R&D) teams comprising 305 employees and 61 team leaders, the association between team identity and team innovative behavior was moderated by team reflexivity as predicted. Further, team identity was positively associated with cross‐team innovative behavior only when reflexivity and perceived interdependence between teams were both high, and negatively associated when reflexivity was low and perceived interdependence between teams was high.
    August 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12410   open full text
  • Firm Adaptation, Preadaptation, and Sequential Ambidexterity in Firm Boundaries During an Era of Ferment and an Era of Incremental Change.
    Chirag Patel, Mariyani Ahmad Husairi.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 31, 2017
    We explore the relation between firms’ internal skills and knowledge from past applications and the mechanism they use to adapt during an era of ferment and then to an era of incremental change in a new technological domain. We extend current research on incumbent firms’ success at facing radical technological change by studying dynamic firm boundaries of incumbents within the industry along a new technological trajectory. We use the concepts of problem, search, and solution from the knowledge‐based view and foundational view of knowledge recombination to develop our theoretical framework. We propose that preadapted firms—the ones with accumulated internal skills and knowledge from past applications that prove relevant by chance to the new technological domain—are more likely to choose internal technology sourcing during an era of ferment (than nonpreadapted firms). Subsequently, firms that choose internal sourcing during an era of ferment are more likely (than firms that source externally) to choose external sourcing during an era of incremental change leading to greater market acceptance for their innovation. Analysis of a longitudinal data set of 161 U.S. banks provides support for our hypotheses. The findings of this study indicate an important temporal dependency between internal and external sourcing, thus contributing to the sequential ambidexterity literature. Our theoretical framework provides support to the foundational view of knowledge recombination and contributes to the knowledge‐based view of the firm.
    July 31, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12409   open full text
  • The Impact of Information Technology on New Product Development Performance.
    Timo Mauerhoefer, Steffen Strese, Malte Brettel.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 26, 2017
    Many managers expect a substantial impact of digitization on new product development (NPD) as it is an information‐intensive business process. Therefore, a better understanding of how information technology (IT) might improve the NPD process is important for both theory and practice. Drawing on the IT business value literature, this study develops a comprehensive conceptual model to investigate empirically how IT and non‐IT organizational antecedents translate into NPD IT capabilities and competences and how these are related with NPD performance. Based on survey data from German NPD managers, this study offers several insights. First, it shows that the development of superior NPD IT capabilities and competences depends on the ability to acquire and deploy suitable IT (i.e., firm‐level IT capabilities) and on appropriate strategic, structural, and cultural conditions ensured by a strong top management focus on NPD IT (i.e., executive champion for NPD IT). This study hence contributes empirical evidence to the NPD and the IT business value literature by expanding research on complementary resources. Second, this study addresses limitations regarding the conceptualization of NPD IT capabilities and their relationship with further sources of competitive advantage arising from NPD IT tool usage by considering both the effectiveness and the frequency of usage as well as the relationship between both. Third, this research updates the measurement of NPD IT tool usage effectiveness (i.e., IT leveraging competence) to account for technological developments. Moreover, this study reveals that the effectiveness of NPD IT tool usage is positively associated with NPD performance. It also highlights that the dissemination of IT tools does not directly increase NPD performance, but that NPD IT tool use frequency is an important antecedent of IT leveraging competence. For managers, this paper offers empirical evidence that firm‐wide IT capabilities and a focus on NPD IT are important predictors of NPD performance.
    July 26, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12408   open full text
  • Predicting Innovation Success in the Motion Picture Industry: The Influence of Multiple Quality Signals.
    Neeraj Bharadwaj, Charles H. Noble, Annette Tower, Leah M. Smith, Yuexiao Dong.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 09, 2017
    In settings characterized by frequent product entries and rapid market exit, predicting innovation success is a difficult task. The challenge in such short life‐cycle markets is exacerbated when the offering is an experience good (i.e., product quality is not known prior to consumption). This article investigates a variety of information disequilibrium‐reducing cues that can signal a new product's quality, and posit that those cues affect knowledge of and attitude toward (i.e., customers' mindset) the item, and in turn, demand. The work draws on signaling theory in an experience good context (motion pictures) to set up a nomological net that includes three sources of quality cues as predictors of consumer demand, namely: (i) traditional prelaunch decisions (e.g., production budget, advertising budget, and sequel), (ii) volume and valence of movie critics' reviews, and (iii) text contained in the movie critics' reviews. Based on a stratified, random sample of movie introductions (n = 115), the results show that the prelaunch (structured numeric) variables alone explain a meaningful proportion of the variance in domestic box office sales. The postlaunch (structured numeric) variables, volume and valence of critics' reviews, add more explanatory power, and analyzing over two million words from the (unstructured) text of critics' reviews adds further explanatory power. This research answers a recent call to model the variety of structured and unstructured variables to predict innovation success in data‐rich environments, and thereby represents the pioneering study to combine all three sources of quality cues—(i) prelaunch, structured variables; (ii) postlaunch, structured variables; and (iii) postlaunch, unstructured variables derived from text reviews—as determinants of demand. The approach taken also substantiates film as innovation and as an interesting case of new product development. For managers in a short life‐cycle, experience good settings, the results support the inclusion of a broader “variety” of quality signals to improve forecasting in today's data‐rich environments. Practitioner Points The results here highlight the importance of considering both marketing decisions and expert reviews in forecasting approaches for new product launches. Exploring a nuanced approach to analyzing expert reviews seems to be particularly promising in predicting product successes and failures. This research also helps us develop a deeper understanding of the nature of critics' reviews. Beyond just “thumbs up/thumbs down” sort of recommendations, we identify specific words that are influential in making an impression on consumers and, ultimately, driving product success or failure. This work also emphasizes the challenges of predicting success in markets for short life‐cycle experience goods such as films. In these markets, expert reviews likely carry even more weight since consumers have great difficulty in assessing the product in advance.
    July 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12404   open full text
  • Ideator Expertise and Cocreator Inputs in Crowdsourcing‐Based New Product Development.
    John Jianjun Zhu, Stella Yiyan Li, Michelle Andrews.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 06, 2017
    Crowdsourcing‐based new product development (NPD) involves consumers in contributing ideas as ideators in the ideation phase, and providing inputs as cocreators in self‐selected subtasks in the product development phase. The novelty of this NPD approach furnishes little understanding about the effect of crowds' self‐select participation into ideation and development subtasks, and this study aims to bridge this gap. This article draws on the attention allocation perspective of online knowledge sharing to identify the domains of ideator expertise based on the types of development subtasks they self‐selected to perform as cocreators in prior projects. It separately examines the impact of different domains of ideator expertise (marketing and engineering) and the interaction between ideators' expertise and cocreators' inputs on crowdsourcing‐based NPD outcomes. Large‐scale, longitudinal data from a crowdsourcing‐based NPD platform reveal that ideators' engineering expertise helps convert ideas into final products more than ideators' marketing expertise. In contrast, ideators' marketing expertise helps these products achieve more sales than ideators' engineering expertise. Moreover, final products achieve more sales if ideators' marketing expertise embedded in initial product ideas is later augmented with either marketing or engineering‐related development inputs by crowd cocreators. However, ideas generated by ideators with engineering expertise achieve fewer product sales when those ideas are complemented by more marketing‐related development inputs by cocreators. These findings extend crowdsourcing‐based NPD theory and furnish insight on managing crowdsourcing‐based NPD platforms.
    July 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12400   open full text
  • Big Data Facilitation, Utilization, and Monetization: Exploring the 3Vs in a New Product Development Process.
    Jeff S. Johnson, Scott B. Friend, Hannah S. Lee.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 30, 2017
    Big data is transforming the new product development (NPD) process. Organizations are investing heavily in big data capabilities to capitalize on the ongoing analytics movement. Yet there is a lack of understanding of how firms can leverage big data as a capability to generate innovation success in dynamic marketplaces. To address this need for improved insights, the authors operationalize and analyze the 3Vs of big data usage—volume, variety, and velocity—in an NPD model. Drawing on the results of a survey of 261 managers reporting on their business unit's NPD processes and big data usage, this study identifies the antecedents of the multidimensional usage of big data. Empirically assessing the effects of firm orientations, the authors show that an exploration orientation has a positive effect on all three dimensions of a firm's big data usage while an exploitation orientation has no effect. Moving downstream, the results also reveal that the environmental factor of customer turbulence interacts differentially with the big data usage dimensions' impact on new product revenue (NPR). Specifically, customer turbulence accentuates the relationship between big data velocity and NPR but attenuates the relationship between big data volume and NPR.
    June 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12397   open full text
  • “What You See, Is What You Get?” Guidelines for Influencing Consumers' Perceptions of Consumer Durables through Product Appearance.
    Ruth Mugge, Darren W. Dahl, Jan P. L. Schoormans.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 30, 2017
    Consumers often purchase consumer durables without using these products beforehand. Product appearance is then one of the factors that consumers use to form inferences about the experience and credence attributes of consumer durables. For companies, it is important to successfully manage these inference processes of consumers to create a competitive advantage. However, a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between product appearance and the inferences about products' experience and credence attributes is lacking. This research provides empirically based, generalizable guidelines to assist companies with selecting the product appearance of consumer durables to trigger strategically valued experience and credence attributes. An empirical analysis of 120 consumer durables, belonging to four product categories on 31 design characteristics identifies five design dimensions (i.e., harmony, novelty, natural, weight, compressed) that differentiate product appearances of consumer durables. Furthermore, the findings show that these design dimensions relate to perceptions of performance quality, ease of use, and technological advancement. Specifically, product appearances that score high on harmony, neutral on novelty, and somewhat above neutral on weight trigger the most positive performance quality perceptions. Product appearances that score high on natural, low on novelty, and neutral on compressed trigger the most positive ease of use perceptions. Novel and nonnatural appearances prompt positive inferences about technological advancement. These findings are integrated into a discussion of the managerial implications and the potential avenues for future research on product appearance.
    June 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12403   open full text
  • Linking Data‐Rich Environments with Service Innovation in Incumbent Firms: A Conceptual Framework and Research Propositions.
    Gabriele Troilo, Luigi M. De Luca, Paolo Guenzi.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 30, 2017
    The impact of big data on innovation is not only driven by technology and analytics. It involves a transformation of the organizational culture, structures, processes, roles, and capabilities that underpin the innovation process. Understanding these factors is particularly important for service innovators, given the strong interdependence between the organizational context and technology in service companies. Moreover, in many of these organizations, the innovation process is still deeply rooted in a non‐digital past. This study answers the call to understand what are the key characteristics of a systematic process for service innovation in data‐rich environments. In particular, the authors investigate the primary factors that enable existing service organizations to capture the innovation potential inherent in data‐rich environments. To this aim, the authors implemented a two‐step research design. First, they integrated the service innovation and information systems literatures in a unified conceptual framework that articulates the relationship between data‐rich environments and service innovation from an organizational perspective. Second, they carried out 40 semi‐structured interviews in seven large service firms, which allowed them to refine and populate the initial framework with typologies, concepts, and examples from the field. A major contribution of this study is to articulate the concept of data density, as three distinct processes (pattern spotting, real‐time decisioning, and synergistic exploration) connecting data‐rich environments with service innovation opportunities. Finally, the authors identified a set of organizational enablers that facilitate the links among technology, data density processes, and service innovation. The findings of this study offer a roadmap for service managers who need to align the service innovation process of their organizations with the opportunities offered by data‐rich environments.
    June 30, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12395   open full text
  • Inferior Member Participation Identification in Innovation Communities: The Signaling Role of Linguistic Style Use.
    Kristof Coussement, Steven Debaere, Tom De Ruyck.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2017
    Community managers often struggle to ensure the viability of innovation communities (IC) due to their big data characteristics and inferior member participation, which result in minimal activity and low‐quality input. In response to a recent call in the innovation literature for new approaches to dealing with the challenges of big data, we propose an IC‐management strategy that relies on extracting linguistic‐style cues from community posts to identify future inferior member participation. When future destructive IC behavior is signaled, the moderator can effectively select the correct member for corrective treatment to prevent negative community impact. This article uses text mining to extract self‐interest‐oriented and positive emotional writing style cues from 39,387 posts written by 1611 members of 10 ICs. Two multilevel regression models deliver novel insights into the relationship between these linguistic cues and the likelihood of inferior community participation (quantity and quality). First, a community member's use of a positive emotional writing style signals less inferior participation quantity and quality in the future. Second, a moderator's use of a self‐interest‐oriented writing style suggests more inferior participation quality, while a self‐interest‐oriented community indicates less inferior participation quality. Third, community managers should work to build a positive‐emotion‐driven community, as such communities experience constructive member participation. This article shows that community managers who struggle with their IC must realize that in addition to what people say, how they say it gives insights into the IC's viability. We conclude our study by revealing the theoretical and managerial implications for IC management and community moderators.
    June 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12401   open full text
  • Organizational Structures for New Service Development.
    Elina Jaakkola, Anette Hallin.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 19, 2017
    Although previous research has demonstrated that many critical success factors for new service development (NSD) relate to how the NSD function is organized, few attempts have been made to examine the organizational arrangements for NSD in more detail. This study explores what kind of organization structures firms use for NSD, and what implications such structures have for NSD. To expand the previous research heavily focused on standardized services, a qualitative, in‐depth study of NSD in knowledge‐intensive business service firms was conducted. The study uses a multiple case comparative research strategy where empirical data was collected in nine companies. The study empirically identifies four key organizational arrangements for NSD: NSD in customer relationships, NSD in temporary project teams, NSD in business development units, and NSD in separate R&D units. These arrangements are conceptualized as organization structures characterized by their level and nature of specialization, standardization, formalization, and centralization. The study shows that these key NSD structures can coexist in organizations despite their different and even contradictory characteristics, and highlights the unique opportunities and challenges that each structure brings for NSD. Challenging extant research that has focused on examining particular structural characteristics as success factors for NSD, this study demonstrates that NSD performance may be driven by a configuration of several, simultaneously operating NSD structures rather than by one superior structure. Accordingly, firms should establish organizational approaches that support close connections between different NSD structures.
    June 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12399   open full text
  • Identifying New Product Ideas: Waiting for the Wisdom of the Crowd or Screening Ideas in Real Time.
    Steven Hoornaert, Michel Ballings, Edward C. Malthouse, Dirk Van den Poel.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 19, 2017
    Crowdsourcing ideas from consumers can enrich idea input in new product development. After a decade of initiatives (e.g., Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea, Dell's IdeaStorm), the implications of crowdsourcing for idea generation are well understood, but challenges remain in dealing with the large volume of rapidly generated ideas produced in crowdsourcing communities. This study proposes a model that can assist managers in efficiently processing crowdsourced ideas by identifying the aspects of ideas that are most predictive of future implementation and identifies three sources of information available for an idea: its content, the contributor proposing it, and the crowd's feedback on the idea (the “3Cs”). These information sources differ in their time of availability (content/contributor information is available immediately; crowd feedback accumulates over time) and in the extent to which they comprise structured or unstructured data. This study draws from prior research to operationalize variables corresponding to the 3Cs and develops a new measure to quantify an idea's distinctiveness. Applying automated information retrieval methods (latent semantic indexing) and testing several linear methods (linear discriminant analysis, regularized logistic regression) and nonlinear machine‐learning algorithms (stochastic adaptive boosting, random forests), this article identifies the variables that are most useful towards predicting idea implementation in a crowdsourcing community for an IT product (Mendeley). Our results indicate that consideration of content and contributor information improves ranking performance between 22.6 and 26.0% over random idea selection, and that adding crowd‐related information further improves performance by up to 48.1%. Crowd feedback is the best predictor of idea implementation, followed by idea content and distinctiveness, and the contributor's past idea‐generation experience. Firms are advised to implement two idea selection support systems: one to rank new ideas in real time based on content and contributor experience, and another that integrates the crowd's idea evaluation after it has had sufficient time to provide feedback.
    June 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12396   open full text
  • Harnessing Difference: A Capability‐Based Framework for Stakeholder Engagement in Environmental Innovation.
    Rosina Watson, Hugh N. Wilson, Palie Smart, Emma K. Macdonald.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 02, 2017
    Innovation for environmental sustainability requires firms to engage with external stakeholders to access expertise, solve complex problems, and gain social legitimacy. In this open innovation context, stakeholder engagement is construed as a dynamic capability that can harness differences between external stakeholders to augment their respective resource bases. An integrative systematic review of evidence from 88 scientific articles finds that engaging stakeholders in environmental innovation requires three distinct levels of capability: specific operational capabilities; first‐order dynamic capabilities to manage the engagement (engagement management capabilities); and second‐order dynamic capabilities to make use of contrasting ways of seeing the world to reframe problems, combine competencies in new ways, and co‐create innovative solutions (value framing), and to learn from stakeholder engagement activities (systematized learning). These findings enhance understanding of how firms can effectively incorporate stakeholder perspectives for environmental innovation, and provide an organizing framework for further research into open innovation and co‐creation more broadly. Wider contributions to the dynamic capabilities literature are to (i) offer a departure point for further research into the relationship between first‐order and second‐order dynamic capabilities, (ii) suggest that institutional theory can help explain the dynamic capability of value framing, (iii) build on evidence that inter‐institutional learning is contingent on not only the similarity but also the differences between organizational value frames, and (iv) suggest that operating capabilities impact the effectiveness of dynamic capabilities, rather than only the other way around, as is usually assumed. A methodological contribution is made through the application of quality assessment criteria scores and intercoder reliability statistics to the selection of articles included in the systematic review.
    June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12394   open full text
  • Knowledge Development Approaches and Breakthrough Innovations in Technology‐Based New Firms.
    Dzidziso Samuel Kamuriwo, Charles Baden‐Fuller, Jing Zhang.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 17, 2017
    Compared to large established firms, technology‐based new firms (TBNF) seem well placed to produce breakthrough innovations although questions remain as to their adeptness at subsequent exploitation. Building on the innovation and strategy literatures, the study identifies two different knowledge‐development approaches or modes (business models) in TBNFs—internal versus external—and examines their relation to breakthrough innovation and subsequent progression of the product to market. The internal mode assembles knowledge inside the firm to generate its innovations, whereas the external mode relies heavily on alliances to develop and assemble knowledge among firms embedded in a creative network. The study uses a unique panel dataset of 69 UK new biotechnology firms over an 11‐year period to explore this issue empirically. The findings show that the external knowledge‐development mode is associated with more breakthrough innovations and a faster movement of innovations to market. The externally focused mode is not impeded by its relative lack of internal knowledge; it uses partners to access, assemble, and develop a wide scope of knowledge in a flexible manner. In addition, partners provide deep domain expertise to undertake the requisite deep‐dives. In contrast, the internal mode has the huge challenge of assembling knowledge resources internally and suffers from a quicker onset of path dependence that impedes the generation of breakthroughs. This study provides a choice of business models (internal or external) that is associated with different breakthrough and speed to market performance outcomes. Going forward, policy makers and managers seeking breakthrough innovations, and speedy progression of the innovations to market should consider the potential resource efficiency of the external mode and the vital role played by collaborations—small firm versus large firm and private versus public entities.
    May 17, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12393   open full text
  • How Do Established Firms Produce Breakthrough Innovations? Managerial Identity‐Dissemination Discourse and the Creation of Novel Product‐Market Solutions.
    Diana B. Perra, Jatinder S. Sidhu, Henk W. Volberda.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 15, 2017
    Despite the legacy of experience, some established firms are able to avoid a mindset, behaviors, and routines that can be expected to lead them down paths of local search and incremental product innovations of ever‐declining value. Indeed, established firms are often adept at introducing successful path‐breaking innovations. To explain this apparent paradox, this article draws on the organizational identity literature to present a model that ascribes breakthrough innovations by established firms to managerial identity‐dissemination discourse (MIDD). MIDD is argued to provide a sense‐giving framework, which fosters an understanding of the firm as a nexus of values around which the firm can be continuously rediscovered and reconstituted in new ways. By exposing the firm as an idea that can assume fresh forms in terms of product‐market combinations, MIDD stimulates and coordinates creative endeavor, thus increasing the disposition to produce breakthrough innovations. The model also suggests that the impact of MIDD is likely to depend on transformational leadership and the level of centralization and formalization in the company. The results of a cross‐sectional empirical study provide support for the model. In contrast to the focus of earlier research on behavioral and structural explanations for breakthroughs by established firms, this article advances understanding by offering a cognitive explanation. In doing so, the article highlights that creativity and innovation in firms are mentally located in an interpretive schema of the firm's identity, which has important implications in relation to organizing for breakthroughs. The article discusses these implications with particular reference to the use of multifunctional teams and advanced information and communication technologies for facilitating breakthroughs.
    May 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12390   open full text
  • The Effect of Corporate Support Programs on Employees’ Innovative Behavior: A Cross‐Cultural Study.
    Andreas Engelen, Lea Weinekötter, Saadat Saeed, Susanne Enke.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 11, 2017
    This article establishes a theoretical model that sheds light on whether corporate support programs can foster employees’ innovative behavior across nations and which national cultural dimensions moderate this relationship. To validate the arguments empirically, this research consists of two sequential, independent studies. The first study uses secondary data from the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor special report. Analysis of responses from 11,560 full‐time employees in 13 countries shows that the relationship between support and innovative behavior is more positive when the nation's levels of power distance and masculinity are low and individualism is strong. A second experimental study is conducted in Germany and China using employees’ individual behavior as the dependent variable and corporate support programs differentiated into three types of corporate support (providing time, providing budget, and providing advice) as the independent variable. Findings indicate that all three types of corporate support programs positively impact employees’ innovative behavior in the sample from Germany, at least indirectly via feasibility and desirability judgments as mediators, but no significant relationships in the sample from China. This study contributes to the research stream on employees’ innovative behavior and corporate support programs by adding national cultural properties as environmental factors. In addition, this study investigates the mediating effect of feasibility and desirability judgments between three types of corporate support programs and innovative behavior. This study also contributes to innovation research in general and to research on employees’ innovative behavior in particular by building and validating a multilevel model empirically.
    May 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12386   open full text
  • Facilitating Radical Front‐End Innovation Through Targeted HRM Practices: A Case Study of Pharmaceutical and Biotech Companies.
    Annabeth Aagaard.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 10, 2017
    This study extends the knowledge of the human resource management (HRM)–innovation relationship and examines how innovation‐facilitating bundles of HRM practices are applied to facilitate radical pharmaceutical front‐end innovation (FEI). The empirical investigation is an explorative case study of science‐driven FEI and HRM practices across one in‐depth case study and seven validation studies among international pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The findings provide a theoretical overview of key HRM practices in support of radical pharmaceutical FEI as well as an empirical mapping of how innovation‐facilitating bundles of HRM practices are applied to actively develop radical, science‐driven pharmaceutical FEI, including the identification of the key innovation challenges and opportunities involving innovation‐facilitating HRM practices in pharmaceutical FEI. The article contributes to the existing innovation literature in terms of identifying how radical FEI may be facilitated through the application of innovation‐facilitating bundles of HRM practices. The empirical contribution and managerial implications provide nine specific suggestions for how pharmaceutical management groups can better support radical pharmaceutical FEI through targeted HRM practices. The derived results of the study also underline inherent challenges of the pharmaceutical industry and regulations (FDA) that may not stimulate radical innovation, which cannot be resolved by HRM, but require the attention of policy makers. The value added lies in the specificity of the empirical, pharmaceutical context in which the issue of supporting radical, science‐driven FEI is investigated.
    May 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12387   open full text
  • How Do Resource Structuring and Strategic Flexibility Interact to Shape Radical Innovation?
    Yuan Li, Peter Ping Li, Haifeng Wang, Yucheng Ma.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 10, 2017
    As high resource consumption and high uncertainty are two of the most critical challenges to radical innovation, it is imperative to adopt resource structuring for an active management of resource portfolios, and also to adopt strategic flexibility for active management of contextual uncertainties, especially for firms in the emerging economies characterized by serious resource deficiency and high contextual uncertainty. Though firms engaging in resource structuring and strategic flexibility separately could foster radical innovation, the interaction effect of resource structuring and strategic flexibility could be complementary or substitutive, and the effective utilization of these two organizational dimensions as a joint force should be well aligned to achieve scientific breakthroughs. Specifically, this study explores how two different types of strategic flexibility (i.e., resource flexibility and coordination flexibility) as special capabilities interact with two different types of resource structuring (i.e., resource acquisition and resource accumulation) as special mechanisms to shape radical innovation under high uncertainty. With a sample of 508 Chinese firms, our results show that the specific effects of resource acquisition and resource accumulation on radical innovation are contingent upon resource flexibility and coordination flexibility in two contrasting patterns. Specifically, a firm with high resource flexibility tends to foster radical innovation under high uncertainty by interacting with resource accumulation, rather than with resource acquisition; in contrast, a firm with high coordination flexibility is likely to foster radical innovation under high uncertainty together with resource acquisition, rather than with resource accumulation. The theoretical and practical implications of the above two contrasting patterns are also discussed.
    May 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12389   open full text
  • Workforce Composition and Innovation: How Diversity in Employees’ Ethnic and Educational Backgrounds Facilitates Firm‐Level Innovativeness.
    Ali Mohammadi, Anders Broström, Chiara Franzoni.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 07, 2017
    This article studies how workforce composition is related to a firm's success in introducing radical innovations. Previous studies have argued that teams composed of individuals with diverse backgrounds are able to perform more information processing and make deeper use of the information, which is important to accomplish complex tasks. We suggest that this argument can be extended to the level of the aggregate workforce of high‐technology firms. In particular, we argue that ethnic and higher education diversity within the workforce is associated with superior performance in radical innovation. Using a sample of 3,888 Swedish firms, this article demonstrates that having greater workforce diversity in terms of both ethnic background and educational disciplinary background is positively correlated to the share of a firm's turnover generated by radical innovation. Having more external collaborations does, however, seem to reduce the importance of educational background diversity. The impact of ethnic diversity is not affected by external collaboration. These findings hold after using alternative measures of dependent and independent variables, alternative sample sizes, and alternative estimation techniques. The research findings presented in this article would seem to have immediate and important practical implications. They would suggest that companies may pursue recruitment policies inspired by greater ethnic and disciplinary diversity as a way to boost the innovativeness of the organization. From a managerial perspective, it may be concluded that workforce disciplinary diversity could be potentially replaced by more external links, while ethnic diversity could not.
    May 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12388   open full text
  • How Central Is Too Central? Organizing Interorganizational Collaboration Networks for Breakthrough Innovation.
    John Qi Dong, Killian J. McCarthy, Wilfred W. M. E. Schoenmakers.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 21, 2017
    Firms increasingly look to collaboration with alliance partners in their quest for breakthrough innovation. But how does the position of a firm in its alliance network weighted by the centrality of its partners—a concept which we term “partner‐weighted alliance centrality”—and the heterogeneities in the types of partners that it cooperates with—in terms of its private‐public collaboration—influence this quest? Using longitudinal data from the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, we build alliance networks in the period 1985–2001 to investigate these questions. We show that, for breakthrough innovation, collaborating with more partners that are more central in alliance networks the better, but only to a point. Beyond that point, we find that the likelihood of achieving breakthrough innovation drops. Furthermore, and looking at the kinds of knowledge provided by the partners in each firm's alliances, we report that firms with a greater share of private partners, relative to public partners, suffer less from the diminishing benefits of collaboration with central partners when developing breakthrough innovation. Taken together, we make novel contributions about how to organize for breakthrough innovation, and provide actionable managerial advice in terms of selecting collaborative partners in alliance networks.
    April 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12384   open full text
  • The Role of Managers in Enacting Two‐Step Institutional Work for Radical Innovation in Professional Organizations.
    Giovanni Radaelli, Graeme Currie, Federico Frattini, Emanuele Lettieri.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 21, 2017
    Radical innovation in professional settings faces an institutional challenge. Professionals enjoy autonomy predicated on jurisdictional knowledge and can resist radical innovation if their interests are threatened. Our study examines if and how managers mediate professional resistance and ensure that radical innovation can take hold. A comparative case study of 12 Italian hospitals introducing integrated service configurations shows that managers may hold back from introducing radical innovation where they judge professional resistance as insurmountable. Executives reinforce, rather than challenge, the status quo, and discourage middle managers from further actions. Where the professional context is more receptive because of micro‐institutional affordances, then, managers enact different tactics. Managers may centralize decision‐making through political work, which, however, increases professional resistance and hinders radical innovation. Managers may adopt project management approaches, which facilitate local experiments, but struggle to scale‐up the radical innovation. Most successful cases are characterized by executive and middle managers enacting a two‐step institutional work, which reconfigures the regulative, normative, and cognitive foundations of professional boundaries and practice. The comparative study shows how managers can support radical innovation in collaboration with professionals. In the two‐step institutional work, executive and middle managers develop stable alliances with local professional groups to provide cognitive/normative foundations of radical innovation; second, they allow professionals to inhabit nascent institutional arrangements to make sense of how these fit with their prevailing interests, norms, and beliefs; third, they co‐develop new structures/rules that encourage professionals to pursue radical innovation; finally, they perform maintenance work to preserve professionals' attachment to new institutions.
    April 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12385   open full text
  • Should You Really Produce What Consumers Like Online? Empirical Evidence for Reciprocal Voting in Open Innovation Contests.
    Reto Hofstetter, Suleiman Aryobsei, Andreas Herrmann.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 20, 2017
    In open innovation, firms increasingly rely on online consumer votes to evaluate ideas for new products and services. Votes can represent cost‐effective external information about idea quality that can inform and facilitate a firm's task of evaluating and screening of ideas at the early stages of the innovation process. Challenging this perception, we proposed that consumer votes provided in open innovation contests can be socially biased by reciprocal voting. On the basis of theories related to cooperation and social influence, we argued that both gregarious consumers (those who solicit social ties) and consumers who initiate direct reciprocity (those who vote for others) signal a willingness to cooperate that stimulates reciprocal voting from peers. We empirically investigated consumer voting behavior using a unique dataset with information obtained from actual open innovation contests in which consumers could submit their own ideas and see and vote for the ideas of others. We found that both gregariousness and the initiation of direct reciprocity positively influence votes received. Such cooperation pays off for consumers because firms indeed use votes to inform internal idea evaluations. We also found, however, that the votes an idea receives during an innovation contest cannot significantly explain its later revealed quality. Reciprocity may be an effective form of cooperation among consumers, but it has potentially negative implications for firms' evaluations. Our results also indicated that beyond reciprocity, consumers and firms value different types of ideas, which further differentiates their evaluations. Thus, firms should not only be aware of social biases in votes but also account for the diverging idea preferences of customers.
    April 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12382   open full text
  • Effects of Collaborative Communication on NPD Collaboration Results: Two Routes of Influence.
    María Pemartín, Ana I. Rodríguez‐Escudero, José Luís Munuera‐Alemán.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 19, 2017
    Although NPD collaboration with external partners has become the next generation in NPD practice, the discussion concerning how to organize collaboration so as to obtain better results is far from over. Since communication is the most important element in successful interfirm exchange, this study focuses on the impact of collaborative communication and its facets—frequency, formality, reciprocal feedback, and rationality—on NPD collaboration results. In order to explain how collaborative communication can best be managed to enhance NPD collaboration results, this research combines the relational and resource‐based views, proposing the existence of two routes of influence: the direct resource‐based route and the indirect relational route mediated by trust. Using a sample of 207 NPD collaboration projects of innovative firms, empirical findings indicate that reciprocal feedback–rationality and frequency play an important role in product quality and adherence to budget and schedule, respectively, even without trust. Moreover, the trust between partners substantially reinforces the positive influence of reciprocal feedback–rationality on NPD collaboration results and makes the effect of formality significant. Therefore, the two alternative routes are confirmed as important paths to new product success, which provides relevant managerial implications.
    April 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12375   open full text
  • Does Spatial Ambidexterity Pay Off? On the Benefits of Geographic Proximity Between Technology Exploitation and Exploration.
    Annelies Geerts, Bart Leten, René Belderbos, Bart Van Looy.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 12, 2017
    While most scholars tend to agree that it is worthwhile for firms to strive for ambidexterity, less consensus exists on how to organize simultaneously for exploration and exploitation. Although firms increasingly conduct R&D activities in multiple locations and countries, prior ambidexterity research has ignored a geographical dimension in explaining the ambidexterity–performance relationship. In this paper, we develop and validate the concept of “spatial ambidexterity,” which we define as the degree to which firms pursue technology exploration and exploitation in proximate locations. We argue that both activities benefit from proximity as firms will increase their ability to enact cross‐fertilization opportunities and synergies between explorative and exploitative technological activities. Relying on a panel dataset (1995–2003) of the technological activities of 156 large R&D intensive European, U.S. and Japanese firms, we examine the degree to which technology exploration and exploitation activities are pursued simultaneously in similar or different geographical regions. Patent data are used to construct indicators of technology exploration and exploitation activities. Spatial ambidexterity is measured as the degree to which global technology exploration and exploitation activities are pursued in proximity. Our analysis confirms that firms exhibiting greater geographic proximity between technology exploration and exploitation activities display an elevated level of technological performance. Both technology activities of an explorative and exploitative nature appear to benefit from spatial proximity.
    April 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12380   open full text
  • Measuring the Knowns to Manage the Unknown: How to Choose the Gate Timing Strategy in NPD Projects.
    Kim Van Oorschot, Katrin Eling, Fred Langerak.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 12, 2017
    Stage‐wise timing of new product development (NPD) activities is advantageous for a project's performance. The literature does not, however, specify whether this implies setting and adhering to a fixed schedule of gate meetings from the start of the project or allowing flexibility to adjust the schedule throughout the NPD process. In the initial project plan, managers and/or development teams often underrate the time required to complete the project because of task underestimation. Although the level of task underestimation (i.e., the unknown) is not identifiable at the start of the project, our study argues that project managers and/or teams can manage the unknown by measuring three project conditions (i.e., the knowns) during front‐end execution, and use their values to select the best gate timing strategy. These project conditions entail: (i) the number of unexpected tasks discovered during the front‐end, (ii) the willingness of customers to postpone their purchase in case the execution of these unexpected tasks would lead to a delayed market launch, and (iii) the number of unexpected tasks discovered just before the front‐end gate. Together these conditions determine whether a more fixed or more flexible gate timing strategy is most appropriate to use. The findings of a system dynamics simulation corroborate the supposition that the interplay between the three project conditions measured during front‐end execution determines which of four gate timing strategies with different levels of flexibility (i.e., one fixed, one flexible, and two hybrid forms) maximizes new product profitability. This finding has important implications for both theory and practice as we now comprehend that the knowns can be used to manage the unknown.
    April 12, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12383   open full text
  • Appetizer or Main Course: Early Market vs. Majority Market Go‐to‐Market Strategies for Radical Innovations.
    Monika C. Schuhmacher, Sabine Kuester, Erik Jan Hultink.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 06, 2017
    Different views exist in the literature regarding which adopter group to target with a go‐to‐market strategy: early market consumers or consumers in the majority market. Particularly when radical innovations are launched, the approach to the market becomes a critical success factor for firms seeking to recoup their significant investments in these innovation endeavors. Four experimental studies investigate whether and how to differentiate the design of go‐to‐market strategies, represented as bundles of marketing mix elements consisting of brand name, launch price, message content, and distribution intensity, for different consumer groups. Using the concept of consumer innovativeness, this study distinguishes between the early market of innovative consumers and the majority market populated by consumers low in innovativeness. Applying a signaling framework, the results indicate that the early market can be targeted with a go‐to‐market strategy signaling exclusive innovativeness; the majority market should be approached with a strategy signaling security. Further, at a signal vehicle level using specific marketing mix elements, the study demonstrates the relevance of adapting the go‐to‐market strategy for a radical innovation with regard to message content, distribution intensity, and launch price in line with consumer innovativeness. The results also indicate that the adaptation of the two signals and their signal vehicles to the targeted consumer markets is generally not necessary for incremental innovations. The authors discuss the implications of their study for future research and provide managers with recipes of go‐to‐market strategies for radical innovations when targeting consumers in the early versus majority market.
    April 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12379   open full text
  • Roles of Relationships Between Large Shareholders and Managers in Radical Innovation: A Stewardship Theory Perspective.
    Feng Zhang, Liqun Wei, Jianjun Yang, Lei Zhu.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 31, 2017
    Radical innovation is critical for firms to enhance their competitiveness. Whether they can achieve it, however, depends on organizational factors, including the corporate governance of the firm. In emerging economies in which shareholder protection is weak, large shareholders are widely used as an efficient governance mechanism to reduce agency problems. The literature on agency theory contains conflicting arguments regarding the role of large shareholders in firm innovation performance and has underestimated the role of social relationships between large shareholders and managers in determining the firm's innovation performance. By applying a stewardship theory perspective, this article argues that the characteristics of the relationship between large shareholders (owners) and managers, manifested as trust and shared goals, may explain variations in a firm's radical innovation. Drawing on data from 174 Chinese firms with large shareholders, our results show that trust has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with firm radical innovation, whereas shared goals exhibit a positive linear relationship with radical innovation. Shared goals further moderate the nonlinear effect of trust on radical innovation. Trust is almost negatively related to firm radical innovation when there is a low level of shared goals. However, when there is a high level of shared goals, the relationship between trust and firm radical innovation is first positive, then plateaus, and finally becomes negative. These findings advance our understanding of the role of the relationship between large shareholders and managers as a driver of radical innovation and contribute to the innovation literature by providing a nuanced understanding of the key factors that influence the effects of the social aspects of governance on firm radical innovation.
    March 31, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12376   open full text
  • Does Product Platforming Pay Off?
    Marc H. Meyer, Oleksiy Osiyevskyy, Dirk Libaers, Marcel van Hugten.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 29, 2017
    Product platforming—a specific approach to new product development utilizing common technology components or subsystems deployed across multiple products or product lines—has been argued to bring numerous valuable organizational outcomes (e.g., effectiveness of R&D process, superior postlaunch product commercial performance, and ultimately sustained competitive advantage). Yet, large‐scale longitudinal empirical examinations of the mechanisms linking product platforming to firm performance are scarce. Drawing on the concepts of architectural leverage and product life cycle flexibility, the article presents the development and empirical test of a set of hypotheses regarding the commercial outcomes of platforming at the product level using a unique dataset comprising all products developed and sold by a large, global LED lighting manufacturer in 2010–2015. The results suggest that platformed products demonstrate significantly higher sales and gross profit margins aggregated over their product life cycle (PLC), vis‐à‐vis the comparable group of nonplatformed, individually developed products. In addition, the findings demonstrate that a product platforming development approach appears to extend the PLC relative to nonplatformed products based on an integral, nonmodular product architecture.
    March 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12378   open full text
  • How Bricolage Drives Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Roles of Opportunity Identification and Learning Orientation.
    Wenwen An, Xinglu Zhao, Zhi Cao, Jianqi Zhang, Heng Liu.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 27, 2017
    While most studies have viewed bricolage as a tool to overcome resource constraints in the context of new ventures, few of them have directly investigated the effects of bricolage to identify new entrepreneurial opportunities in the context of incumbent firms. Drawing upon a subjectivist view of entrepreneurship, we reframe bricolage as a concrete activity of experiential resource‐learning that creates subjective knowledge of resource at hand. We argue that the subjective knowledge derived from bricolage will shape a firm's “subjective opportunity set” and facilitate opportunities identification, which will ultimately increase the likelihood of the incumbent firm's corporate entrepreneurship (including product innovation, venturing, and strategic renewal). Hypotheses are thus developed to examine the relationship between bricolage and corporate entrepreneurship as well as the mediating role of opportunity identification. Moreover, as bricolage activities depend on interactive social contexts rather than individual efforts, the firm's learning orientation is proposed as a moderator that influences the positive effects of bricolage on opportunity identification. We test these hypotheses using the survey data from 248 incumbent firms in China. The empirical results generally support our hypotheses by showing that (1) bricolage positively influences opportunity identification, (2) opportunity identification mediates the relationship between bricolage and corporate entrepreneurship, and (3) learning orientation has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between bricolage and opportunity identification. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of bricolage in context of corporate entrepreneurship by being an opportunity identification incubator. Implications for managers are also included in the end of this article.
    March 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12377   open full text
  • Process Innovation: Open Innovation and the Moderating Role of the Motivation to Achieve Legitimacy.
    Christos Tsinopoulos, Carlos M. P. Sousa, Ji Yan.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 14, 2017
    Global competition has increased the pressure for firms to develop new and efficient processes in ways that are perceived to be legitimate. At the same time, there has been a realization that engaging with open innovation can improve competitiveness. Our study aims to address two research questions: (a) How does engaging with open innovation support an organization's process innovation? and (b) How does the motivation to achieve legitimacy affect the relationship between engaging with open innovation and process innovation? We use arguments from the resource‐based view to explain how open innovation influences an organization's likelihood of introducing new processes. We then use arguments from institutional theory to explain how the motivation to achieve legitimacy moderates this relationship. We test our conceptual model using data from the European Community Innovation Survey administered by the U.K. government. Our findings and theoretical development support the notion that engagement with open innovation will increase the likelihood of introducing new processes and that the motivation to achieve legitimacy will affect this relationship. However, this moderating effect will be different depending on how engagement takes place. It will be positive on co‐operation with external parties, and negative on the use of information. Therefore, when organizations co‐operate with external parties and are motivated to achieve legitimacy, the likelihood of introducing a new process will increase. However, the effect is opposite in the case of use of external information. These findings contribute to the understanding of the relationship between open and process innovation.
    March 14, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12374   open full text
  • Does It Pay to Be Innovation and Imitation Oriented? An Examination of the Antecedents and Consequences of Innovation and Imitation Orientations.
    Ruby P. Lee, Xinlin Tang.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. February 27, 2017
    Although innovation orientation has been documented as the primary strategy to support a firm's growth, imitation orientation, which represents an alternative strategic and cultural focus, has begun to receive attention. However, empirical evidence as to how each orientation is shaped by environmental turbulence and whether it is fruitful to adopt both orientations simultaneously is lacking. This study attempts to close such an important research gap by surveying 294 managers at 147 firms in China. Results indicate that dysfunctional competition and technological turbulence, two critical environmental forces in emerging economies, influence the extent to which a firm adopts these two strategic orientations. The results also suggest that firms should stay focused on one strategic orientation rather than both to optimize their performance outcomes.
    February 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12370   open full text
  • A Novel Approach for Predicting and Understanding Consumers' Sense of Design Similarity.
    Thomas F. Schreiner, Thomas Fandrich, Mark Heitmann, Katrin Talke.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. February 07, 2017
    Product designers continuously emphasize how important yet difficult it is to create new products with designs similar enough for brand recognition, yet dissimilar enough for a unique positioning. Advancing the understanding of perceived design similarity would greatly help to systematically manage this balance. Design literature typically assesses how much a new design deviates from the status quo based on consumers’ holistic similarity perceptions. For management practice, however, tests of numerous design alternatives with consumers throughout the NPD process are time‐consuming, costly, and threaten confidentiality. In addition, simple surveys often do not suffice to understand the role of individual design characteristics in the holistic perception of a product design. This article introduces an objective measurement approach of design similarity to overcome these drawbacks. The results of an empirical study demonstrate that consumers’ perception of design similarity can be reproduced by means of this approach. In addition, this approach makes measurement of design similarity more efficient, uncovers the design characteristics that drive holistic similarity perceptions, and enables managers to predict the positioning of alternative product designs in the perceptual space minimizing the need for consumer surveys.
    February 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12367   open full text
  • How Does Material Resource Adequacy Affect Innovation Project Performance? A Meta‐Analysis.
    Matthias Weiss, Martin Hoegl, Michael Gibbert.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 31, 2017
    The link between material resource adequacy and the performance of innovation projects is one of the most basic and managerially rewarding relationships in innovation management to study, and yet it has remained unclear. Some argue that adequate material resources foster innovation, whereas others suggest the exact opposite: constrained material resources stimulate creativity and innovation. Complementing previous work that focused on project‐level contingencies of the relationship between material resource adequacy and innovation project performance, the objective of this meta‐analysis is to develop a contingency framework involving study‐level and context‐level boundary conditions in an attempt to clarify this relationship. The results show that material resource adequacy is basically positively related to innovation project performance. Testing whether the focus on different dimensions of innovation project performance alters this basic relationship results in the same positive relationship for all examined innovation project outcomes (i.e., general performance, project efficiency, product quality, speed, and market success), except new‐product novelty that did not show a significant relationship with material resource adequacy. Moreover, while the relationship between material resource adequacy and innovation project outcomes turns out to be generalizable across different types of material resources (financial resources vs. equipment) and different product types (tangible vs. intangible products), it is contingent upon the national culture of the countries, in which the projects have been carried out. Specifically, studies in countries scoring high on the cultural dimension of power distance show significantly stronger positive correlations between adequacy of material resources and innovation project performance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
    January 31, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12368   open full text
  • Dark Side or Bright Light: Destructive and Constructive Deviant Content in Consumer Ideation Contests.
    Alexandra Gatzweiler, Vera Blazevic, Frank Thomas Piller.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 31, 2017
    Firms use ideation contests to generate ideas from consumers. This type of collaboration provides access to new knowledge and reveals latent consumer needs. But it also is risky, as firms give up control to an unknown crowd. Some contestants use ideation contests to post content that is unintended and unwanted by contest hosts, a behavior that represents deviant co‐creation. Drawing on literature from sociology and consumer research, deviance is defined as a relative, norm‐violating behavior that has the potential to activate others. We report the results from a netnography study to define the phenomenon of deviant co‐creation in ideation contests. Based on these findings, we provide a theoretical foundation for deviant co‐creation and conceptualize and empirically illustrate various patterns of deviant content, ranging from destructive to constructive. The study reveals that deviant content in ideation contests includes illegitimate as well as legitimate content. Legitimate content includes five themes: humorous, provocative, unique, violation from technical, and social norms. Deviant content usually bewilders evaluators and draws their attention to the content. Destructive deviant content may trigger visible and malicious protests or result in mocking and ridicule on the contest platform and other social media, thereby exposing the contest host to reputational risks. Constructive deviant content can lead to positive discussions in comment sections and other social media outlets, as well as foster further development of an initial idea, thereby contributing to the firm's innovation potential. This article provides managers a deeper understanding of deviant content raising awareness for the dark side risks as well as indicating how to leverage it to achieve constructive co‐creation.
    January 31, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12369   open full text
  • Ready, Steady, Green: Examining the Effectiveness of External Policies to Enhance the Adoption of Eco‐Friendly Innovations.
    Sven Heidenreich, Patrick Spieth, Martin Petschnig.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 19, 2017
    The development and adoption of eco‐friendly innovations needs to be enhanced to reduce emissions caused by industry and transportation. Companies have been heavily investing in technologies and manufacturing processes to improve the development of eco‐friendly innovations such as alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs). While the long‐term viability of AFVs will be determined by consumer demand, only few consumers are willing to adopt these eco‐friendly innovations. To increase the diffusion of AFVs, it appears crucial to reach a critical mass of adopters and thus the point at which an innovation spreads exponentially through a target market. In this respect, previous research points to the importance of using external policies to turn the early majority into early adopters, which are primarily distinguished by their extent of innovativeness. However, diffusion theory suggests that consumer innovativeness as an innate trait is fairly stable over time and is thus not externally changeable. Yet, external measures might still be effective in strengthening effects of consumer innovativeness, turning the early and perhaps also the late majority into early adopters. Unfortunately, current research on consumer adoption behavior in general and on AFV adoption still lacks studies of the effectiveness of different external measures to turn potential adopters into early adopters by fostering positive effects of consumer innovativeness. This article addresses this shortcoming by empirically analyzing data from 1080 consumer evaluations in the domain of AFVs. Results from structural equation modeling confirm that AFV adoption relates positively to consumer innovativeness and that this effect can be intensified by providing external policies such as infrastructure, incentives, and communication policies.
    January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12364   open full text
  • R&D, Marketing Innovation, and New Product Performance: A Mixed Methods Study.
    Christoph Grimpe, Wolfgang Sofka, Mukesh Bhargava, Rabikar Chatterjee.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 19, 2017
    This paper investigates the relationship between investments in marketing innovation, that is, the way in which technologically unchanged products are designed, priced, distributed, and/or promoted, and a firm's new product performance. Marketing innovation, such as calorie‐based packaging or unusual distribution channels, may lead to new products. However, it is unclear whether they pay off, particularly when the firm follows a dual strategy, that is, investing in both innovative marketing and R&D at the same time. We draw from theory on competence development as well as diffusion of innovation and argue that pursuing a dual strategy lowers performance, an effect that we attribute to the role of complexity in innovation. Based on a mixed methods study that integrates a data set of 866 firms from a representative set of industries in Germany and extensive interview evidence, we find empirical support for our hypotheses. Our research contributes to the emerging stream of literature that seeks to better understand the role of marketing in firms' innovation processes.
    January 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12366   open full text
  • The Role of Innovation Intermediaries in Firm‐Innovation Community Collaboration: Navigating the Membership Paradox.
    Ghita Dragsdahl Lauritzen.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 11, 2017
    Research on user innovation shows that tensions in collaborations between firms and innovation communities can hinder innovation, and that innovation intermediaries can help resolve these tensions by bridging opposing interests. Despite the compelling role of innovation intermediaries, few studies on such mediation exist. Using an embedded case study, this article examines the role of an innovation intermediary that facilitates online innovation contests for client firms and identifies an apparent membership paradox evolving around three key tensions of power, competence, and identity. The article reveals that innovation intermediaries shape new understandings of power, competence, and identity that shift focus from resolving tensions to managing paradoxes. The membership paradox (re)appears at both the project level (between control and openness) and at the individual level, between professionalism and personality for employees and between imitation and authenticity for community participants. This article contributes to the user innovation literature by demonstrating how opposing firm and community interests are mediated through managing new forms of membership uncertainty. Moreover, the lens of paradox management offers a novel dimension to explaining why tensions that arise between firms and innovation communities are difficult to resolve, and also how the ensuing gaps in mutual understanding might be tackled. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings for user innovation researchers and practitioners are discussed.
    January 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12363   open full text
  • Configurations of Innovations across Domains: An Organizational Ambidexterity View.
    Feng Zhang, Yonggui Wang, Dahui Li, Victor Cui.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 27, 2016
    How do firms balance explorative and exploitative innovation for superior firm performance? While most prior studies have approached this issue by focusing on technology‐related innovation, the role of balancing exploration and exploitation in other important organizational domains, i.e., marketing, and the interaction effect of ambidexterity across different domains have been overlooked. This study contributes to this line of research by investigating how firms simultaneously balance exploration and exploitation across two critical domains, namely technology innovation and market innovation. The study distinguishes four types of configurations: market leveraging (technology exploration and market exploitation), technology leveraging (technology exploitation and market exploration), pure exploitation (technology exploitation and market exploitation), and pure exploration (technology exploration and market exploration). From an organizational ambidexterity perspective, the current work investigates whether and how these different combinations exert distinctive effects on firm performance. Specifically, the article posits that (a) technology exploration and market exploitation complement each other, and (b) technology exploitation and market exploration also complement each other, such that both market leveraging and technology leveraging strategies have positive effects on firm performance. The article also maintains that such positive relationships are fully mediated by differentiation and low cost advantages. Conversely, it is argued that (c) technology exploration and market exploration conflict with each other, and (d) so do technology exploitation and market exploitation, such that both pure exploration and pure exploitation have negative effects on firm performance. Hypotheses were tested using survey data collected from 292 manufacturing and service firms in China. The results supported most of the hypotheses, except that pure exploration demonstrated no significant relationship with firm performance.
    December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12362   open full text
  • Benefiting from Open Innovation: A Multidimensional Model of Absorptive Capacity*.
    Ann‐Kristin Zobel.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 19, 2016
    While recent studies shed some light on the performance implications of open innovation, there is a gap in understanding how firms can translate their openness into innovation outcomes. In particular, it is unclear whether—and if so, how—firms can create a competitive advantage in product innovation by tapping into external sources of innovation. To address this gap, this study conceptualizes multidimensional components of absorptive capacity and develops a nomological network that explicates relationships between these components and competitive advantage in product innovation. By marrying the open innovation and absorptive capacity perspectives, higher‐order models of absorptive capacity are proposed which delineate the underlying processes to recognize, assimilate, and exploit external sources of innovation. The empirical analysis of the nomological network based on original survey data reveals important findings. First, there is a positive indirect baseline association between external technological resource access and competitive advantage in product innovation, mediated by the firm's technology‐related capabilities. Second, components of absorptive capacity modify this indirect baseline relationship. Recognition capacity is positively associated with external technological resource access and therefore, operates as an antecedent to the proposed baseline relationship. Assimilation capacity constitutes a relevant condition to the proposed baseline relationship. The indirect association between external technological resource access and competitive advantage in product innovation is dependent on the level of assimilation capacity. Exploitation capacity has an additional and independent direct positive association with competitive advantage in product innovation. This study contributes to the open innovation literature by delineating organizational processes that help to explain interfirm differences in benefiting from external sources of innovation. In addition, this study adds to the absorptive capacity literature by developing and validating a set of measures that captures, individually and in concert, three components of absorptive capacity.
    December 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12361   open full text
  • Whom Should We Talk to? Investigating the Varying Roles of Internal and External Relationship Quality on Radical and Incremental Innovation Performance.
    Michael Obal, Rangapriya Kannan‐Narasimhan, Guihan Ko.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Research suggests that close relationships with internal and external partners are likely to have a significant impact on new product development (NPD). What is unclear is how the effects of internal and external relationships influence development paths for different types of innovations. Prior literature indicates that the pathways for developing incremental innovations differ considerably from those for radical innovations. Thus it is plausible that the effects of external versus internal relationships vary across these two innovation types. This paper uses the 2012 Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS) data set to investigate the roles of internal and external relationship quality on the development of both incremental and radical innovations. The results find that internal and not external relationship quality is beneficial for the development of incremental innovations. When driven by internal relationships, a flexible NPD process is advantageous for the financial performance of incremental innovations. Meanwhile external and not internal relationship quality is valuable for developing radical innovations. External relationship quality results in process flexibility, leading to project execution success and subsequent financial performance for radical innovations. As expected, project execution success consistently leads to increased financial performance. These findings indicate the critical differences in types of relationship quality required when developing new products based on radical versus incremental innovations.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12340   open full text
  • Mapping the Impact of Social Media for Innovation: The Role of Social Media in Explaining Innovation Performance in the PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study.
    Deborah L. Roberts, Frank T. Piller, Dirk Lüttgens.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Social media (SM) allow users to easily create, edit, or share content. The vast numbers of individuals that converge around sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter embody a rich source of external knowledge that could be utilized for new product development (NPD). Complementing other channels for open innovation (OI), SM can provide access to novel information about customer needs and technological solutions unknown to the firm. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are considerable benefits from using SM during an innovation project, but empirical evidence is scarce. Contributing to the perspective of openness in search, a number of hypotheses propose how SM as a new channel for OI can contribute to firm performance. This model is tested using data from the PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study, identifying factors influencing the relationship between SM and NPD performance. The findings indicate that utilizing information from SM channels can lead to higher performance, but that this link is influenced by the formalization of a firm's NPD process. This study also finds that the ability of a firm to benefit from external search in SM strongly depends on complementary internal processes when organizing and conducting this activity. Furthermore, managers have to take care when utilizing information from SM channels in radical projects, as for this kind of project only a weak significant performance contribution of SM could be found.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12341   open full text
  • The Effects of Decentralization in Strategy‐Making and National Culture on NPD Portfolio Planning.
    Pilar Carbonell, Ana I. Rodriguez Escudero.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Traditionally, the understanding among scholars and practitioners has been that a portfolio of NPD projects is the expression of a firm's strategy and thus it must support the strategy. In keeping with this view, the current study focuses on new product development (NPD) portfolio planning, which is defined as a firm's effort to formulate portfolio decisions using a defined innovation strategy. Connecting portfolio decisions to a defined innovation strategy has been associated with higher innovation success. Surprisingly, empirical research indicates that portfolio decisions do not always support the company's innovation strategy. Furthermore, during recent years, an increasing number of authors underscore the importance of responsiveness and adaptability in portfolio decision‐making. The current study addresses these two issues by examining a direct effect of decentralization in strategy‐making on NPD portfolio planning, and a moderating effect of decentralization in strategy‐making on the relationship between NPD portfolio planning and NPD program success. The study also examines the influence of national culture on the proposed relationships. The theoretical model was tested using data from the 2012 PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study. Findings indicate that NPD portfolio planning positively influences NPD program success. Also, results revealed inverted U‐shaped direct and moderating effects, respectively, of decentralization in strategy‐making on NPD portfolio planning, and of decentralization in strategy‐making on the relationship between NPD portfolio planning and NPD program success. With regard to the moderating effect of national culture, results indicate that uncertainty avoidance does not moderate the relationship between NPD portfolio planning and NPD program success. Nonetheless, we found significant moderating effects of individualism and power distance on the curvilinear relationship between decentralization in strategy‐making and NPD portfolio planning.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12356   open full text
  • Firm Characteristics and NPD Program Success: The Significant Influence of Global Discovery Management.
    Anna Dubiel, Serdar S. Durmusoglu, Sebastian Gloeckner.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Managing new product development (NPD) with a global point of view is argued to be essential in current business more than ever. Accordingly, many firms are trying to revitalize their NPD processes to make them more global. Therefore, examining global NPD management is one of the top priorities for research. While scholars have examined global launch management, there has been scant attention on the direct effect of global discovery management on NPD success. Therefore, this study investigates how a globally managed discovery phase enhances a firm's overall NPD success. Drawing upon the resource‐based view (RBV) and using Kotabe's () generic model for market success in global competition as the overarching framework, this study examines four drivers of NPD success: global discovery management, the firm's “global footprint,” its inbound knowledge sourcing practices (i.e., “open innovation proclivity”), and nationality of the teams (i.e., “cross‐national global NPD team use”). The hypotheses are tested using a sample of 255 business units from multiple industries, headquartered worldwide, and surveyed during the 2012 PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS). The PLM‐SEM analyses show that, of the four drivers examined, only global discovery management strongly influences a firm's NPD program success. The findings enhance our understanding of the particularities in global NPD. Based on the study's results, suggestions are provided as to how multinationals can leverage their international operations in the course of their front‐end activities.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12330   open full text
  • The Roles of Sustainability Orientation and Market Knowledge Competence in New Product Development Success.
    Marius C. Claudy, Mark Peterson, Mark Pagell.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Firms’ sustainability orientation (SO) is widely understood as a strategic resource, which can lead to competitive advantage and superior (financial) performance. While recent empirical evidence suggests a moderate and positive relationship between SO and financial performance on a corporate level, little is understood about the influence of SO on new product development (NPD) success. Building on the natural‐resource‐based view (NRBV) of the firm, we hypothesize that firms’ SO positively influences NPD success, because of efficiency gains and differentiation advantages. However, scholars have also argued that the win–win paradigm postulated by NRBV might not always hold because NPD managers might find it difficult to balance sustainability objectives with the needs of their customer and the competitive dynamics in their markets. It is, therefore, proposed that market knowledge competence (MKC) is an important capability, which helps firms to balance social and ecological objectives with economic goals such as profitability and market share. Using data from 343 international firms from 24 countries that was collected by the Product Development and Management Association, structural equation modeling results suggest that (1) SO positively influences NPD and that (2) this relationship is partially mediated by firms’ market knowledge capabilities. The findings suggest that strategic‐level SO and MKC are complementary in that they help in balancing trade‐offs between sustainaility objectives and profitability goals. In this way, the study contributes to a better understanding of how critical NPD practices can help managers to translate firms’ SO into NPD success. The article concludes by highlighting implications for product innovation managers.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12343   open full text
  • Sustainability, Social Media Driven Open Innovation, and New Product Development Performance*.
    Shuili Du, Goksel Yalcinkaya, Ludwig Bstieler.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Sustainability and social media use in open innovation play important roles in a firm's new product development (NPD) process. This research examines, in conjunction, the roles of sustainability and social media driven inbound open innovation (SMOI) for a firm's NPD performance, and further, takes a more refined approach by differentiating between different types of SMOI activities. To this end, this research develops and tests a conceptual framework, which predicts that (1) a firm's sustainability orientation (SO) is positively associated with its NPD performance, (2) customer focus (CF) partially mediates the SO–NPD performance link, and (3) particular SMOI activities moderate the CF–NPD performance link. The empirical results, using data from the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA)'s comparative performance assessment study, provide support for most of the framework. Notably, this research documents a positive link between SO and NPD performance, as well as a partial mediating role of CF. The results further suggest that social media driven open innovation activities focused on gathering market insights enhance CF directly, while social media driven open innovation activities that garner technical expertise enhance the link between CF and NPD performance. This paper bridges the separate literatures on sustainability and open innovation, and contributes to the NPD research. The findings suggest that managers should take a strategic approach to sustainability and embed it in the NPD process. Furthermore, managers should manage social media based open innovation carefully to fully benefit the firm during the front end and back end of NPD.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12334   open full text
  • Ambidextrous Idea Generation—Antecedents and Outcomes*.
    Sebastian Gurtner, Ronny Reinhardt.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Ambidexterity, defined as the capability to develop both incremental and radical innovations, is an important driver of firm success. Idea generation is an essential starting point for both types of innovation. Therefore, this study investigates whether ambidextrous idea generation, defined as the capability to actively generate both incremental and radical ideas, affects new product development (NPD) success. Analyses on the Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS) data, which includes data from 453 companies distributed over 24 countries, demonstrate that ambidextrous idea generation does indeed affect NPD program success. Consequently, this study also investigates which antecedents foster ambidextrous idea generation. The innovation paradox concept predicts that achieving ambidexterity requires overcoming paradoxical antecedents. Therefore, we tested whether combinations of financial and breakthrough orientations (the paradox of strategic emphasis), a formal innovation process and an innovation culture (the paradox of innovation drivers), tight and loose customer coupling (the paradox of customer orientation), and internal development and external collaboration (the paradox of openness) affects ambidextrous idea generation. The results show that only customer orientation and openness have the expected inverted u‐shaped effect. These finding are in line with construal level theory, which predicts that the organizational characteristics that influence idea‐generation activity must be at the same construal level to have the desired effect. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, the analyses indicate that ambidextrous idea generation has significant repercussions for the entire NPD program. Second, the results show that resolving innovation paradoxes only has an effect if the construal level of the paradox and the activity match. This finding indicates an important boundary condition for the innovation paradox concept.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12353   open full text
  • Consistency Matters in Formally Selecting Incremental and Radical New Product Ideas for Advancement.
    Katrin Eling, Abbie Griffin, Fred Langerak.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Several new product development (NPD) scholars have argued that formal processes should be used when selecting incremental new product ideas for advancement at the very beginning of the fuzzy front end (FFE), but that such formal processes may be less beneficial when selecting radical new product ideas. However, arguments also exist for using formal idea selection processes for both types of new product ideas. In practice, informal processes are used for selecting both idea types and more formal processes are used for selecting radical ideas. Unequivocal empirical evidence for either of the opposing views or practices is lacking. This study sheds light on this matter using data from 161 of the firms that participated in the Product Development and Management Association's latest (2012) Comparative Performance Assessment Study. The results reveal that the highest idea success rate (i.e., the proportion of selected ideas that are eventually launched as new products and are successful in the marketplace) is associated with firms’ use of formal processes to select the vast majority of both incremental and radical new product ideas for advancement. This finding supports earlier claims that even for (raw) idea selection processes that take place at the very beginning of the FFE, managers need to adopt a portfolio perspective and consistently use formal idea advancement selection processes to ensure attaining the right balance between radical and incremental projects in later stages of the NPD pipeline to enhance overall NPD success. Notably, this finding shows that common managerial practices of using inconsistent approaches for selecting radical and incremental ideas for advancement need to be reconsidered.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12320   open full text
  • PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS): Methods and Future Research Directions.
    Hyunjung Lee, Stephen K. Markham.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 17, 2016
    Best practices data are critical for managing and researching new product development. For these purposes the PDMA Research Foundation conducted the 2012 PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS). This article reports the use of the CPAS data among product development researchers and provides a complete description of the data gathering and cleaning process needed to write additional articles using these data, including other articles in this special issue. This article also reports important results of the CPAS data, makes comparisons between the Best and the Rest firms, and makes comparisons among firms by geography, industry, product/technology/market types, and company size. The results offer insights for academics and practitioners to conduct further research and to find potential new product development best practices.
    November 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12358   open full text
  • The Paradox of Openness: How Product and Patenting Experience Affect R&D Sourcing in China?
    Tang Wang, Dirk Libaers, Haemin Dennis Park.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 04, 2016
    External R&D sourcing may help firms compete in an environment characterized by rapid technological changes. Yet, prior studies have produced conflicting findings on how a firm's technological experience affects the extent to which the firm engages in external R&D sourcing. Although many highlight that firms with extensive technological experience are equipped with more technological knowledge, collaborative skills, and absorptive capacity, encouraging greater levels of external R&D, others suggest the opposite due to potential exchange hazards and partnership conflicts. Adopting an external partner's perspective, the current study reconsiders this “paradox of openness” by analyzing how a focal firm's product experience and patenting experience affect an external partner's tendency to provide external R&D services to the focal firm. Specifically, this study explore how a focal firm's knowledge protectiveness and tacitness embedded in its product and patenting experience influences the external partners' motivation for knowledge transfer. This study predicts that a firm's product experience increases the focal firm's external R&D sourcing because it provides high levels of knowledge tacitness and external openness and can encourage external partners to share and exchange knowledge with the focal firm. In contrast, a firm's patenting experience decreases the focal firm's external R&D sourcing because it denotes knowledge explicitness and protectiveness and may discourage external partners to share and exchange knowledge with the focal firm. This study further predicts that patenting experience has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between product experience and external R&D sourcing. Using a data set of 575 high‐tech firms in China, this study finds support for our predictions. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the knowledge‐based view and technology entrepreneurship in emerging markets.
    November 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12359   open full text
  • Follow the Leader or the Pack? Regulatory Focus and Academic Entrepreneurial Intentions.
    Mark Johnson, Erik W. Monsen, Niall G. MacKenzie.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 17, 2016
    Drawing on the academic entrepreneurship and regulatory focus theory literature, and applying a multilevel perspective, this paper examines why university academics intend to engage in formal (spin‐off or start‐up companies and licensing university research) or informal (collaborative research, contract research, continuous professional development, and contract consulting) commercialization activities and the role local contextual factors, in particular leaders and work‐group colleagues (peers), play in their commercialization choices. Based on a survey of 395 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academics working in 14 Scottish universities, the research findings suggest that an individual's chronic regulatory focus has a direct effect on their formal and informal commercialization intent. The results reveal that the stronger an individual's chronic promotion focus the stronger their formal and informal commercialization intentions and a stronger individual chronic prevention focus leads to weaker intentions to engage in informal commercialization. In addition, when contextual interaction effects are considered, leaders and workplace colleagues have different influences on commercialization intent. On the one hand, promotion‐focused leaders can strengthen and prevention‐focused leaders can under certain circumstances weaken a promotion‐focused academic's formal commercialization intent. On the other hand, the level of workplace colleague engagement, acting as a reference point, strengthens not only promotion‐focused academics’ intent to engage in formal commercialization activities, but also prevention‐focused academics’ corresponding informal commercialization intent. As such, universities should consider the appointment of leaders who are strong role models and have a track record in formal and/or informal commercialization activities and also consider the importance workplace colleagues have on moderating an academic's intention to engage in different forms of commercialization activities.
    October 17, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12355   open full text
  • Legitimacy‐Seeking Mechanisms in Product Innovation: A Qualitative Study*.
    Raluca Bunduchi.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. September 26, 2016
    Product innovation research adopts a rational choice perspective to examine resource allocation decisions for product innovation. This research emphasizes strategic alignment between the innovation and the organization as the key factor shaping these decisions. In contrast, organizational research suggests that to access resources, product innovations have to be perceived as legitimate by corporate sponsors. Legitimacy is rooted in alignment with the prevalent corporate norms, beliefs, and cultural model. Adopting an institutional perspective and relying on an in‐depth case study of three product innovations, this study explores legitimacy‐seeking behavior in product innovation. The findings indicate that the rational perspective emphasized in most product innovation research is complemented by efforts to seek both moral and cognitive legitimacy to resource product innovation. The study clarifies the critical role that the organizational context plays in triggering legitimacy‐seeking behavior. The analysis unpacks legitimacy‐seeking behavior, revealing patterns of legitimating mechanisms (lobbying, relationship building, and gathering feedback) that are deployed as part of legitimacy strategies (conforming, selecting, and manipulating) to achieve a range of legitimacy outcomes (pragmatic, moral, and cognitive). The analysis reveals the existence of a hierarchy of legitimacy outcomes as actors prioritize one type of legitimacy versus another. The study also finds interdependencies between mechanisms and strategies to reinforce particular outcomes as legitimacy‐seeking behavior evolves over time.
    September 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12354   open full text
  • Frontline Employees' Innovative Service Behavior as Key to Customer Loyalty: Insights into FLEs' Resource Gain Spiral.
    Ruth Maria Stock, Ad de Jong, Nicolas A. Zacharias.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. September 23, 2016
    Many service firms require frontline service employees (FLEs) to follow routines and standardized operating procedures during the service encounter, to deliver consistently high service standards. However, to create superior, pleasurable experiences for customers, featuring both helpful services and novel approaches to meeting their needs, firms in various sectors also have begun to encourage FLEs to engage in more innovative service behaviors. This study therefore investigates a new and complementary route to customer loyalty, beyond the conventional service–profit chain, that moves through FLEs' innovative service behavior. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces a resource gain spiral at the service encounter, which runs from FLEs' emotional job engagement to innovative service behavior, and then leads to customer delight and finally customer loyalty. In accordance with COR theory, the proposed model also includes factors that might hinder (customer aggression, underemployment) or foster (colleague support, supervisor support) FLEs' resource gain spiral. A multilevel analysis of a large‐scale, dyadic data set that contains responses from both FLEs and customers in multiple industries strongly supports the proposed resource gain spiral as a complementary route to customer loyalty. The positive emotional job engagement–innovative service behavior relationship is undermined by customer aggression and underemployment, as hypothesized. Surprisingly though, and contrary to the hypotheses, colleague and supervisor support do not seem to foster FLEs' resource gain spiral. Instead, colleague support weakens the engagement–innovative service behavior relationship, and supervisor support does not affect it. These results indicate that if FLEs can solicit resources from other sources, they may not need to invest as many of their individual resources. In particular, colleague support even appears to serve as a substitute for FLEs' individual resource investments in the resource gain spiral.
    September 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12338   open full text
  • Effects of University–Industry Collaboration on Technological Newness of Firms.
    Alexander Wirsich, Alexander Kock, Christoph Strumann, Carsten Schultz.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. September 11, 2016
    Exploring new technological opportunities and reacting to environmental changes are key factors for firm performance. Collaborating with external partners, especially universities, is considered to be a powerful engine of technological development. However, there are several barriers associated with university–industry collaboration (UIC), such as divergent cultures and competing objectives. Previous studies show rather mixed effects regarding the purported benefits of UIC, and empirical evidence on the effects of UIC on technological newness of innovation is lacking. This study investigates whether and under which conditions UIC enhances the recombination of extant knowledge across technologies and facilitates the implementation of novel technologies at the firm level. The paper is based on the resource based view of the firm and analyzes the interaction between collaboration diversity and UIC intensity. This longitudinal analysis examines joint publications and the patent data of 318 technology‐oriented companies from the S&P 500 Index in the years 1985–2007. This study focuses on technological newness as the dependent variable, defined as the extent to which new technology fields are discovered as a result of either exploration of completely new technologies or the novel combination of existing technology fields. Results show that UIC has a significant positive effect on technological newness, with a time lag of two years. The effect follows an inverted U‐shaped pattern in UIC portfolios with high diversity, and a U‐shaped pattern when diversity is low.
    September 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12342   open full text
  • The Encroachment Speed of Potentially Disruptive Innovations with Indirect Network Externalities: The Case of E‐Readers.
    Mark E. Parry, Tomoko Kawakami.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 29, 2016
    The authors examine factors that affect the encroachment speed of disruptive innovations with indirect network externalities. The authors focus on the 2010 introduction of a new generation of e‐readers in Japan and explore the reasons why, relative to comparable e‐readers in the United States, the Japanese e‐readers were introduced later and adoption rates have been lower. Existing research suggests several possible explanations for these cross‐country differences, including the attitudes and behaviors of the firms that compose the paper book value network in Japan, environmental variables such as legal and regulatory constraints, and cultural differences between Japan and the United States. To assess the importance of these explanations, the authors interviewed 20 key figures in the United States and Japan and reviewed a variety of published information sources. Findings indicate that the slower encroachment speed of e‐readers in Japan reflects a kind of myopia among publishing industry insiders arising from three sources: (1) organizational factors, (2) technology factors, and (3) environmental factors. Important elements within these categories include the interpretation of the market performance of earlier generations of e‐readers, the interdependence of partners within the value network for e‐books, the presence of competing technology formats that create uncertainty among consumers regarding the availability of e‐books for a specific platform, and the existence of regulations and institutionalized activities that constrain the supply of e‐books and retail pricing flexibility. Findings have important implications for future studies of encroachment speed, the management of disruptive technologies, and strategic responses to potentially disruptive innovations launched by fringe competitors and new entrants.
    August 29, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12333   open full text
  • Domain‐Relevant Commitment and Individual Technical Innovation Performance.
    Lance A. Bettencourt, Edward U. Bond, Michael S. Cole, Mark B. Houston.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 26, 2016
    Individual innovators play a critical organizational role in that they generate and often champion technology and product ideas. Amidst an ongoing stream of organizational and team innovation research, few empirical studies focus on differences in individual innovation performance despite the importance of the individual innovator to a firm's innovation efforts. Based on goal commitment theory, we introduce a new domain‐relevant commitment construct and develop a conceptualization of conditional indirect effects. Our model suggests that relevant individual abilities enhance commitment to technical innovation and innovation performance while also insulating against the impact of situational variables, making employees' commitment to innovation performance less dependent upon context. Hypotheses are tested using two sources of data and a sample of 339 R&D professionals from a Fortune 100 industrial firm. Results suggest that commitment to innovation is a key motivational factor in explaining individual technical innovation performance. Situational characteristics impact motivation differently for individuals with lower vs. higher ability levels, even in this context in which truly low‐ability individuals, in the absolute sense, have been screened out by the employment selection process. The relationship between commitment and innovation performance is strengthened by higher levels of individual ability.
    August 26, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12339   open full text
  • How Do Strategy and Leadership Styles Jointly Affect Co‐development and Its Innovation Outcomes?
    Ruth Maria Stock, Nicolas A. Zacharias, Armin Schnellbaecher.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 24, 2016
    Co‐development with customers attracts considerable interest as a means to improve companies’ product innovativeness and performance. Forward‐thinking companies integrate co‐development within their business models, but many remain uncertain about which levers best foster its implementation. This study therefore takes a top‐down perspective on ways to stimulate co‐development with customers. Relying on boundary theory and its wider contextualization in relation to resource dependence theory, the authors argue that an innovation‐oriented strategy, combined with transformational and transactional leadership, represents senior management levers for driving general openness and providing strategic directions for innovation, which then helps bridge the boundary with customers and facilitate the co‐development of new products. Data from 135 managers and 415 subordinates reveal that some senior management levers can foster co‐development. Specifically, the results of the hierarchical regression analyses confirm the hypothesized positive interaction effect of innovation‐oriented strategy and transformational leadership, whereas the combination of innovation‐oriented strategy and transactional leadership is not beneficial. The strength of innovation‐oriented strategy as an important senior management lever differs for goods and services, which is not the case for the other two levers. Finally, this study provides a more fine‐grained perspective on the new product frequency outcomes of co‐development, by relying on organizational learning theory. Most research is restricted to linear relationships, but the current investigation unveils an inverted U‐shaped relationship between co‐development and companies’ new product frequency. Hence, companies can profit from co‐development at lower and medium levels, but the common notion of “the more, the better” does not apply to an unlimited degree for co‐development. Practitioner Points Senior managers should implement an innovation‐oriented strategy to provide guidance regarding the company's innovation generation goals in co‐development projects. Companies need to support organizational members with adequate freedom and flexibility in terms of co‐development projects, instead of focusing on fixed goals, expectations, or rewards. If they offer services in particular, companies should initiate appropriate training and coaching for senior managers, to help them better motivate and lead organizational members with a transformational leadership style. Co‐development can be fostered by senior managers from the top but also should be tracked, using management tools and key performance indicators, to recognize negative efficiency trends as early as possible.
    August 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12332   open full text
  • How Do Transformational Leaders Promote Exploratory and Exploitative Innovation? Examining the Black Box through MASEM.
    Priscilla S. Kraft, Andreas Bausch.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 22, 2016
    Understanding how firms can promote exploratory and exploitative innovations is of high interest for both scholars and practitioners. Although a substantial body of research has emphasized that top management's transformational leadership is crucial to innovation, the mechanisms through which strategic leaders influence these distinct types of innovations remain unclear. Building on upper echelon and social learning theory, this study develops and empirically examines a model that investigates the mediating roles of three distinct strategic orientations (market, learning, and entrepreneurial orientation) on the relationship between transformational leadership and exploratory and exploitative innovation. Using meta‐analytic methods combined with structural equation modeling, this study integrates findings from separate research streams, covering over 15 years of research, and using a sample of 215 effect sizes from 75 studies. The results from the partial mediation model reveal that transformational leaders play a key role in creating these specific strategic orientations which, in turn, support different innovation outcomes. Specifically, the findings indicate that transformational leaders promote exploitative innovations predominantly by building a market orientation, whereas they foster exploratory innovations by stimulating an entrepreneurial and a learning orientation. Hence, this study extends upper echelon research by uncovering the different mechanisms through which transformational leaders promote exploratory and exploitative innovations as it theoretically identifies and empirically validates the unique mediating roles of three specific strategic orientations. The results thus provide valuable insights for the challenging management of exploratory and exploitative innovations, as they provide a “guiding map” which reveals how transformational leaders from the top may use specific orientations to foster these distinct types of innovations.
    August 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12335   open full text
  • Aligning Knowledge Assets for Exploitation, Exploration, and Ambidexterity: A Study of Companies in High‐Tech Parks in China.
    Hsing‐Er Lin, Edward F. McDonough, Jie Yang, Chihyuan Wang.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 09, 2016
    There is little research that has explored the effects of how knowledge assets are aligned with each other in exploitation and exploration innovation strategies. This study uses alignment theory to explore the effects of aligning knowledge assets on facilitating a firm's ability to pursue ambidexterity, which is defined as the simultaneous pursuit of explorative and exploitative innovation strategies. We also explore the relative influence of organizational and human capital in fostering an exploitation innovation strategy on the one hand, and an exploration innovation strategy on the other. Using a primary survey sample of 127 companies in two high‐tech parks in China, we found that greater reliance on relatively more organizational capital versus human capital has a significantly positive impact on the success of an exploitative innovation strategy. The amount of organizational capital relative to the amount of human capital has a stronger positive association with exploratory innovation strategy when social capital is greater. We also found that the combination of organizational, human, and social capital fosters ambidexterity, i.e., the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation. This study extends alignment theory and examines the effects of aligning these knowledge assets on a firm's ability to foster organizational ambidexterity.
    August 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12337   open full text
  • Antecedents to Decision‐Making Quality and Agility in Innovation Portfolio Management.
    Alexander Kock, Hans Georg Gemünden.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 09, 2016
    Innovation portfolio management (IPM) is a dynamic decision‐making process, in which projects are evaluated and selected, and resources are allocated. Previous research has developed an understanding of IPM success and its influencing factors. However, little research investigated the quality of the decision‐making process and the ability to quickly adapt the portfolio. This study focuses on the antecedents of decision‐making quality and agility (i.e., responsiveness to changes in the environment). Based on a decision‐making framework, five structural and cultural IPM components are derived as important antecedents of decision‐making quality, which in turn influences agility. The structural components (1) clarity of strategic goals, (2) formality of the IPM processes, and (3) controlling intensity serve a coordinating function. The cultural components (4) innovation climate and (5) risk climate serve a motivating function in IPM. An analysis of a sample of 179 firms and their innovation portfolios through structural equation modeling using a double‐informant design documents that these five components all positively influence portfolio decision‐making quality, which in turn positively influences agility. Results further show that environmental turbulence moderates some of these relationships. While the positive effect of process formality is weakened under increasing turbulence, the effects of controlling intensity and climate for innovation are strengthened by environmental turbulence. The findings have theoretical implications for the understanding of IPM as a dynamic capability and practical implications for the management of portfolios in turbulent environments.
    August 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12336   open full text
  • Drivers and Consequences of Narrative Transportation: Understanding the Role of Stories and Domain‐Specific Skills in Improving Radically New Products.
    Fiona Schweitzer, Ellis A. Van den Hende.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 01, 2016
    This article investigates the role of transportation in concept tests (i.e., a vivid mental image of a new product concept and the way of using it) for radically new products. Based on transportation literature, the article proposes that concept descriptions in a story format can stimulate transportation. Further, the article builds on the literature on domain‐specific skills to propose that technological reflectiveness (i.e., the ability to think about the impact of a technological product on its users and society in general) and product expertise increase transportation. The article explores the effect that transportation has on the ability of consumers to enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of a radically new product and on their ability to provide valuable concept improvement ideas (i.e., ideas that are highly novel, feasible, and beneficial for consumers). A quasi‐experiment with 253 participants demonstrates that a story format, product experience with related product categories, and technological reflectiveness increased transportation with regard to radically new products. The empirical research also showed that transportation facilitates the enumeration of the advantages and the disadvantages of a concept, resulting in more valuable concept improvement ideas. These findings suggest that innovation managers should strive to evoke transportation in concept tests for radically new products, as transportation allows consumers to provide more valuable input.
    August 01, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12329   open full text
  • The Impact of Customer Involvement on New Product Development: Contingent and Substitutive Effects.
    Anna Shaojie Cui, Fang Wu.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 28, 2016
    More and more companies are actively involving their customers in the new product development (NPD) process. However, there is little consensus regarding the contribution of customer involvement to new product outcomes. A better understanding of this contribution can shed light on whether and when it is worthwhile to involve customers and thus provide firms better guidelines for making such decisions. This study examines the effects of two forms of customer involvement on new product outcomes: the traditional form of customer involvement as an information source (CIS) and the more active form of customer involvement as co‐developers (CIC). The authors offer a better understanding of whether customer involvement can lead to successful innovation by (1) identifying conditions that impact the effects of CIS and CIC on NPD outcomes, (2) contrasting the conditional effects of CIS and CIC to understand how they influence NPD outcomes differently, and (3) examining the potential substitutive relationship between CIS and CIC to understand their joint effects in improving innovation. They find that an experimental NPD approach that emphasizes trial and error learning moderates the relationship between customer involvement and new product outcomes. Specifically, the results reveal contrasting contingent effects of CIS and CIC: CIS is more beneficial for new product outcomes when firms take a more experimental NPD approach, whereas the effect of CIC is stronger when the NPD process is characterized with lower experimentation. CIS and CIC also substitute for each other in their contribution to new product outcomes. These findings suggest that each of the two forms of customer involvement has its unique advantages and is suitable for different conditions. When considering the adoption of CIC, firms should take into account their learning approaches as well as the effectiveness of CIS in the NPD process.
    July 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12326   open full text
  • Do We Have to Get Along to Innovate? The Influence of Multilevel Social Cohesion on New Product and New Service Development.
    Matthew B. Shaner, Lisa Beeler, Charles H. Noble.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 05, 2016
    In this study, based on the Comparative Performance Assessment Study survey conducted by the Product Development Management Association, the authors develop and test a model which considers the antecedents and performance outcomes of social cohesion, a seemingly critical organizational factor in new product development (NPD). Using a sample of over 450 innovation and product development professionals from North America, Europe, and Asia, social cohesion is conceptualized and tested across three levels—within team cohesion, between team cohesion, and between firm cohesion. The results of a structural equation model indicate several differences between the antecedents of the varying forms of social cohesion. A post hoc exploration of the difference between goods‐ versus service‐dominant firms provides a clearer picture of cohesion's influence on innovation outcomes. Specifically, within team and between team cohesion are positively associated with new services performance, while for traditional goods‐based NPD, within team, between team, and between firm cohesion all appear to be positively related to performance. The findings suggest that high social cohesion is not always optimal and that managers should focus on specific types or levels of social cohesion as opposed to thinking about social cohesion as a one‐dimensional construct. The findings also suggest that goods‐ and service‐centric firms can use different tactics or strategies to drive social cohesion and, ultimately, new product performance, and that innovation managers may need to allocate resources differently depending on the nature of the market offering being developed. The paper also presents several implications for theory and practice, as well as future research directions related to the various levels of social cohesion and their influence on new product and new service performance.
    July 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12327   open full text
  • When to Use Loose or Tight Alliance Networks for Innovation? Empirical Evidence.
    Erwin Hofman, Johannes I. M. Halman, Michael Song.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 27, 2016
    This study examines the impact of different degrees of organizational coupling among the members of innovation alliance project networks on the commercial performance of collaborative innovations. Specifically, we study how type of innovation (modular vs. architectural innovation) moderates this relationship. Using data from 664 product innovation networks from five different industries in the United States, we find that the degree of organizational coupling among innovation network members significantly affects the commercial performance of collaborative innovations and that the type of innovation has a significant moderating effect. More specifically, the impact on commercial innovation performance of organizational coupling is positive for modular innovations and negative for architectural innovations.
    May 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12325   open full text
  • Project Suspensions and Failures in New Product Development: Returns for Entrepreneurial Firms in Co‐Development Alliances.
    Yansong Hu, Peter McNamara, Dorota Piaskowska.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 18, 2016
    Entrepreneurial biotech and large pharmaceutical firms often form alliances to co‐develop new products. Yet, new product development (NPD) is fraught with challenges that often result in project suspensions and failures. Considering this, how can firms increase the chances that their co‐development alliances will create value? To answer this question, the authors build on insights from signaling theory to argue that prior project suspensions provide positive signals leading to an increase in value creation, while project failures have the opposite effect. In addition, drawing on insights from temporal construal theory, this research predicts that the strength of these effects is contingent on the stage along the exploration–exploitation continuum at which the alliance is formed. The authors undertook event study analyses of 248 alliances formed by 104 biotechnology firms from the United States and Europe listed on eight stock exchanges over an 8‐year period between 1996 and 2003. The results confirm that prior NPD project suspensions have a stronger value creation effect (or prior failures have a weaker value destruction effect) in the case of exploration alliances in the upstream of NPD processes than in the case of moderate‐scale exploitation alliances in the downstream of NPD. This study is among the first to examine how both prior NPD project suspensions and failures of firms affect the abnormal returns achieved from co‐development alliances. This research therefore contributes to the innovation literature by honing a better understanding of setbacks and failures in NPD. Moreover, the findings contribute to the literature on strategic alliances by identifying new conditions under which firms can create or preserve value. This research also contributes to signaling theory by providing evidence of the moderation effect caused by the signaling environment. Finally, this study contributes to the entrepreneurial literature on value creation for entrepreneurial firms in alliances following adverse events.
    May 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12322   open full text
  • Perspective: Understanding the Nature and Measurement of the Lead User Construct.
    Christoph Hienerth, Christopher Lettl.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 04, 2016
    The lead user concept has attracted a lot of attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, different studies apply different conceptualizations and measures of the lead user construct. Such variation in measurement of the construct make it almost impossible to consolidate findings from prior lead user research, which in turn hampers the accumulation of insights on the concept itself. This is also a challenge with respect to managerial practice: due to different interpretations of the concept, managers and R&D staff find it difficult to identify lead users for workshops and cooperation, and companies are often unable to transfer results from lead user projects to new product and business development. As a result, they only rarely repeat their work with lead users. The aim of this article is therefore to provide some thoughts and guidance on the conceptualization and measurement of the lead user construct.
    May 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12318   open full text
  • Interaction Orientation and Product Development Performance for Taiwanese Electronics Firms: The Mediating Role of Market‐Relating Capabilities.
    Yen‐Chun Chen, Po‐Chien Li, Kenneth R. Evans, Todd J. Arnold.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 02, 2016
    While academics and practitioners are increasingly aware of the value of including the customer in new product development (NPD), processes for doing so effectively remain unclear. Therefore, this study explores the process through which a firm's interaction orientation (the ability to effectively interact with customers) influences product development performance. Drawing on the resource‐based view, this study develops a research model in which two market‐relating capabilities—market‐linking and marketing capabilities—mediate the effect of interaction orientation on product development performance. The validity of this model is examined by analyzing primary data gathered from 167 Taiwanese electronics companies. The model results provide support for a process link between interaction orientation, market‐relating capabilities, and product development performance, such that a firm's capabilities enable the conversion of customer‐based resources into productive new product outcomes. More specifically, the interaction orientation–product development speed relationship is mediated by both marketing and market‐linking capabilities, while the interaction orientation–product innovativeness relationship is partially mediated by marketing capability. That is, interaction orientation has indirect effects on product innovativeness and product development speed by strengthening both marketing and market‐linking capabilities that in turn improve product development performance. In addition, the results suggest that a firm's interactive rationality moderates the relationship between interaction orientation and marketing capability. Overall, this study enhances our understanding of how firms achieve superior product development performance by developing effective customer interaction. The findings of this study provide important strategic insights into NPD.
    May 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12321   open full text
  • Investigating the Influence of Technology Inflows on Technology Outflows in Open Innovation Processes: A Longitudinal Analysis.
    Uros Sikimic, Vittorio Chiesa, Federico Frattini, Vittoria G. Scalera.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 20, 2016
    The open innovation (OI) paradigm emphasizes the importance of integrating inbound and outbound flows of technology to increase a firm's innovation performance. While the synergies between technology inflows and outflows have been discussed in conceptual OI articles, the majority of empirical studies have typically focused on either the inward or the outward dimension of OI. According to recent reviews of OI literature, there is a need for further research that takes an integrated perspective on this topic and studies the combination of the inbound and outbound dimensions of OI. This paper follows these calls by focusing on technology licensing as the main contractual form for OI, and by investigating the relationship between technology in‐licensing and out‐licensing activities at the firm level of analysis. In particular, this paper argues that technology in‐licensing positively influences the volume of technology out‐licensing through two mechanisms. The first—resource‐based—occurs because in‐licensing investments expand and enrich the firm's technology base, thus increasing its value and, as a result, creating more opportunities for out‐licensing. The second—capabilities‐based—occurs because, due to commonalities between technology in‐licensing and out‐licensing in terms of performed tasks and required skills, repeated execution of in‐licensing transactions contributes to the development of higher out‐licensing capabilities and, as a result, increase out‐licensing volume. These arguments are tested using a panel dataset of 837 Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 1998–2007. Consistent with the predictions, the empirical analysis shows that higher investments in in‐licensing and more extensive in‐licensing experience lead to superior volumes of technology out‐licensing. These results contribute to research on OI and licensing, by empirically showing the existence of positive interactions between technology inflows and outflows and of synergies in the development of absorptive and desorptive capacities.
    April 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12319   open full text
  • R&D Partnerships and Innovation Performance: Can There Be too Much of a Good Thing?
    Hanna Hottenrott, Cindy Lopes‐Bento.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 14, 2016
    R&D collaboration facilitates the pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as well as the sharing of risks and costs. Research therefore stresses the positive relationship between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies address the potential drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the cost of coordination and monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure, and involves the risk of opportunistic behavior by the partners. Thus, while for lower collaboration intensities the net gains can be high, costs may start to outweigh benefits if firms perform a higher share of their innovation projects collaboratively. For a sample of 2735 firms located in Germany and active in a broad range of manufacturing and service sectors, this study finds that increasing the share of collaborative R&D projects in total R&D projects is associated with a higher probability of product innovation and with a higher market success of new products. While this confirms previous findings on the gains for innovation performance, the results also show that collaboration has decreasing and even negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold. Thus, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation follows an inverted‐U shape and, on average, costs start to outweigh benefits if a firm pursues more than about two‐thirds of its R&D projects in collaboration. This result is robust to conditioning market success to the introduction of new products and to accounting for the selection into collaborating. This threshold is, however, contingent on firm characteristics. Smaller and younger as well as resource‐constrained firms benefit from relatively higher collaboration intensities. For firms with higher collaboration complexities in terms of different partners and different stages of the R&D process at which collaboration takes place, returns start to decrease already at lower collaboration intensities.
    March 14, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12311   open full text
  • A Bibliometric Review of Open Innovation: Setting a Research Agenda.
    Krithika Randhawa, Ralf Wilden, Jan Hohberger.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 02, 2016
    Through an objective, systematic, and comprehensive review of the literature on open innovation (OI), this article identifies gaps in existing research, and provides recommendations on how hitherto unused or underused organizational, management, and marketing theories can be applied to advance the field. This study adopts a novel approach by combining two complementary bibliometric methods of co‐citation analysis and text mining of 321 journal articles on OI that enables a robust empirical analysis of the intellectual streams and key concepts underpinning OI. Results reveal that researchers do not sufficiently draw on theoretical perspectives external to the field to examine multiple facets of OI. Research also seems confined to innovation‐specific journals with its focus restricted to a select few OI issues, thereby exerting limited influence on the wider business community. This study reveals three distinct areas within OI research: (1) firm‐centric aspects of OI, (2) management of OI networks, and (3) role of users and communities in OI. Thus far, studies have predominantly investigated the firm‐centric aspects of OI, with a particular focus on the role of knowledge, technology, and R&D from the innovating firm's perspective, while the other two areas remain relatively under‐researched. Further gaps in the literature emerge that present avenues for future research, namely to: (1) develop a more comprehensive understanding of OI by including diverse perspectives (users, networks, and communities), (2) direct increased attention to OI strategy formulation and implementation, and (3) enhance focus on customer co‐creation and conceptualize “open service innovation.” Marketing (e.g., service‐dominant logic), organizational behavior (e.g., communities of practice), and management (e.g., dynamic capabilities) offer suitable theoretical lenses and/or concepts to address these gaps.
    March 02, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12312   open full text
  • Resourceful Sensemaking: Overcoming Barriers between Marketing and Design in NPD.
    Michael B. Beverland, Pietro Micheli, Francis J. Farrelly.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. February 25, 2016
    New product development (NPD) success depends on the capacity of different functions to effectively collaborate. In particular, while recent studies have highlighted the importance of marketing and design working together, research suggests this relationship is often fraught with conflict due to different “thought worlds.” However, empirical research also identifies that the solution lies not in reducing the psychological distance between the two functions, but in the sensemaking practices used by designers and marketers to expand each other's understanding of the potential NPD solution. This process is known as resourceful sensemaking, and it refers to practitioners’ capacity to transform knowledge with the aim of expanding each other's horizons to ensure better team outcomes. Drawing on 71 interviews with designers and marketers in Australia and New Zealand, we examine how each function strategically deploys knowledge of the other to improve NPD outcomes. Building on the sensemaking literature, we demonstrate that while still drawing on different thought worlds, the inputs of both designers and marketers are necessary for effective NPD. We also identify that both are capable of creating a common framework of meaning through three resourceful sensemaking practices: exposing, co‐opting, and repurposing. Moreover, we identify the need for resourceful sensemaking that results in horizon‐expanding discourse among those involved in NPD. These practices are found to enable marketers and designers to expand the range of considerations and inputs into NPD; help organizations reconcile either/or dualisms; and lead them to identify unmet consumer needs, which result in the creation of innovative products. This paper thereby advances understanding of interfunctional coordination in NPD, integration of design into NPD, and sensemaking more broadly.
    February 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12313   open full text
  • A contemporary justice perspective on dual ladders for R&D professionals.
    Patrick Hoffmann, Martin Hoegl, Miriam Muethel, Matthias Weiss.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. February 12, 2016
    Research and development (R&D) professionals play a key role in companies' innovation performance. Whereas prior research has indicated the potential benefits of dual ladder career systems to retain and motivate R&D professionals, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the design properties of dual ladders that facilitate such positive effects. The purpose of this study is to address this research gap by exploring how organizations can design dual ladders to enhance R&D professionals' organizational commitment and career satisfaction. Drawing on contemporary justice theory, we point to two factors integral for the successful application of dual ladders: the perceived equality of the technical ladder and the transparency of the dual ladder. These factors are related to R&D professionals' organizational commitment and career satisfaction. Furthermore, this study investigates whether these relationships are moderated by R&D professionals' age and self‐directedness in career management as well as firm size. The hypotheses are tested in a cross‐level study with 9 heads of R&D departments, 32 human resource managers, and 382 R&D professionals from 32 organizations. Based on the analyses, this study finds positive relationships between the perceived equality and the transparency of the dual ladder with R&D professionals' organizational commitment and career satisfaction. In addition, the findings show that the effects of the perceived equality of the technical ladder on R&D professionals' career satisfaction are weaker at high levels of self‐directed career management. The study contributes by developing theory on the consequences of dual ladders' design properties and moderating influences thereon. Thus, this research has implications for the literature on innovation management by expanding the knowledge on the interplay between career management and the human side of innovation.
    February 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12310   open full text
  • Signaling Strategies for Innovative Design: A Study on Design Tradition and Expert Attention.
    Pietro Micheli, Gerda Gemser.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 12, 2016
    There is increasing acknowledgement that innovative product design has a positive effect on financial performance. However, innovative design may require specific efforts to aid interpretation and appreciation by the market. So far, little is known about how companies can enhance their chances of success when introducing innovative designs. This study contributes to the development of this area of research. Drawing on signaling theory, it examines the role of two types of signals that may act as enablers for market acceptance of innovative design: adherence to a national design tradition, and attention from experts and specialized media. Using data collected from Danish design‐intensive companies, findings show that design innovativeness has a positive impact on financial performance. The analyses demonstrate that the effect is reinforced if a novel design adheres to a national design tradition. In addition, novel designs will be more positively accepted if they receive attention from design experts and attract media coverage. Research also contributes to signaling theory, as it shows how intrinsic—design innovativeness and adherence to a design tradition—and extrinsic—expert and media attention—cues interact and influence financial performance. The paper concludes by discussing managerial implications, particularly in relation to the new product development process and the role of design, and by suggesting avenues for further research.
    January 12, 2016   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12308   open full text
  • Success Factors for Service Innovation: A Meta‐Analysis.
    Chris Storey, Pinar Cankurtaran, Paulina Papastathopoulou, Erik Jan Hultink.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 23, 2015
    Service sectors form a considerable part of the world economy. Contrary to the logical assumption that service innovation research should represent a significant share of all innovation research, the vast majority of innovation studies focus on products as opposed to services. This research presents a meta‐analysis of the antecedents of service innovation performance conducted on 92 independent samples obtained from 114 articles published between 1989 and 2015. This research contributes to our understanding of service innovation in three major ways. First, this is the first meta‐analysis that specifically assesses the relative importance of antecedents of service innovation performance, while also pinpointing the differences in meta‐analytic findings between antecedents of service and product innovation performance. Although there are some universal success factors that transcend the boundaries between services and products, the presence of marked differences implies that it would be wrong to treat the development of new services and new products as the same. Second, the meta‐analysis demonstrates that the antecedents of service innovation performance are contingent on the sector context (i.e., explicit versus tacit services). Comparing results between products and services, and between tacit and explicit services, there appears to be a continuum where explicit services sit interstitial between tacit services on one side and products on the other. Third, the meta‐analysis compares and contrasts the antecedents of two dimensions of service innovation performance (i.e., commercial success and strategic competitive advantage). Previous meta‐analyses treated these two dependent variables collectively, which falls short of identifying issues that may affect management decisions when faced with different objectives. Additionally, this research investigates the effect of several other moderators (i.e., culture, unit of analysis, journal quality, and year of publication) on the relationships between the antecedents and service innovation performance. The results are discussed in relation to their implications for research and managerial practice.
    December 23, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12307   open full text
  • Nonmimetic Knowledge and Innovation Performance: Empirical Evidence from Developing Countries.
    Tang Wang, Dirk Libaers.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 10, 2015
    The knowledge‐based view suggests that the innovative performance of a firm is a function of the utilization and recombination of internal and external knowledge. The process of knowledge utilization and recombination to create new products can occur internally, through research and development activities, as well as externally, by making investments in creating links with suppliers, universities, customers, and a wide range of actors in the innovation system. This study focuses on the impact of unique, nonmimetic external knowledge, which is defined as unique technological knowledge that is not tapped by other firms in the new venture's operating environment, on the new venture's innovative performance. The purpose of the research is to investigate whether firms really benefit from utilizing and recombining unique, nonmimetic knowledge in creating innovative products in a developing country context. Drawing on the knowledge‐based view and institutional theory, this study argues that entrepreneurs in their utilization and recombination of unique, nonmimetic knowledge are not always successful at creating new products. The empirical context is drawn from the Enterprise Survey produced by the Investment Climate Group of the World Bank. The findings based on a large sample of new ventures in developing countries reveal a curvilinear relationship with marginal diminishing returns between the degree of unique, nonmimetic knowledge and innovative performance. The results also show significant moderating effects of strategic product planning and economic and regulatory policy uncertainty. Specifically, strategic product planning helps in converting very unique, nonmimetic knowledge into new products. In addition, policy uncertainty can also positively moderate the process of recombining and converting unique, nonmimetic knowledge into new products. This study provides a more complete account of how unique, nonmimetic external knowledge affects innovative performance of new ventures in developing countries.
    December 10, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12306   open full text
  • Stock Market Response to Strategic Technical Alliances between Drug and Biotechnology Firms.
    Dandan Liu, Xiaoling Pu, Mary E. Schramm.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 01, 2015
    Traditionally, firms in the pharmaceutical industry have depended on their internal research and development (R&D) capabilities to maintain a productive new product pipeline. During the past two decades, however, the industry's pipeline productivity has decreased compromising the industry's ability to meet shareholder expectations. As a strategy to invigorate pipeline productivity, and impact financial performance, pharmaceutical firms have increased utilization of strategic technical alliances. Earlier research shows that the degree of financial impact resulting from strategic technical alliances varies in terms of partnership type and differences between client and partner firms. This research studies strategic technical alliances between pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms from 1985 to 2012. Event study methodology is used to determine the relationship between stock market response to alliance announcements, measured as cumulative abnormal returns, and factors representing the absorptive capacity of the pharmaceutical firms in the sample. Then, variables indicating the development stage of the drugs included in the alliances are added to assess the effect of project risk on the market response. The study finds that, in general, the stock market responds in a positive manner to strategic technical alliances in the pharmaceutical industry reflecting the market's immediate response, and expectations of future firm value, resulting from the alliance. The degree of the market's response varies in terms of the client firms’ absorptive capacity with new product introductions being the strongest driver. The market responds similarly to alliances across different drug development stages, however, a stronger response is observed in preclinical and extension stages.
    December 01, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12305   open full text
  • Organizing for Inbound Open Innovation: How External Consultants and a Dedicated R&D Unit Influence Product Innovation Performance.
    Mattia Bianchi, Annalisa Croce, Claudio Dell'Era, C. Anthony Di Benedetto, Federico Frattini.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 20, 2015
    Firms increasingly acquire technological knowledge from external sources to improve their innovation performance. This strategic approach is known as inbound open innovation. The existing empirical evidence regarding the impact of inbound open innovation on performance, however, is ambiguous. The equivocal results are due to moderating factors that influence a firm's ability to acquire technological knowledge from external sources and to transform it into innovation outputs. This paper focuses on a relevant yet overlooked category of moderating factors: organization of research and development (R&D). It explores two organizational mechanisms: one informal and external‐oriented (involvement of external consultants in R&D activities) and one formalized and internal‐oriented (existence of a dedicated R&D unit), in the acquisition of technological knowledge through R&D outsourcing, a particular contractual form for inbound open innovation. Drawing on a capabilities perspective and using a longitudinal dataset of 841 Spanish manufacturing firms observed over the period 1999–2007, this paper provides a fine‐grained analysis of the moderating effects of the two organizational mechanisms. The involvement of external consultants in R&D activities strengthens the impact of inbound open innovation on innovation performance by increasing marginal benefits of acquiring external technological knowledge through R&D outsourcing. Moreover, it reduces the level of inbound open innovation to which the highest innovation performance corresponds. Instead, the existence of a dedicated R&D unit makes the firm less sensitive to changes in the level of inbound open innovation, by reducing marginal benefits of acquiring external technological knowledge through R&D outsourcing, and increases the level of inbound open innovation to which the highest innovation performance corresponds. The results regarding the role of informal and formalized R&D organizational mechanisms contribute to research on open innovation and absorptive capacity, and also inform managers as to what organizational mechanism is recommended to acquire external technological knowledge, depending on the objectives that the firm pursues.
    November 20, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12302   open full text
  • When Does Customer Orientation Hinder (Help) Radical Product Innovation? The Role of Organizational Rewards.
    Ashwin W. Joshi.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 13, 2015
    Prior marketing literature offers a compelling theoretical rationale in support of two contradictory propositions, namely, that customer orientation is negatively related to (i.e., hinders) radical product innovation and that customer orientation is positively related to (i.e., helps) radical product innovation. In this research, the contextual conditions that determine the validity of these contradictory propositions are identified. Drawing from the literature on organizational rewards, two types of organizational rewards—outcome based and strategy based—are identified as being the key contextual conditions. It is hypothesized that when outcome‐based rewards are in effect, customer orientation is negatively related to radical positive innovation and, that when strategy‐based rewards are in effect, customer orientation is positively related to radical product innovation. Results from a survey of 156 manufacturing firms, and from a survey of 97 of their customers, provide support for these hypotheses. While prior research has attempted to explain the contradictory nature of the relationship between customer orientation and radical product innovation using typology‐based and mediator‐based approaches, the contextual condition‐based approach has not been well developed. This gap is addressed by the present research. From a practitioner perspective, the research is important because it identifies a concrete mechanism that new product development managers can deploy, in tandem with customer orientation, if they intend to generate radical product innovations. Given the potential gains that flow from radical product innovation, the research findings are expected to be of considerable interest to managers of new product development projects.
    November 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12301   open full text
  • Making Up Is Hard to Do: Knowledge Acquisition Strategies and the Nature of New Product Innovation.
    Denise Dunlap, Edward F. McDonough, Ram Mudambi, Tim Swift.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. September 25, 2015
    Innovation creates significant challenges for firms in high‐technology industries. This article examines how the use of external knowledge acquired from mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and joint ventures (JVs) influence the nature of innovative competence in the global pharmaceutical industry. We create a unique database on never‐before approved products that measure the scientific merit of new, exploratory product innovations, ranging from radical to incremental. We then follow their market success by recording the number of new exploitative product innovations that stem from these product innovations and that are later approved and subsequently marketed. Using a large data set spanning a 15‐year period, we find that firms were able to “make up” for their lack of exploitation or exploration innovative capabilities through the use of M&As and JVs. These external knowledge acquisition strategies were found to overcome internal processes that otherwise could cause firms to overemphasize exploitation over exploration and vice versa. Our findings suggest that acquiring external knowledge via M&As is associated with diminished exploratory product innovation, while assimilating external knowledge sourced from JVs is associated with a reduction in new exploitative product innovation.
    September 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12298   open full text
  • Perspective: New Service Development: How the Field Developed, Its Current Status and Recommendations for Moving the Field Forward.
    Wim G. Biemans, Abbie Griffin, Rudy K. Moenaert.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 25, 2015
    New service development (NSD) is a growing innovation discipline. Despite the growth of articles about NSD, several authors have criticized the lack of attention paid to NSD, compared with new product development (NPD), and the lack of consensus across NSD findings. At the same time, others have proclaimed that NSD is a sophisticated, mature field of research. This paper tries to resolve these issues by analyzing 230 empirical articles on NSD, published over a period of 30 years. It investigates the content of NSD research articles, the authors contributing to the field, and the research methodologies employed. It finds that, despite its growing popularity, the field has not moved forward substantively. NSD is a subject specialty but lacks an “invisible college” of researchers addressing the topic. This has resulted in a body of research that fails to provide managers with consistent answers to basic questions about how to most effectively manage NSD processes. One of the main causes for the lack of coherence in the knowledge on this topic may stem from the fact that, rather than initially approaching research in the domain without ingoing bias and using grounded theory approaches to create initial understanding, many of the early researchers applied the concepts, frameworks, and methods used to understand NPD to the NSD domain. To correct this problem, it is proposed that the field of NSD needs to move forward in a significantly different manner. This paper provides several recommendations for attracting more academics to the field, elevating the visibility and status of NSD as a research domain, and also presents a research agenda that may help reorient future research in this area so that a more complete and coherent body of knowledge is generated that both advances the field and helps practitioners manage NSD more effectively and efficiently.
    August 25, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12283   open full text
  • Benefits of Customer Codevelopment of New Products: The Moderating Effects of Utilitarian and Hedonic Radicalness.
    Marina Candi, Jan Ende, Gerda Gemser.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 20, 2015
    There is growing belief in the value of actively involving customers in innovation, commonly referred to as customer codevelopment or cocreation. These strategies are generally believed to be beneficial, although contingent views are prevalent. A widely espoused contingent view is that the positive contribution of customer codevelopment is dependent on the degree of radicalness (or innovativeness) of the products being developed. Some work argues that customer codevelopment is more useful for incremental innovation, whereas other work claims that customer codevelopment is more valuable when innovation is radical. This research makes an important contribution to this discourse by making a distinction between utilitarian radicalness and hedonic radicalness. Utilitarian radicalness refers to the degree to which an innovation is novel in terms of technology and functionality, whereas hedonic radicalness refers to the degree to which an innovation is novel in terms of sensorial, emotional, or symbolic aspects. Hypotheses about the contribution of customer codevelopment to market success depending on levels of utilitarian and hedonic radicalness are tested using dual‐respondent data about a large sample of innovation projects. The findings suggest that the contribution of customer codevelopment to market success is positively moderated by utilitarian radicalness and negatively moderated by hedonic radicalness. This underlines the importance of taking not only the level, but also the nature, of radicalness into account when making decisions about customer codevelopment.
    August 20, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12286   open full text
  • Enhancing Stock Market Return with New Product Preannouncements: The Role of Information Quality and Innovativeness.
    Ruby P. Lee, Qimei Chen, Nathaniel N. Hartmann.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 19, 2015
    To advance development and application of signaling theory in the new product preannouncement literature while seeking to resolve ambiguity regarding the influence of innovativeness on stock market return, the role of information quality is examined. Specifically, this study investigates the effect of innovativeness across low and high levels of information quality. The results, ascertained using event study methodology on a sample of 243 new product preannouncements collected over a nine‐year period, indicate that higher information quality increases the strength of the positive relationship between innovativeness and stock market return. The findings offer managers insight into what role information quality plays in new product preannouncements that can help their firms generate higher stock market return.
    August 19, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12284   open full text
  • The Role of Marketing Resources in Radical Innovation Activity: Antecedents and Payoffs.
    Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos, Mathew Hughes, Paul Hughes.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 17, 2015
    While radical product innovations represent significant engines of firm growth, questions remain over whether marketing helps or hurts (1) a firm's radical product innovation activity and (2) its rewards from radical product innovation activity. By attaching an attention‐based view of the firm to a market‐based assets view of marketing, this paper examines the role of three marketing resources—market knowledge, reputation, and relational resources—on radical innovation activity. Our conceptual framework posits differentiated effects among marketing resources as antecedents of radical innovation activity and as moderators of its impact on firms' financial performance. Using a survey of a broad set of high‐tech business‐to‐business (B2B) firms to test hypotheses, it is found that firms with strong relational resources enjoy a higher propensity for, and stronger financial rewards from, radical innovation activity. Reputational resources come with a trade‐off as they hurt the incidence of radical innovation but enhance its financial rewards. However, market knowledge resources appear to hurt both radical innovation activity and its financial rewards. Our results point to the multifaceted role of marketing in radical innovation activity, which is unlikely to come with a single benefit or liability as prior work often posits. Rather, our research heightens the alertness of managers to assess their firms' marketing strength as a bundle of stocks of several marketing resources. Managers must understand the distinct benefits and drawbacks of each resource in developing and launching radical innovations. Our research underscores the differentiated value of marketing in radical innovation activity in B2B high‐tech contrary to the entrenched idea of a limited or even stifling role of marketing in this context.
    August 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12285   open full text
  • The Influence of CEOs' Visionary Innovation Leadership on the Performance of High‐Technology Ventures: The Mediating Roles of Connectivity and Knowledge Integration.
    Odellia Caridi‐Zahavi, Abraham Carmeli, Ofer Arazy.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 29, 2015
    Senior leaders play an essential role in facilitating knowledge creation processes and driving firms' innovation performance. However, little is known about the underlying relational mechanisms by which CEOs help build knowledge integration capability and drive firm innovation. We developed and tested a conceptual model about the ways in which CEOs shape a context conducive for knowledge creation processes and drive multiple innovation performance. A field, survey‐based, study among small‐ to medium‐sized technological ventures (SMVs) showed that CEO visionary innovation leadership (manifested by both vision for innovation and enactment of the vision through specific leadership behaviors) was positively related to a context of connectivity. Connectivity was related to firm knowledge integration capacity, which in turn resulted in enhanced firm innovation (new product quality, development speed, and product innovation). The findings also indicate direct links between CEO visionary innovation leadership and knowledge integration, and between connectivity and product innovation. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
    July 29, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12275   open full text
  • The Effect of New Product Preannouncements on the Evaluation of Other Brand Products.
    Helge Thorbjørnsen, Micael Dahlén, Yih H. Lee.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 27, 2015
    Some firms preannounce new products long before they are actually available on the market. Previous research has investigated the effects of such new product preannouncements (NPPs) on consumer and competitor responses. This paper examines how NPPs affect consumers' construal of and preferences for the new product and, in turn, how these evaluations influence their preferences for the brands' other products. Specifically, the paper demonstrates that consumers' construal level of NPPs spills over to their construal of other products in the brand family, causing a positive, biased evaluation of these products. Three experimental studies reveal that the mere information about an NPP can shift evaluation of currently available brand products in a positive direction through construal‐level spillover and increased perceptions of similarity. The studies contrast NPPs to new product announcements (NPAs) and consistently find more positive results for the former. Moreover, the studies find that product newness has a moderating effect on the results, such that the positive spillover effects are more pronounced for really new products than for incrementally new products. The results also show that the effects are contingent on the credibility of the NPP: If consumers do not consider the NPPs credible, no positive spillover effects will materialize. Finally, the studies demonstrate that the positive evaluative spillover is specific to the products in the brand family and does not affect consumers' perceptions or choice of competitor products. Consumers actually rate the competing brand's remaining products lower when the focal brand engages in NPPs. The study has important implications for managers regarding how to use NPPs to influence consumers' construal and evaluations of brand products.
    July 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12280   open full text
  • Perspective: A Review of Marketing Research on Product Design with Directions for Future Research.
    Michael G. Luchs, K. Scott Swan, Mariëlle E. H. Creusen.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 27, 2015
    The authors provide synthesized summaries of research on product design conducted over the 20‐year period from 1995 to 2014, as well as suggestions for future research. Building on the conceptual model of product design proposed by Luchs and Swan, the current project describes research findings based on a review of 252 articles drawn from eight of the academic journals most influential to marketing thought, and identified by their inclusion of the terms “product design” or “industrial design” within their abstracts, subject terms, and/or author supplied keywords. Specifically, the authors provide integrated summaries of 25 product design subtopics organized within Luchs and Swan's original 11 product design research topic categories, which, in turn, address the following three general product design research categories: context and strategy, product design process, and product design consequences. These summaries are followed by suggested future research opportunities to address gaps in the literature. In addition to seeking inspiration for future research based on a review of extant research, the authors illustrate an approach for exploring research opportunities based on current and emerging industry trends, such as sustainability, the sharing economy, and the emergence of consumer‐oriented health and performance management products. For each identified industry trend, the authors provide illustrative design implications with consequent illustrative research opportunities. This balanced approach to identifying near‐term research opportunities based on extant research and based on industry trends, i.e., looking forward and externally, may in turn improve the potential impact of future research on both knowledge development and on industry practice.
    July 27, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12276   open full text
  • Can Perceived Support for Entrepreneurship Keep Great Faculty in the Face of Spinouts?
    Nicos Nicolaou, Vangelis Souitaris.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 14, 2015
    Despite the recent increase in academic entrepreneurship research, we still know relatively little about the degree of involvement of academic inventors in university spinouts. In this study, we distinguish between academic inventors who leave the university after the creation of a spinout (academic exodus) and those who maintain their university affiliation (academic stasis). Drawing from the literature on innovation‐supportive climates and from organizational support theory, we argue that perceptions of institutional support and departmental norms regarding entrepreneurship are associated with the exodus versus stasis decision. We find that inventors who have higher perceptions of institutional support for entrepreneurship are less likely to leave. This relationship is enhanced by perceptions of favorable departmental norms toward entrepreneurship. We discuss the implications of our work for the literature on academic entrepreneurship, innovation‐supportive climates, and perceived organizational support. Our study has clear policy implications for universities, policymakers, and funders who aim to stimulate academic entrepreneurship, but are concerned about losing entrepreneurial faculty. Specifically, we advise universities and policymakers to actively support academic inventors wishing to spin out and to monitor this support in a customer‐friendly manner, in order to ensure that the inventors' perceptions of support are favorable. It is also important for universities to look out for inconsistencies between a supportive environment for entrepreneurship at the institutional level and unfavorable norms toward entrepreneurship at the departmental level; such inconsistencies can lead good faculty members out of academia. More broadly, universities can pursue an aggregation strategy that aims to retain both a research and commercialization identity while building strong links between them.
    July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12274   open full text
  • Innovations—Doomed to Fail? Investigating Strategies to Overcome Passive Innovation Resistance.
    Sven Heidenreich, Tobias Kraemer.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 14, 2015
    The constant and successful market introduction of new products is of major concern to companies throughout all industries. However, empirical research points to high failure rates of innovations, indicating that most new products fail as they are rejected by consumers due to their resistance to innovation. Several studies have confirmed the importance of passive innovation resistance as a dominant barrier, which has to be overcome before new product adoption can start. However, empirical evidence on how to overcome passive innovation resistance is still lacking. This study intends to address this gap by evaluating the effectiveness of marketing instruments (i.e., mental simulation and benefit comparison) to reduce negative effects of passive innovation resistance on new product adoption. The results of a scenario‐based experiment (n = 679) confirm high effectiveness for both instruments. However, the effectiveness varied with the type of passive innovation resistance present. More specifically, mental simulation was found to be the most effective instrument in the case of cognitive passive resistance, whereas benefit comparison was found to be most effective in the case of situational passive resistance. Thereby, the effect of both marketing instruments was stronger the more radical the new product was perceived. Hence, companies should assess the type of passive innovation resistance that is predominant in their target market, and align their choice of marketing instruments that accompany a new product launch to most effectively overcome passive innovation resistance. Employing such new product launch tactics should decrease initial market resistance and thus help companies in reducing innovation failure rates.
    July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12273   open full text
  • The Influence of Organizational and National Culture on New Product Performance.
    Martin Eisend, Heiner Evanschitzky, David I. Gilliland.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 04, 2015
    The authors conduct a meta‐analysis on the combined influence of organizational and national culture on new product performance. For this purpose, they refer to the effectiveness of value congruency and develop a conceptual model describing the fit between organizational culture types as suggested by the competing values framework and national culture, as described by Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The meta‐analysis is based on 489 effect sizes taken from 123 manuscripts. The findings show that organizations with a market culture show the highest new product performance, while hierarchy‐type organizations show the lowest performance. The influence of national culture variables supports the effect of value congruency, and shows that in individualistic cultures the impact of a clan culture decreases, the impact of an adhocracy culture type decreases with uncertainty avoidance, and the influence of a hierarchy culture type increases with power distance. The superior effect of a market culture type can be matched by other organizational orientations, but in particular national cultures only. The combined findings underline the importance for firms that seek to improve the success rate of new products on international markets to consider the fit of a national culture with a firm's organizational culture.
    May 04, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12268   open full text
  • Employees' Innovative Behavior in Social Context: A Closer Examination of the Role of Organizational Care.
    Yannick P.M. Bammens.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. April 02, 2015
    A substantial body of research has examined the antecedents of innovation in organizational settings, but our current understanding of how social aspects of the work environment influence the innovative behavior of employees remains underdeveloped. One of these social aspects connected to the theme of “doing well by doing good” concerns organizational care, with scholars examining how actions centered on promoting employee well‐being may result in pro‐organizational outcomes. The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual analysis of the intricate relationship between organizational care and employees' innovative behavior by detailing key mediating mechanisms and conditional factors. This research will combine insights from multiple theories and literatures, most notably self‐determination theory, social exchange theory, and the literatures on organizational care, work motivation, and innovation. The proposed multilevel model clarifies how organizational care affects the creative, complex, and mundane elements of employees' innovative behavior through its effect on the motivational constructs of intrinsic motivation, identified motivation, and introjected obligation feelings, respectively. Moreover, the model highlights the potential dark sides of organizational care that managers must consider when designing and implementing caring policies and practices. Specifically, it clarifies how the effect of organizational care on employees' innovative behavior may depend on their subjective perceptions of care intrusiveness and care insincerity. As such, this study responds to calls for rich and nuanced conceptual research in the innovation field, especially concerning the role of employees' social work environment in motivating their innovative behavior. Important theoretical and practical implications of this conceptual analysis will be discussed, and valuable directions for future research will be outlined.
    April 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12267   open full text
  • Innovation Performance in New Product Development Teams in China's Technology Ventures: The Role of Behavioral Integration Dimensions and Collective Efficacy.
    Jingjiang Liu, Jiyao Chen, Yi Tao.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 30, 2014
    In emerging markets, technology ventures increasingly rely on new product development (NPD) teams to generate creative ideas and to mold these innovative ideas into streams of new products or services. However, little is known about how behavioral integration (a behavioral team process) and collective efficacy (a motivational team process) jointly facilitate or inhibit team innovation performance in emerging markets—especially in China, the world's largest emerging‐market setting with collectivist and high power distance cultures. Drawing on social cognitive theory and behavioral integration research, this article elucidates the relationships between behavioral integration dimensions (i.e., collaborative behavior, information exchange, and joint decision‐making) and innovation performance and also examines how collective efficacy moderates these relationships in China's NPD teams. Results from a sample of 96 NPD teams in China's technology ventures reveal that information exchange is positively associated with innovation performance. Collaborative behavior positively but marginally influences innovation performance, whereas joint decision‐making does not relate to innovation performance. Moreover, collective efficacy demonstrates an important moderating role. Specifically, both collaborative behavior and joint decision‐making are more positively associated with innovation performance when collective efficacy is higher. In contrast, information exchange is less positively associated with innovation performance when collective efficacy is higher. This study makes important theoretical contributions to the literature on team innovation and behavioral integration in emerging markets by offering a better understanding of how behavioral and motivational team processes jointly shape innovation performance in China's NPD teams. This study also extends social cognitive theory by identifying collective efficacy as a boundary condition for the overall effectiveness of behavioral integration dimensions. In particular, this study highlights the condition under which behavioral integration dimensions facilitate or inhibit NPD team innovation performance in China.
    May 30, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12177   open full text
  • Profitability Goals, Control Goals, and the R&D Investment Decisions of Family and Nonfamily Firms.
    Josip Kotlar, Hanqing Fang, Alfredo De Massis, Federico Frattini.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. May 08, 2014
    Research and development (R&D) investments can help build sustainable competitive advantages and improve firm performance. Nevertheless, managers also acknowledge the difficulties associated with managing R&D and the low chances of success of innovation programs. For this reason, researchers have long been interested in understanding how managers make R&D investment decisions. Research grounded in the behavioral theory of the firm suggests that a primary driver of R&D investment decisions is profitability: when profitability goals have not been met, managers are more likely to initiate a problemistic search through increasing R&D investments. While emphasizing profitability goals and their relationship with R&D investments, prior research largely downplays the role of goals beyond profitability that exist in a significant number of firms (family firms) that are owned and managed by family members whose primary concern is preserving their control over the organization. Research indicates that these family‐centered noneconomic goals lead family managers to minimize R&D investments and that the coexistence of multiple goals produces highly variable R&D investment behavior. Yet, how family‐centered goals for control and profitability enter decision‐making in family firms is not fully understood. In this study, we propose that family managers form distinctive reference points that capture supplier bargaining power and are used to evaluate the degree of external obstruction to their managerial control. The empirical analysis of panel data on 431 private Spanish manufacturing firms observed over the period 2000–2006 shows that the importance of profitability and control goals follows a sequential logic in family firms, such that family firms react more strongly to increasing supplier bargaining power when their profitability reference points have been reached. This study extends current understanding of the distinctive organizational processes engendered by family management in business organizations leading to new research opportunities at the intersection of the innovation management and family business literatures.
    May 08, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12165   open full text
  • Salespersons as Internal Knowledge Brokers and New Products Selling: Discovering the Link to Genetic Makeup.
    Wouter E. Berg, Willem Verbeke, Richard P. Bagozzi, Loek Worm, Ad (Addy) Jong, Ed Nijssen.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 25, 2014
    Managers increasingly realize the importance of involving the sales force in new product development. However, despite recent progress, research on the specific role of the sales force in product innovation‐related activities remains scarce. In particular, the importance of a salespersons' internal knowledge brokering has been neglected. This study develops and empirically validates the concept of internal knowledge brokering behavior and its effect on selling new products and developing new business, and explores whether a salesperson's internal brokering qualities are determined by biological traits. The findings reveal that salespeople with the DRD2 A1 gene variant engage at significant lower levels of internal knowledge‐brokering behavior than salespeople without this gene variant, and as a result are less likely to engage effectively in new product selling. The DRD4 gene variant had no effect on internal knowledge brokering. Management and future research implications are discussed.
    March 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12156   open full text
  • Perspective: Linking Design Thinking with Innovation Outcomes through Cognitive Bias Reduction.
    Jeanne Liedtka.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 25, 2014
    “Design thinking” has generated significant attention in the business press and has been heralded as a novel problem‐solving methodology well suited to the often‐cited challenges business organizations face in encouraging innovation and growth. Yet the specific mechanisms through which the use of design, approached as a thought process, might improve innovation outcomes have not received significant attention from business scholars. In particular, its utility has only rarely been linked to the academic literature on individual cognition and decision‐making. This perspective piece advocates addressing this omission by examining “design thinking” as a practice potentially valuable for improving innovation outcomes by helping decision‐makers reduce their individual level cognitive biases. In this essay, I first review the assumptions, principles, and key process tools associated with design thinking. I then establish its foundation in the decision‐making literature, drawing on an extensive body of research on cognitive biases and their impact. The essay concludes by advancing a set of propositions and research implications, aiming to demonstrate one particular path that future research might take in assessing the utility of design thinking as a method for improving organizational outcomes related to innovation. In doing so, it seeks to address the challenge of conducting academic research on a practice that is obviously popular in management circles but appears resistant to rigorous empirical inquiry because of the multifaceted nature of its “basket” of tools and processes and the complexity of measuring the outcomes it produces.
    March 25, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12163   open full text
  • Financial Incentives and Salesperson Time Orientation in New Product Launch: A Longitudinal Study.
    Frederik Beuk, Alan J. Malter, Jelena Spanjol, John Cocco.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 24, 2014
    The success of a new product launch critically depends on an engaged and dedicated sales force. Salespeople who are involved in a new product launch must overcome significant uncertainty associated with the new product's performance, which can affect success expectations and, in turn, sales effort for the new product. Moreover, success expectations may drop in the first few months of the launch period, due to initial negative market feedback or general decline in sales force enthusiasm. Diminished expectations may start a vicious circle effect where lower success expectations for the new product lead to lower sales effort that, in turn, leads to lower performance, which further lowers expectations, and so on. Based on insights from attribution‐expectancy theory, this study investigates two distinct mechanisms to counteract the potential downward spiral in success expectations and sales effort devoted to a new product. Specifically, this research examines the role of financial incentives and salespersons' long‐term orientation in creating and maintaining high new product success expectations and sales effort during a new product launch. To investigate how the effect of these factors changes over time, success expectations and sales effort are examined across two critical points in time: the start of a new product launch and at completion of the first sales cycle. To test the model empirically, the North American sales force (n = 129) of a business unit of a global firm is surveyed longitudinally during the launch of a new line of industrial products. The data are analyzed using a partial least squares model. The results show that initial success expectations have a significant effect on sales effort later in the launch, and that this relationship is mediated by success expectations later in the launch. Success expectations and sales effort early in the launch are also shown to impact the perceived attractiveness of the financial incentives offered, but this does not translate into higher success expectations or sales effort at the end of the launch. In contrast, the long‐term orientation of salespersons is key to maintaining higher success expectations and sales effort at the end of the launch.
    March 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12157   open full text
  • Do Retailers Really Profit from Ambidextrous Managers? The Impact of Frontline Mechanisms on New and Existing Product Selling Performance.
    Michel Borgh, Jeroen J.L. Schepers.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 24, 2014
    When manufacturers introduce a new product to the market, downstream retail partners are faced with inherent trade‐offs. Retail sales personnel have to support the new product's introduction with substantial sales efforts but also sell the existing products in stock, before storage and devaluation costs spin out of control. This study shows how retail sales managers can guide sales personnel's performance of new and existing product selling, respectively. The authors argue that a manager may prioritize selling new products, existing products, or both (i.e., have an ambidextrous selling orientation). Based on data gathered from sales representatives and company databases of a large European consumer electronics retailer, the authors perform a time‐lagged partial least squares analysis to test empirically their conceptual model. The authors find that ambidextrous sales managers outperform their singular‐oriented counterparts if they properly align their orientation with a frontline management mechanism consisting of task autonomy, performance feedback, and employee age. More specifically, ambidextrous managers promote net profit obtainment if they grant their sales employees task autonomy and give little performance feedback. In addition, a remarkable finding is that older sales agents tend to outperform their younger counterparts when working under an ambidextrous manager. The authors discuss the implications of these findings.
    March 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12158   open full text
  • The Role of Sales in NPD: An Investigation of the U.S. Health‐Care Industry.
    Avinash Malshe, Wim Biemans.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 24, 2014
    The new product development (NPD) literature emphasizes that the success of new products strongly depends on a firm's capability to understand customer needs and translate them into new products. Because of their close relationships with customers, salespeople are in the ideal position to connect the firm's NPD efforts to its customers. The extant literature on the role of sales in NPD focuses on either sales’ contribution to generating new product ideas or the adoption of new products by salespeople, while a systematic study of sales’ contribution during all NPD stages is lacking. In addition, the role of sales is typically studied in isolation, while in practice, the role of sales depends on the relationship between sales and marketing. This article addresses these gaps in the literature by reporting on an empirical investigation of the role of sales during the entire NPD process in the U.S. health‐care industry, taking into account the complexities of the sales‐marketing dynamic. The article is based on interviews with 21 sales and 15 marketing informants from the U.S. health‐care industry, both pharmaceutical firms (selling drugs to physicians) and device manufacturing firms. Our findings highlight how salespeople are distant from NPD process during the discovery stage. Salespeople are focused on selling to customers, and marketing keeps sales distant from the NPD process. During the development stage, sales is still only indirectly involved in NPD through its relationship with marketing. During commercialization, however, marketing takes the driver's seat and strongly involves sales in the various (pre)launch activities. But while salespeople are mostly indirectly involved in NPD, sales managers have a closer relationship with sales and are more directly involved. The findings also show how the involvement of sales is influenced by characteristics of the health‐care industry. Thus, this article contributes to our understanding of the role of sales in NPD by integrating theoretical perspectives from the sales‐marketing interface literature into the NPD literature.
    March 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12159   open full text
  • The Significance of the New Venture's First Sale: The Impact of Founders' Capabilities and Proactive Sales Orientation.
    Ilona Pitkänen, Petri Parvinen, Pekka Töytäri.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. March 24, 2014
    Initial sale success in the market with a new product is a critical milestone for a new venture. Failure at the introduction stage of a new product could have lethal consequences for the venture. In the present study, the authors investigate the role of a new venture company's first successful sale in the venture's future commercial success. The authors develop and test a model of the impact of the founders' entrepreneurial and commercial capabilities and proactive sales orientation on the significance of the first sale and sales growth of a new venture. Using survey data and partial least squares estimation, the results reveal that the founders' commercial capabilities have a positive effect on proactive sales orientation, while their entrepreneurial capabilities positively moderate the effect of commercial capabilities. Further, the results reveal that a proactive sales orientation positively affects the significance of the first sale and that value‐based selling approach positively moderates the effect of proactive sales orientation. Finally, the results reveal that the significance of the first sale is positively related to sales growth. Thus, the authors conclude that combining the founders' commercial and entrepreneurial capabilities strengthens proactive sales orientation and that, in turn, a proactive sales orientation particularly increases the significance of the first sale when new venture companies practice value‐based selling. Research has convincingly demonstrated proactive selling behavior to be one of the most powerful predictors of sales performance. Value‐based selling is a sales approach to identify, quantify, communicate, and verify value of a new product to the customer. Our findings suggest that founders who possess both strong commercial and entrepreneurial capabilities engage considerably more in proactive sales practice as compared with founders that only possess strong commercial capabilities. Hence, rather than hiring specific sales expertise, founders should develop their proactive, value‐selling capabilities.
    March 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12160   open full text
  • The Mediating Role of Strategic Orientations on the Relationship between Ambidexterity‐Oriented Decisions and Innovative Ambidexterity.
    Sebastian Kortmann.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 24, 2014
    Building on upper echelon theory and strategic process theory, this article analyzes the relationship between ambidexterity‐oriented decisions and innovative ambidexterity. While ambidexterity‐oriented decisions embrace the capability of top management teams to manage contradictory strategic directions, namely adaptability and alignment, innovative ambidexterity captures the ability of firms to simultaneously develop discontinuous and incremental innovations. In addition to the direct relationship between ambidexterity‐oriented decisions and innovative ambidexterity, it is argued that innovation orientation and cost orientation denote two cultural implementation mechanisms that mediate this effect. Using two top‐executive data sets collected in the United States (n = 83) and India (n = 78), the empirical analysis shows that innovation orientation and cost orientation partially mediate the direct influence of ambidexterity‐oriented decisions on innovative ambidexterity, thus further explaining how formulated decisions made by the top management team nurture ambidextrous innovation behavior. Hence, this article extends prior literature that emphasizes a positive influence of top managers on innovation through incorporating an organizational ambidexterity perspective. Second, this study contributes to ambidexterity literature through integrating strategic process theory. While ambidexterity‐oriented decisions primarily relate to strategy formulation, innovation orientation and cost orientation are associated with strategy implementation. The results show that both strategic subprocesses are vital in enabling ambidextrous innovation behavior. Third, an operationalization for the ability of top management to balance adaptability‐ and alignment‐oriented decisions is provided based on prior literature.
    January 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12151   open full text
  • Opening the Black Box of Upper Echelons in China: TMT Attributes and Strategic Flexibility.
    Tang Wang, Dirk Libaers, Hao Jiao.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 24, 2014
    Many scholars have suggested that strategic flexibility is a critical firm capability to survive in today's competitive arena. The decision to take strategic actions to make the firm more strategically flexible typically originates in the top management team (TMT). As the principal decision‐making unit of the firm, TMT members' information acquisition and processing capabilities and subsequent interpretation of environmental changes critically influence the decision to make the firm more strategically flexible to achieve a better fit with its market environment. Therefore, in order to understand how firms can adapt to environmental changes, scholars must study the sociopsychological processes of interaction among members of the TMT. This study examines the relationships between TMT's sociopsychological attributes (shared vision, social integration, and political ties) and strategic flexibility, which is decomposed into organizational flexibility and technological flexibility. The study further investigates how the level of competitive intensity can moderate the relationships. All the hypotheses are tested using structural equation models based on the survey data from 227 firms in China. The results show that organizational flexibility mediates the impact of TMT's social integration and political ties on technological flexibility. Surprisingly, a TMT's shared vision for the firm neither impedes nor facilitates the firm's effort in attaining the desired degree of organizational flexibility. However, TMT's shared vision does have a positive and direct impact on technological flexibility. Moreover, intense competition amplifies the positive impact of TMT social integration on the degree of organizational flexibility, but there is no significant moderating effect of competitive intensity on the relationship between a TMT's political ties and organizational flexibility. The results extend previous research by highlighting the importance of TMTs' sociopsychological attributes in driving technological flexibility, through the mediating impact of organizational flexibility.
    January 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12152   open full text
  • De‐escalation Mechanisms in High‐technology Product Innovation.
    Kumar R. Sarangee, Jennifer L. Woolley, Jeffrey B. Schmidt, Eileen Long.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    Many decision‐makers struggle to reduce commitment to failing endeavors. While de‐escalation mechanisms have been documented and tested in information technology, accounting, psychology, and organizational behavior, little work has addressed de‐escalation in innovation. This study identifies and examines the applicability of de‐escalation mechanisms specifically in new product development (NPD) projects. Initially, we conducted an extensive literature review to identify de‐escalation mechanisms found in research across different academic disciplines. Subsequently, we conducted a qualitative study using semistructured interviews to gather primary data. In total, using a sample of organizations that compete in high‐technology industries, 31 managers and engineers in 15 NPD projects that were terminated prior to completion were interviewed regarding mechanisms used to de‐escalate commitment to failing new product innovation projects. Several mechanisms reportedly used for innovation projects parallel those identified in the previous literature. More importantly, the authors uncover novel and previously undocumented ways to discontinue or redirect poorly performing projects. Specifically, internal competitions, feature‐level de‐escalation, continual assumption assessment, benchmarking, roadmaps, and comprehensive product testing are particularly well suited for innovation projects. These findings extend the body of extant literature on de‐escalation of commitment to include innovation, notably in high‐technology settings. The study also highlights that organizations may want to accept or even encourage failure, thereby increasing the efficacy of resource use. Implications for further research and practice are offered.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12142   open full text
  • The Influence of Regulation and Disruptive Potential on Incumbents' Submarket Entry Decision and Success in the Context of a Network Industry.
    Stefan Huesig, Katalin Timar, Claudia Doblinger.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    This paper uses the theoretical perspectives of disruptive innovation, network externalities, and regulation to study the submarket strategies of incumbent firms that operate in a regulated network industry. In this setting, the impact of potentially disruptive innovations might be different because of the tighter regulation of incumbent firms. By analyzing the entry and success patterns of incumbent mobile network operators (MNOs) in the public hotspot markets in 17 Western European countries, we focus on how regulation and network effects as well as disruption factors influence the incumbent firms' strategies. In doing so, this paper departs from prior research that has primarily focused on unregulated industries and combines contradicting explanations from disruptive innovation theory, the motivation/ability framework, regulation theory, as well as network effects to provide a comprehensive analysis on how incumbents behave in a regulated network industry that is being confronted with a potentially disruptive innovation. In particular, while disruptive innovation theory predicts that the incumbents' vast experience in an industry could cause them to avoid entering new submarkets created by potentially disruptive innovations, the desire to avoid regulation could encourage such submarket entry. Furthermore, in regulated network industries, incumbent firms might have a stronger motivation to enter new submarkets as the importance of single customers and high market shares could be substantially different. These contrasting insights are used to develop an integrative research model and to derive hypotheses on incumbents' submarket entry decision and success. Drawing on cross‐sectional, multicountry data of 62 MNOs that operate in 17 Western European countries, this study uses logit and tobit regressions to test the impact of disruption factors, regulation, and network externalities on the entry decision and success of incumbent firms. The results reveal that the incumbent MNOs are caught in an area of conflict between the regulated industry context and their international technology strategy. The findings suggest that the incumbent MNOs' motivation and ability to escape regulation positively influenced their submarket entry and success in the public hotspot market. Thus, the potentially disruptive scenario was successfully turned into a potentially sustaining one as the incumbent MNOs could enhance their presence in the mobile broadband market. The testing on a multicountry basis as well as the positive influence of ethnocentric technology strategies for public hotspots, which are devised in the headquarters' location and are then brought out internationally, shed new light on an industry that has typically been characterized by country‐by‐country decisions. These findings may also reveal challenges for future research on disruptive innovations in multinational industries and expose future challenges for regulative authorities and managers. This paper thereby adds to the theory of disruptive innovation as it includes the influence of regulation on incumbents in network industries. Additionally, this study expands on previous findings on the disruptive potential of wireless local area network technology by employing a multi‐country analysis in 17 Western European countries.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12143   open full text
  • Legitimacy and the Value of Early Customers.
    Tang Wang, Michael Song, Y. Lisa Zhao.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    To overcome resource constraints and achieve exponential growth, a new venture must rely on early customers of its products to communicate value and commitment to others. For this reason, founders of new ventures focus more on early customers as a key element of their founding strategy than on other elements. But when do early customers really add value to new ventures? Scholars have used legitimacy theory to examine the benefits of gaining acceptance and conveying firm quality through conforming to social norms and following similar methods and forms. It has been argued that, independent of the customers of products and services, observable legitimacy characteristics of a new organization function as signals and are used by critical external constituents to infer the quality of the firm. This research, however, sheds little light on the manner in which firm legitimacy influences how potential customers respond to the existence of early customers. The current study therefore proposes that, depending on types of legitimacy (cognitive, regulative, and normative), early customers may have a different impact on subsequent firm performance. While a young firm may reduce information asymmetry that hampers their attractiveness to customers and other external stakeholders via the costly signal of obtaining early customers, the signal fit argument suggests that discrepancy between a signal and the characteristics of the signaler can lead to unreliable quality and lower signaling value. Legitimacy is critical because, when legitimacy is absent, early customers may not serve as an effective signal for the new venture. This study therefore explores the extent to which the signaling effect of early customers depends on these three types of legitimacy. This study employs the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) public database, a panel study of 4928 new businesses founded in the United States in 2004. Four surveys (baseline, first follow‐up, second follow‐up, and third follow‐up) were conducted using self‐administered Web survey and computer‐assisted telephone interview methods. In this study, the independent variables include early customers and the three types of legitimacy (cognitive, regulative, and normative) as well as a set of control variables. All independent variables were measured at the founding of the businesses in the KFS baseline survey. Dependent variables in this study include second‐year revenue, third‐year revenue, and fourth‐year revenue as measured in the KFS first, second, and third follow‐up surveys, respectively. The multinomial logistic regression and Heckman sample selection model is used to analyze the data. Results show that early customers are beneficial to new ventures, and the benefits of early customers to firm performance are higher when there is cognitive legitimacy from a capable founding team and regulative legitimacy from paying federal Social Security and Medicare taxes. Surprisingly, while incorporation improves performance for new ventures, the benefit of having early customers relative to not having early customers is lower, not higher, when the firm is incorporated than when the firm is not incorporated. Early customers have the same benefit regardless of the presence of normative legitimacy through the presence of a network with suppliers. This study therefore offers insights into the role of early customers at founding. Early customers can be very useful for founders with significant experience, and it may be a good strategy to seek them out. However, it appears that there are specific conditions under which pursuing early customers may not be an effective strategy. Founders can make strategic decisions not to pursue early customers if there are no anticipated payoffs.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12144   open full text
  • Timing Product Replacements under Uncertainty—The Importance of Material–Price Fluctuations for the Success of Products That Are Based on New Materials.
    Jan Hendrik Fisch, Jan‐Michael Ross.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    Being first to market with new products is one of the most enduring pieces of strategic advice handed to managers. This view also emphasizes the importance of launching new products that are based on new materials as soon as possible. However, when the input costs of products that embody new materials are uncertain because of volatile material prices, the advantage of being an early mover comes along with the risk of paying unexpectedly high material prices. Real‐option theory suggests delaying material substitution under uncertainty even if the new material enables superior product performance. Firms who have created the flexibility to switch between alternative inputs can benefit from responding to opportunities or threats that arise from changes in the environment. The current study formalizes this logic in a switching‐option model and tests it on a sample of material substitution projects from the manufacturing sector. Our findings shed light on how input‐cost fluctuations influence the timing–performance relationship and bring into question the common advice to launch new products as soon as possible. Instead, our results suggest that firms who align the timing of market launch to trends and fluctuations of material prices improve their competitive positions. These insights suggest novel ways for new product development (NPD) managers how to successfully use external information at the back‐end of the NPD process and how to compete in an era defined by volatile material prices and technological change.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12145   open full text
  • The Locus of Innovation: The Effect of a Separate Innovation Unit on Exploration, Exploitation, and Ambidexterity in Manufacturing and Service Firms.
    Floortje Blindenbach‐Driessen, Jan Ende.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    This paper investigates the effects of having a separate innovation unit on exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity in manufacturing and service firms according to traditional paradigms of the innovation management discipline that innovation units should be organized in a separate department. Many manufacturing firms have such a unit while few service firms do. This paper sets out to investigate the advantages of having such a unit for exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity, and whether there are differences between manufacturing and service firms that could help explain why such units are present or absent. The literature suggests that a separate innovation unit has a positive effect on exploration and ambidexterity in manufacturing firms. However, the effect on improving operational activities, that is, exploitation, is unclear. If exploration and exploitation are two ends of a continuum, as the literature suggests, more exploration comes at the cost of exploitation. On the other hand, others have suggested the possibility of an orthogonal relationship, where a separate unit can simultaneously enhance exploration and exploitation. In this paper, the Dutch Community Innovation Survey (CIS) is used to investigate these relationships for manufacturing and service firms, with a question added to the survey regarding the locus of innovation within each firm, that is, mostly within a dedicated innovation unit or dispersed throughout the firm. Our findings show that a separate innovation unit increases exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity in both manufacturing and service firms. It thereby provides support for the orthogonal view of ambidexterity. A separate unit enhances the ability to exploit and be ambidextrous equally in service and manufacturing firms, but has a weaker positive effect on exploration, and exploratory and ambidextrous performance in service firms. This finding implies that both manufacturing and service firms benefit from having a separate innovation unit, with the advantages being greatest for manufacturing firms. In service firms, such an innovation unit alone may not be sufficient, as such units are expensive to maintain, while they contribute less to ambidextrous performance than in manufacturing firms. Based on the latter finding, future studies should make a distinction between the ability to be ambidextrous in creating exploratory and exploitative innovations, and ambidextrous performance, the ability to gain financially from engaging in both types of activities simultaneously.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12146   open full text
  • Innovation Process and Outcomes for Large Japanese Firms: Roles of Entrepreneurial Proclivity and Customer Equity.
    Ken Matsuno, Zhen Zhu, Mark P. Rice.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    The authors investigate the structural relationships among entrepreneurial proclivity, innovation process characteristics (technological strength, marketing strength, and marketing–R&D integration), and customer equity in achieving business growth and financial return in the Japanese context. Following field interviews and a pilot test, survey data are collected from 207 pairs of marketing and R&D executives from strategic business units (SBUs) of large manufacturing companies in Japan. Based on the partial least squares analysis of data, the authors find nuanced effects of organizations' entrepreneurial proclivity on the critical organizational process, resource, and business performance. The study theorizes and empirically supports the idea that customer equity is a potent intermediary outcome that contributes to both top‐line (growth) and the bottom‐line (ROI) of a business. Specifically, the study shows that: (1) entrepreneurial proclivity directly and positively influences technology strength, marketing strength, and marketing‐R&D integration; (2) entrepreneurial proclivity's effect on business growth and financial return is positive and mediated by customer equity; (3) marketing–R&D integration has a moderating effect on the positive impact of technology strength on customer equity; and (4) customer equity is a strong driver of business growth and financial return. There is a dearth of research on entrepreneurship in Asia; very few empirical studies have been reported from Japan in particular. This study contributes to boundary testing of the theoretical relationships. Although entrepreneurial proclivity appears to be an inspirational concept, its actual adoption remains an important question for many Japanese companies. Those Japanese firms that aspire to be entrepreneurial need to be mindful what innovation processes and resources it takes to fulfill the positive influences of entrepreneurship.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12147   open full text
  • When Is Open Innovation Beneficial? The Role of Strategic Orientation.
    Colin C. J. Cheng, Eelko K. R. E. Huizingh.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    Various scholars have accomplished a great deal to better understand open innovation effectiveness. Case studies have detailed its performance effects, while other studies showed the effectiveness of an aspect of open innovation, such as collaboration with third parties, external technology commercialization, and cocreation. Though most studies report a positive relation between open innovation and innovation performance, some studies indicate possible negative effects. This has resulted in a call for research on what kind of organizational context suits open innovation best. This study therefore addresses two questions: (1) does performing open innovation activities lead to increased innovation performance, and to which aspects of innovation performance is open innovation most strongly related? (2) what is the moderating impact of various kinds of strategic orientation on the relation between open innovation and innovation performance? In this study, we investigate three types of strategic orientations: entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, and resource orientation. In a survey among 223 Asian service firms, we first develop and test a comprehensive measurement scale for open innovation that captures the entire range of open innovation activities, including outside‐in activities, inside‐out activities, and coupled activities. The final scale comprises of 10 items and indicates to what extent a firm has implemented open innovation activities. Next, we study the relation between open innovation and innovation performance. The results indicate that performing open innovation activities is significantly and positively related to all four dimensions of innovation performance: new product/service innovativeness, new product/service success, customer performance, and financial performance. The impact of open innovation is not limited to a particular aspect of innovation performance; it positively affects a broad range of innovation performance indicators. Though open innovation is positively related to all four dimensions of innovation performance, the effect sizes are not equal. The impact on new service innovativeness and financial performance is relatively stronger. Regarding the influence of a firm's strategic orientation, we find that all significant moderation effects are positive. This suggests that, in general, having a more explicit strategic orientation enhances the effectiveness of open innovation. When comparing the three strategic orientations, entrepreneurial orientation strengthens the positive performance effects of open innovation significantly more than market orientation and resource orientation do. In turn, market orientation has a significantly stronger moderation effect than resource orientation. These findings provide empirical evidence of the context dependency of open innovation. Especially an entrepreneurial orientation, which is associated with proactive and entrepreneurial processes, seems to create a fertile setting for open innovation.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12148   open full text
  • The Impact of a Creativity‐supporting Work Environment on a Firm's Product Innovation Performance.
    Jan Dul, Canan Ceylan.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 20, 2014
    Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that a creativity‐supporting work environment contributes to a firm's product innovation performance. Although there is evidence that such an environment enhances innovative behavior at individual level, very few studies address the effect of a creativity‐supporting work environment on product innovation performance at firm level, and the results are inconsistent. This paper examines the relationship between a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment and a firm's product innovation performance in a sample of 103 firms. For measuring a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment, a comprehensive and creativity‐focused framework is used. The framework consists of 9 social‐organizational and 12 physical work environment characteristics that are likely to enhance employee creativity. These characteristics contribute to the firm's overall work environment that supports creativity. The firm's product innovation performance is defined by two distinct concepts: new product productivity (NP productivity), which is the extent to which the firm introduces new products to the market, and new product success (NP success), which is the percentage of the firm's sales from new products. In most firms, different knowledgeable informants provided the data for the variables. The results show that firms with creativity‐supporting work environments introduce more new products to the market (NP productivity), and have more NP success in terms of new product sales (NP success). NP productivity partly mediates the relationship between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success. The mediation model shows that the two paths from a creativity‐supporting work environment to NP success are about equally important: the direct path between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success has a coefficient of .22, and the coefficient of the indirect path via NP productivity is .23. The creativity‐supporting work environment framework can be used in managerial practice to enhance employee creativity for product innovation. It allows applying a flexible and broad approach by influencing both social‐organizational and physical characteristics of the work environment.
    January 20, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12149   open full text
  • How Should Customers Be Integrated for Effective Interorganizational NPD Teams? An Input–Process–Output Perspective.
    Ruth Maria Stock.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. January 16, 2014
    Interorganizational new product development (NPD) teams with business customers are rapidly becoming more prevalent; yet the drivers of such cooperations at the team level remain unclear to practitioners and researchers alike. This study proposes an input–process–output model in which various characteristics of interorganizational teams affect NPD team effectiveness through the mediating construct of NPD team cooperation. Furthermore, various moderators, reflecting the supplier's dependence on the customers (customer power and customer participation) and the supplier's environmental uncertainty (market dynamism and technological turbulence), affect the strength of the underlying relationships. The results show that customer power positively affects the relationship between intrapersonal team characteristics and team cooperation. In addition, a negative moderation occurs in interpersonal characteristics. Customer participation exhibits opposing moderating effects. Regarding the supplier's environmental uncertainty, market dynamism and technological turbulence strengthen the relationships under consideration.
    January 16, 2014   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12112   open full text
  • Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: The Value of Low Purchase Intention Consumers to Product Pricing.
    Melissa Maier Bishop, Nelson A. Barber.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 06, 2013
    Hypothetical bias is a common research problem in measuring intentions. This study examines differences in individuals' hypothetical and nonhypothetical willingness to pay (WTP) based on purchase intention level. The purpose of Study 1 is to see if hypothetical bias is affecting all groups of individuals when segmented by purchase intentions. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to assess to individuals' purchase intentions and hypothetical WTP for an environmentally friendly (EF) offering. Individuals then participated in an auction that required them to bid on the same offering, thus requiring an actual monetary commitment. Through segmenting individuals into three purchase intention groups (high, moderate, and low), WTP biases were found to be positively related to stated intention level. High and moderate purchase intenders significantly overstated their hypothetical WTP. However, low purchase intenders did not. Further, no significant differences existed in nonhypothetical WTP between the three groups. The price that low purchase intenders were willing to pay through the CVM represented closely what they and the rest of the market were willing to pay in practice. The purpose of Study 2 was to examine several reasons why higher purchase intenders may be overstating their hypothetical WTP, with normative pressure and social desirability bias taken into consideration. Individuals indicated their purchase intentions and hypothetical WTP for an EF and a non‐EF product, and then participated in an auction. The higher purchase intenders again overstated their actual WTP for both products, whereas low purchase intenders did not. Results suggest that both normative pressure and social desirability bias contribute to hypothetical bias for products that carry a normative dimension (EF products). Controlling for these two factors eliminated the differences between hypothetical and nonhypothetical WTP. For products that did not have a normative component (non‐EF products), controlling for social desirability eliminated the gap between the hypothetical and nonhypothetical WTP amounts. A main implication from this research is that hypothetical bias is not a universal phenomenon and does not operate equally in all groups of purchase intenders. Marketers may want to consider only using lower purchase intenders in their pricing estimates for new products, especially for those that carry a normative component. Further, the CVM has received much criticism for measuring hypothetical WTP. However, estimates produced by the CVM were nearly exact for the low purchase intender group and were reliable when controlling for social desirability bias and normative pressure for the higher purchase intenders.
    December 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12131   open full text
  • A Closer Look at Cross‐functional R&D Cooperation for Innovativeness: Innovation‐oriented Leadership and Human Resource Practices as Driving Forces.
    Ruth Maria Stock, Florian Totzauer, Nicolas A. Zacharias.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 06, 2013
    Because cross‐functional research and development (R&D) cooperation appears to drive innovation, many firms have invested considerably in it. However, despite substantial efforts to improve information and communication infrastructures or to bring departments in closer proximity with one another, structural investments often fail to produce the desired positive impact on cross‐functional R&D cooperation. This failure may arise because firms undertaking these structural investments do not manage their employees adequately. Extant research acknowledges the importance of motivating and enabling members of the R&D function to cooperate with other functions. Yet empirical studies investigating the relative importance of leadership and different human resource (HR) practices for enhancing cross‐functional R&D cooperation are scarce. Drawing on the resource‐based view and organizational support theory, this study investigates how innovation‐oriented leadership and HR practices might support members of the R&D function and encourage cross‐functional R&D cooperation, which enhances product program innovativeness. Specifically, members of the R&D function who are supported in their innovation efforts through innovation‐oriented leadership and HR practices should reciprocate for the support they receive by intensifying their cross‐functional cooperation to achieve greater product program innovativeness. Relying on multi‐informant data from 125 firms with assessments from marketing and R&D managers, this study shows that innovation‐oriented leadership and HR practices have different effects on cross‐functional R&D cooperation. A structural equation modeling‐based analysis of the hypothesized relationships reveals that innovation‐oriented leadership, rewards, and training and development have considerable positive effects. In contrast, recruitment does not drive cross‐functional R&D cooperation. Because firms usually operate in dynamic markets, and increasingly acquire relevant information from customers when generating innovations, this study also considers market‐related dynamism and customer integration as important contingency factors. For firms facing market‐related dynamism and those relying on customer integration, leadership and training and development are particularly effective for enhancing cross‐functional R&D cooperation. By integrating two theoretical perspectives, this study not only advances knowledge on the antecedents of cross‐functional R&D cooperation, but also helps explain differences in their relative effectiveness. Furthermore, it both adds to the discussion of whether monetary rewards are appropriate means to foster innovation and challenges existing assumptions about the role of recruiting for innovation.
    December 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12132   open full text
  • Antecedents of Innovation Strategies in New Technology‐based Firms: Interactions between the Environment and Founder Team Composition.
    Rognvaldur J. Saemundsson, Marina Candi.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. December 06, 2013
    This research contributes to the ongoing stream of research on the integration of technical and business knowledge for successful innovation, but does so with a unique focus—that of new firm founder teams. This is in contrast to much of the existing literature, which focuses on organizational units in large firms. As part of their strategy for success, new technology‐based firms need to find an optimal balance between exploration and exploitation in their innovation activities. However, the resource constraints they typically face make it difficult for them to pursue both at the same time, which means that at any given point in time they are likely to opt for either exploration or exploitation rather than both. The purpose of this research is to investigate what influences new technology‐based firms to select one innovation strategy over another. Data collected in 145 new technology‐based firms are used to test hypotheses about how environmental conditions and founder team composition interact in their contributions to choice of innovation strategy. Based on hierarchical regression analysis of the data, the research findings suggest that teams consisting of individuals who have dissimilar backgrounds are more likely to adapt their innovation strategy to the characteristics of the environment than teams of individuals with similar backgrounds. Conversely, teams consisting of individuals with similar backgrounds are more likely to continue to follow their preferred strategy. However, as competitive intensity or environmental dynamism increases, such teams are likely to deviate from their preferred strategy.
    December 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12133   open full text
  • The Impact of Product Portfolio Strategy on Financial Performance: The Roles of Product Development and Market Entry Decisions.
    Wooseong Kang, Mitzi Montoya.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    Innovation is one of the most important issues facing business today. The major difficulty in managing innovation is that managers must do so against a constantly shifting backdrop as technologies, competitors, and markets constantly evolve. Managers determine the product portfolio through key decisions about product development and market entry. Key strategic questions are what portfolio strategies provide the greatest reward. The purpose of this study is to understand the relative financial values of each component of a product portfolio. Specifically, the paper examines the short‐term and long‐term financial impacts of product development strategy and market entry strategy. These strategies reflect two critical tensions that must be balanced in product portfolio decision making and essentially determine a firm's product portfolio. In doing so, the paper also investigates how a firm's capabilities drive each component of a product portfolio. From the empirical analyses in the context of the biomedical device industry, the paper found important insights regarding product portfolio strategies. First, a large product portfolio helps a firm's financial performance. In particular, the pioneering new products have strongest impacts on short‐term performances, and nonpioneering mature products do not provide significant contribution. Second, the results indicate a persistent first‐mover advantage. The first‐to‐market new products yield not only an immediate effect, but also persistent long‐term effects, suggesting that it is important to be first in the market even though there may be short‐term losses. Third, the results suggest the need to balance between “mature” and “new” products. Also, firms need to balance “first‐to‐market” and “late‐entered” products. Because a new or pioneering product requires more resource, it may hurt other products in the portfolio. Thus, without support from mature or follower products, new products and pioneering products alone may not increase firm sales or profit. Fourth, from a long‐term perspective, the paper found that the financial market only rewards a firm's overall capability to deliver new products first in the marketplace. Thus, short‐term performance is mainly driven by product‐level innovativeness, whereas firm‐level innovativeness enhances forward‐looking long‐term performance. Fifth, the paper also found that pioneering new products are driven by integrating both primary and complementary technological capabilities. And nonpioneering new products are mainly driven by the capabilities in primary technology domain. These results provide important insight into the relative value and timing of return on investment in radical versus incremental innovation and alternative market entry strategies. By understanding the performance trade‐offs of these different factors in the short and long term, one can develop better guidelines for optimizing innovation strategies, and their dependence on both external and internal environmental conditions.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12111   open full text
  • Exploring Adaptivity in Service Development: The Case of Mobile Platforms.
    Nuri Basoglu, Tugrul Daim, Ebru Polat.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    Together with the developing technologies of a fast‐evolving Web environment, computers, and handheld devices, human–computer interaction is gaining more importance. User interface, as the interactive layer between user and information systems, has a great role in system adoption. Based on a technology acceptance model, acceptance of a system can be explained as a function of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU). Because several external variables have impact on PU and PEOU, the content and interface design of every single application should be addressed accordingly in a way that enhances the consumer's attitude about using the system by considering the impact of external variables through system usage. The objective of this study was to uncover potential external variables that may influence PEOU and PU, and indirectly influence behavioral attitude in mobile service acceptance and to explore the effects of those variables, primarily adaptivity and the relationships of all the variables among each other, through the limited interface of a mobile platform. Thus, developers will be able to relate the tuning of product features to the adoption of the products they are developing based on a platform.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12110   open full text
  • Contextual Innovation Management Using a Stage‐Gate Platform: The Case of Philips Shaving and Beauty.
    Patrick A. Duin, J. Roland Ortt, Wieger T. M. Aarts.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    To improve its innovation process, Philips Shaving and Beauty (S&B) designed a blueprint for its innovation process. Although it has proved to be quite effective, it has experienced a lack of efficiency, in terms of frequent cost and time overruns, in the fuzzy front end of this process. We suggest a contextual innovation management approach to set up a stage‐gate‐based innovation process platform and thus improve the efficiency in the fuzzy front end, which means that, for different contexts, stage‐gate process variants will be designed from which unnecessary activities are removed and important activities are emphasized. The design is based on the identification of relevant contextual factors to develop variations of the common innovation process within Philips S&B. We distinguished different variants of the innovation processes within Philips S&B that can increase the efficiency in the fuzzy front end. Based on interviews within and outside Philips S&B, we identified problems and potential solutions with regard to efficiency in eight recently finished innovation processes. The results indicate that the most important contextual factors are the distinction between incremental and radical innovations, and between market and technology‐based innovations. We used these factors to design three variants on the basic platform of the stage‐gate process.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12109   open full text
  • The Role of Early Adopters in the Diffusion of New Products: Differences between Platform and Nonplatform Innovations.
    Federico Frattini, Mattia Bianchi, Alfredo Massis, Uros Sikimic.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    This paper takes a contingency view to investigate how the role of early adopters (EAs) in the diffusion process changes between platform and nonplatform innovations, what launch decisions firms take to leverage the role of EAs, and how these decisions change between platform and nonplatform innovations. Relying on an exploratory multiple case study of eight industrial product innovations launched in Italy in the 2000s, the paper suggests that the EAs of these innovations play two distinct roles in the diffusion process. The first role, called dissemination, sees EAs triggering and bolstering the propagation of information regarding their opinion about the value for money, properties, advantages, and disadvantages of the new product after they have bought and applied it in their operations. The second role, labeled imitation, consists of EAs inadvertently communicating to later buyers the fact that they have bought the new product, which propels imitative behavior and thus subsequent adoption. A key finding of the paper, which supports a contingency view of innovation diffusion, is that the dissemination role played by EAs has an impact on the adoption of platform innovations, whereas the imitation one is the mechanism through which EAs stimulate subsequent adoption in the case of nonplatform new products. Furthermore, the paper's results point to a constructive view of the process of launching an innovation, whereby firms target at launch different segments of EAs, whose identity is shaped depending on the platform versus nonplatform nature of the innovation and thus on the role they are expected to play in the diffusion process. Concerning managerial implications, this study provides a first tentative understanding of the launch decisions that product and marketing managers may use to target the most appropriate segments of EAs, to leverage their roles and ultimately to favor diffusion. As regards platform innovations, targeting decisions should be driven by the goal to improve the chances that EAs will be willing to disseminate their experience and opinion regarding the new product. As regards instead nonplatform innovations, firms should target EAs whose specific characteristics increase the likelihood of an imitative reaction by later buyers that fear to suffer a competitive disadvantage if they do not conform to EAs' behavior.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12108   open full text
  • Investigating Adoption of Free Beta Applications in a Platform‐Based Business Ecosystem.
    Saku J. Mäkinen, Juho Kanniainen, Ilkka Peltola.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    Planning new product development (NPD) activities is becoming increasingly difficult, as contemporary businesses compete at the level of business ecosystems in addition to the firm‐level product‐market competition. These business ecosystems are built around platforms interlinking suppliers, complementors, distributors, developers, etc. together. The competitiveness of these ecosystems relies on members utilizing the shared platform for their own performance improvement, especially in terms of developing new valuable offerings for end users. Therefore, managing the development of the platform‐based applications and gaining timely end‐user input for NPD are of vital importance both to the ecosystem as a whole and to the developers. Subsequently, to succeed in NPD planning developers utilizing beta testing need a thorough understanding of the adoption dynamics of beta products. Developers need to plan for example resource allocation; development costs; and timing of commercial, end‐product launches. Therefore, the anticipation of the adoption dynamics of beta products emerges as an important antecedent in planning NPD activities when beta testing is used for gaining end‐user input to the NPD process. Consequently, we investigate how free beta software products that are built upon software platforms diffuse among their end users in a cocreation community. We specifically study whether the adoption of these beta products follows Bass or Gompertz model dynamics used in the previous literature when modeling the adoption of stand‐alone products. Further, we also investigate the forecasting abilities of these two models. Our results show that the adoption dynamics of free beta products in a cocreation community follow Gompertz's model rather than the Bass model. Additionally, we find that the Gompertz model performs better than the Bass model in forecasting both short and long out‐of‐sample time periods. We further discuss the managerial and research implications of our study.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12107   open full text
  • A Contingency‐Based Approach to the Use of Product Platforms and Modules in New Product Development.
    Mats Magnusson, Maximilian Pasche.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    To face the challenges of increasing demand for variety, more specific customer demands and shortening product life cycles, firms increasingly adopt mass customization techniques. Two important such techniques are product modularization and product platform development, which allow firms to reach high levels of product variety, and at the same time, keep complexity and its related costs at a limited level. Often modularization and product platform development are treated as variants of the same basic idea. However, even if the concepts are closely related, they also have some fundamental differences, which influence their usefulness and applicability in different settings. One potential shortcoming of existing literature on modularization and product platforms is the present lack of research on their limitations and potential negative effects. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify and explore contingencies influencing the applicability of modularization and product platforms, respectively, taking their different economic effects as a starting point. Moreover, the paper addresses how different organizing solutions are interrelated with the use of modularization and product platform approaches. The empirical observations originate from studies of three Swedish manufacturing firms. The study reveals that important contingencies affecting the applicability of modularization and product platforms are demand side characteristics and the speed of environmental change. Furthermore, it is seen that firms need to organize themselves differently with respect to how they combine modularization and platforms, for example, in terms of degree of centralization, formalization, and allocation of decision‐making authority, and that this poses challenges to the combined use of the two approaches.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12106   open full text
  • Introduction to the Special Issue: Platforms, Contingencies and New Product Development.
    Saku J. Mäkinen, Marko Seppänen, J. Roland Ortt.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 08, 2013
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    October 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12104   open full text
  • Product Innovation Processes in Small Firms: Combining Entrepreneurial Effectuation and Managerial Causation.
    Hans Berends, Mariann Jelinek, Isabelle Reymen, Rutger Stultiëns.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 04, 2013
    This article reports a multimethod study of product innovation processes in small manufacturing firms. Prior studies found that small firms do not deploy the formalized processes identified as best practice for the management of new product development (NPD) in large firms. To explicate small firms' product innovation, this study uses effectuation theory, which emerged from entrepreneurship research. Effectuation theory discerns two logics of decision‐making: causation, assuming that means are selected to attain goals; and effectuation, assuming that goals are created based upon available means. The study used a process research approach, investigating product innovation trajectories in five small firms across 352 total events. Quantitative analyses revealed early effectuation logic, which increasingly turned toward causation logic over time. Further qualitative analyses confirmed the use of both logics, with effectual logic rendering product innovation resource‐driven, stepwise, and open‐ended, and with causal logic used especially in later stages to set objectives and to plan activities and invest resources to attain objectives. Because the application of effectuation logic differentiates the small firm approaches from mainstream NPD best practices, this study examined how small firms' product innovation processes deployed effectuation logic in further detail. The small firms: (1) made creative use of existing resources; (2) scoped innovations to be realizable with available resources; (3) used external resources whenever and wherever these became available; (4) prioritized existing business over product innovation projects; (5) used loose project planning; (6) worked in steps toward tangible outcomes; (7) iterated the generation, selection, and modification of goals and ideas; and (8) relied on their own customer knowledge and market probing, rather than early market research. Using effectuation theory thus helps us understand how small firm product innovation both resembles and differs from NPD best practices observed in larger firms. Because the combination of effectual and causal principles leverages small firm characteristics and resources, this article concludes that product innovation research should more explicitly differentiate between firms of different sizes, rather than prescribing large firm best practices to small firms.
    October 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12117   open full text
  • The Value of Customer Cocreated Knowledge during the Innovation Process.
    Dominik Mahr, Annouk Lievens, Vera Blazevic.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 04, 2013
    Customer cocreation during the innovation process has recently been suggested to be a major source for firms' competitive advantage. Hereby, customers actively engage in a firm's innovation process and take over innovation activities traditionally performed by a firm's employees. Despite its suggested importance, previous research has revealed contradictory findings regarding its impact, the nature of involved customers, and the channels of communication that enable cocreation. To provide a more fine‐grained picture, customer cocreated knowledge is first delineated into its key value dimensions of relevance, novelty, and costs, and then their impact on various innovation outcomes is investigated. Next, the study examines the antecedent role of customer determinants; that is, lead user characteristics and customer–firm closeness, on these knowledge value dimensions. Finally, we explore how these effects are moderated by the type of communication channel used. An empirical validation of the conceptual model is performed by means of survey data from 126 customer cocreation projects. The data analysis indicates that customer cocreation is most successful for the creation of highly relevant but moderately novel knowledge. Cocreation with customers who are closely related to the innovating firm results in more highly relevant knowledge at a low cost. Yet, cocreation with lead users produces novel and relevant knowledge. These effects are contingent on the richness and reach of the communication channels enabling cocreation. Overall, the findings shed light on opportunities and limitations of customer cocreation for innovation and reconcile determinants originating in relationship marketing and innovation management. At the same time, managers obtain recommendations for selecting customers and communication channels to enhance the success of their customer cocreation initiatives.
    October 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12116   open full text
  • Good Cop–Bad Cop: Trust, Control, and the Lure of Integration.
    Anna Brattström, Anders Richtnér.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 04, 2013
    Based on a longitudinal case study of four interorganizational product development collaborations, this paper identifies a lure to cross‐functional integration that has hereto been neglected. In particular, findings suggest that when the buyer firm separates the Research and Development (R&D) Department from the Procurement Department, the two departments play a good cop–bad cop strategy toward the supplier. Thereby, they are able to foster a high level of goodwill trust between R&D personnel of the collaborating firms, while procurement personnel maintain a high level of formal control. Using an intricate sample design with polar cases, the study shows that cross‐functional integration of the two departments hampers interorganizational goodwill trust at the benefit of formal control. The findings offer a way forward for managers seeking to reap the benefits of collaboration, while limiting their exposure to the associated risks.
    October 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12115   open full text
  • Timing the Start of Material Substitution Projects: Creating Switching Options under Volatile Material Prices.
    Jan Hendrik Fisch, Jan‐Michael Ross.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 04, 2013
    Firms developing new products often face the challenge of making investment decisions under uncertain input–cost conditions due to the price volatilities of the materials they use. These decisions need to be made long before the final products are launched on the market. Therefore, firms that invest in the opportunity to switch materials in a timely manner will have the flexibility to react to material price changes and realize competitive advantages. However, volatile material prices may also cause a firm to delay investment. Using real‐options reasoning, this paper studies the influence of input‐cost fluctuations on the timing decision to start new product development (NPD) and thus create the follow‐on opportunity to later replace an existing product. A model that combines waiting and switching options to derive influencing factors of the flexibility value that triggers the investment is developed and tested on a sample of material substitution projects from manufacturing firms. The results show how price uncertainty of the new and the old material, their joint price development, the expected project duration, and competitive preemption are related to the propensity to delay the start of NPD. The findings provide new insights on how timing in adopting materials can be used to hedge exposure to volatile material prices. The insights are relevant for adopters and producers of new materials, as well as for policy makers who strive for supporting the diffusion of new materials.
    October 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12114   open full text
  • Radical Product Innovation Capability: Literature Review, Synthesis, and Illustrative Research Propositions.
    Stanley F. Slater, Jakki J. Mohr, Sanjit Sengupta.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 04, 2013
    Product innovation is a key to organizational renewal and success. Relative to other forms of innovation, radical product innovations offer unprecedented customer benefits, substantial cost reductions, or the ability to create new businesses, any of which should lead to superior organizational performance. In other words, a radical product innovation capability is a dynamic capability, one that enables the organization to maintain alignment with rapidly evolving customer needs in high‐velocity environments. Extensive research has been conducted on the antecedents to an incremental/general product innovation capability, and meta‐analyses have been conducted to integrate the results from the various studies. However, whether and how a radical product innovation capability differs from an incremental product innovation capability is also critical. The purpose of this work is to develop a testable model of the antecedents to radical product innovation success. Based on an extensive literature review, a comprehensive set of organizational components that comprise a firm's radical product innovation capability is identified. These organizational components include senior leadership, organizational culture, organizational architecture, the radical product innovation development process, and the product launch strategy. Of course, each of these components has subcomponents that provide even more texture. This review highlights how the components of a radical innovation capability function differently from those for an incremental capability. In addition, this review strongly suggests that the direct effects models that dominate this literature underestimate the complexity of the interplay of components that comprise a radical product innovation capability. Thus, a model to demonstrate this interplay of these organizational components is provided. Illustrative research propositions are offered to provide guidance to researchers. Suggestions for executives and managers who are involved in the product development process and for scholars who seek to advance the state of knowledge in this area are offered in the conclusion.
    October 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12113   open full text
  • Industry Platforms and Ecosystem Innovation.
    Annabelle Gawer, Michael A. Cusumano.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. September 04, 2013
    This paper brings together the recent literature on industry platforms and shows how it relates to managing innovation within and outside the firm as well as to dealing with technological and market disruptions and change over time. First, we identify distinct types of platforms. Our analysis of a wide range of industry examples suggests that there are two predominant types of platforms: internal or company‐specific platforms, and external or industry‐wide platforms. We define internal (company or product) platforms as a set of assets organized in a common structure from which a company can efficiently develop and produce a stream of derivative products. We define external (industry) platforms as products, services, or technologies that act as a foundation upon which external innovators, organized as an innovative business ecosystem, can develop their own complementary products, technologies, or services. Second, we summarize from the literature general propositions on the design, economics, and strategic management of platforms. Third, we review the case of Intel and other examples to illustrate the range of technological, strategic, and business challenges that platform leaders and their competitors face as markets and technologies evolve. Finally, we identify practices associated with effective platform leadership and avenues for future research to deepen our understanding of this important phenomenon and what firms can do to manage platform‐related competition and innovation.
    September 04, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12105   open full text
  • Assessing a Measurement of Organizational Preparedness for Corporate Entrepreneurship.
    Jeffrey S. Hornsby, Donald F. Kuratko, Daniel T. Holt, William J. Wales.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 05, 2013
    Research has shown that the manifestation of corporate entrepreneurship is an important strategy for the success of private‐ and public‐sector organizations. The Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI) is an instrument that was developed to measure the key internal organizational factors that influence a firm's entrepreneurial activities and outcomes. The present research employs three studies to assess the content, construct, and convergent validity of the CEAI using a well‐established framework for scale development and refinement. The CEAI was found to be a relatively stable instrument, although the factor structure that emerged varied slightly from the original instrument. In sum, as a result of our analyses, a more parsimonious and psychometrically sound set of items for each factor was derived yielding an 18‐item instrument based upon the original 48‐item measure. Our studies of the CEAI present a timely contribution toward advancing research in the area of organizational preparedness for corporate entrepreneurship.
    August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12038   open full text
  • Exploration and Resource Commitments in Unequal Partnerships: An Examination of Corporate Venture Capital Investments.
    Anu Wadhwa, Sandip Basu.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 05, 2013
    While established firms' relationships with external ventures may have significant strategic benefits, the realization of such benefits is fraught with considerable uncertainty. The real options and interorganizational learning literatures present an interesting trade‐off for established firms regarding commitment of resources in a partnership. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how firms manage these trade‐offs when committing resources to external venturing initiatives. We examine the magnitude of resources initially committed by an established firm to an external venturing partnership in the context of corporate venture capital (CVC) investments. While a real options approach suggests that resource commitments should be lowered in the presence of uncertainty regarding realization of benefits, the interorganizational literature emphasizes that resource commitments may be essential for building quality relationships that expedite learning. Corporate investors, who invest in new ventures in order to gain strategic benefits, face higher uncertainty when their investment objectives involve greater exploration. However, greater exploration also increases investors' need to learn from their portfolio ventures. We, therefore, predicted that the degree of exploration would have a U‐shaped relationship with the investor's resource commitment in a venture. We also expected that factors that serve to decrease the investor's uncertainty, i.e., investor experience diversity and venture affiliation to prominent venture capitalists, would moderate the U‐shaped relationship between exploration and resource commitment. The predictions of the study are tested on a sample of 248 initial investments in private ventures made by incumbent firms in the computer, semiconductor, and telecommunications industries between 1996 and 2000. We find some support for our hypotheses. This study contributes to the external venturing literature on CVC investments by examining the determinants of the magnitude of resource commitment to new ventures, and integrates real options perspective, which advocates low resource commitments under uncertainty, with the organizational learning literature, which argues for greater resource commitment to secure partner cooperation. The results of this study reveal interesting insights into how CVC investors manage individual investments to generate strategic benefits.
    August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12037   open full text
  • Top Management Support and Initial Strategic Assets: A Dependency Model for Internal Corporate Venture Performance.
    Robert P. Garrett, Donald O. Neubaum.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 05, 2013
    Internal corporate venturing is frequently used by established companies desiring to innovate and grow. These ventures, however, often fail, and previous research has revealed surprisingly little about the antecedents to performance for this strategically important phenomenon. Using resource dependence theory and the resource‐based view, a model is developed wherein the positive relationship between top management support and the internal corporate venture's (ICV) initial strategic asset endowment is moderated by the amount of the venture's operations autonomy. We then argue how top management support, the venture's initial strategic asset endowment, and parent‐venture product similarity are related to ICV performance. Primary data were collected from 72 firms which furnished data on 145 ICVs. The results suggest that increases in the level of support provided by top management leads to higher levels of initial strategic assets endowed in the corporate venture. This relationship, however, is weakened the more corporate parents give their ICVs operations autonomy. Further, top management's support of the corporate venture, as well as the level of initial strategic assets endowed to the venture, increases the subsequent performance of the ICV. The performance benefit of these initial strategic assets, however, is lower the more there is an overlap between the parent's and the venture's products.
    August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12036   open full text
  • Entrepreneurial Orientation and Firm Performance: Drawing Attention to the Senior Team.
    Sebastiaan Van Doorn, Justin J. P. Jansen, Frans A. J. Van den Bosch, Henk W. Volberda.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. August 05, 2013
    Prior studies have argued entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays an important role in explaining firm performance. This study aims to assess how senior team attributes moderate the relationship between EO and firm performance. For this purpose, an attention‐based perspective is adopted, focusing on attention scope as well as distributed and situated attention. By considering the role of senior team heterogeneity in broadening the attention scope of senior teams and the role of senior team shared vision in aligning distributed attention across organizational functions, this research investigates how senior teams may enhance the value‐creating potential of EO. In addition, we assess situated attention by including the notion of environmental dynamism and examining whether the role of the senior team attributes is contingent upon environmental conditions. Using a time‐lagged sample of 346 firms operating in various industries, we find that senior team heterogeneity helps firms to leverage their EO and improve their performance. Moreover, once environmental conditions are taken into account, results indicate that the absence of heterogeneity at senior team level may be particularly detrimental for firms operating in stable environments. The direct moderating effect of shared vision on the relationship between EO and performance is not substantiated. However, senior team shared vision has a positive impact for firms operating in dynamic environments, providing a premium for firms aiming to realize the inherent value of EO. Our research provides important implications for senior teams aiming to leverage their EO into increased firm performance. Evidence shows that while a heterogeneous team composition and senior team shared vision may provide several benefits, these advantages may fluctuate across environmental conditions.
    August 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12032   open full text
  • Brand‐Specific Design Effects: Form and Function.
    Janell D. Townsend, Wooseong Kang, Mitzi M. Montoya, Roger J. Calantone.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 22, 2013
    Product design is inherently a key component of brand strategy. Accordingly, significant resources are invested to improve product and brand performance; however, foundations for understanding the role product design plays in influencing actual consumer opinions from the marketplace have not been fully explored in the literature. This paper develops a conceptual framework illustrating how two critical design factors—form and function—impact consumer opinion and delineate brand‐specific effects. Nonmonotonic effects are identified, as well as the interaction effects of the individual factors among the dimensions. A longitudinal model based on objective measures of form and function is tested with a data set developed from models available in the U.S. automotive market from 1999–2007; it includes 16 firms, 32 brands, and 137 products. The results indicate the relationships between factors of form and function are multifarious and complex, but clearly play a significant role in forming consumer opinions, although they do exhibit diminishing returns. The findings further indicate brand‐specific effects exist, and consumer opinions vary by brand. The findings provide foundations for understanding the interplay between product development and brand management. Overall, this research supports the notion that brand strategies can be supported through the management of design dimensions.
    July 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12042   open full text
  • Project Failures Arising from Corporate Entrepreneurship: Impact of Multiple Project Failures on Employees' Accumulated Emotions, Learning, and Motivation.
    Dean A. Shepherd, J. Michael Haynie, Holger Patzelt.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 22, 2013
    In this paper, we consider an organizational paradox inherent to corporate entrepreneurship; that is, the pursuit of entrepreneurial projects is necessary for organizational rejuvenation, renewal, and/or organic growth; however, the high failure rate of entrepreneurial projects likely has enduring implications for the project team members and, by extension, the organization. Drawing on the psychology and emotion literatures, we model the human capital costs of corporate entrepreneurship arising from the multiple failures of entrepreneurial projects. Specifically, we explore how and with what consequence negative emotions can accumulate across multiple failures; when this accumulation is most likely to occur; and what the nature of this accumulation is across organizational contexts, employee differences, and time. This theorizing complements extant scholarship focused on the financial benefits and costs of corporate entrepreneurship by investigating the negative impact of multiple project failures on employees.
    July 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12035   open full text
  • Top Management Compositional Effects on Corporate Entrepreneurship: The Moderating Role of Perceived Technological Uncertainty.
    Ciaran Heavey, Zeki Simsek.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 22, 2013
    Because corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is central to firms' ability to compete, adapt, and perform in increasingly turbulent environments, there is a great interest in understanding its origins. To date, prior studies have overwhelmingly focused on the architectural factors—the structures, cultures, resources, and incentives—that shape entrepreneurial processes within organizations and the environmental conditions that stimulate entrepreneurial activity. However, some researchers have recently begun to argue that the requirements and challenges of CE fall most saliently on the shoulders of the firm's top management team. Focusing on various aspects of top managers' activities, roles, and processes, this line of research demonstrates the enabling role of top management teams in their firm's pursuit of CE. We extend this research by examining the impact of top management team composition in terms of human capital and social capital on CE. Additionally, because external environment perceptions within top teams shape their sociopolitical process and framing of the issues facing their firms, we submit that a team's level of perceived technological uncertainty moderates the impact of the team's human and social capital on CE. We find support for these arguments using multisource data from a sample of 99 high‐technology firms. The discussion finally traces the implications of our theory and findings for research and managerial understanding on CE.
    July 22, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12033   open full text
  • Enabling Innovation through Strategic Synergies.
    Darren Ford, Angela Paladino.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 07, 2013
    This paper empirically examines the effect that a market orientation (MO) and resource orientation (RO) have on three performance outcomes: financial performance, customer value, and innovation. Individually, the effect each orientation has on performance has been explored but with conflicting results. This study addresses a pertinent gap in the literature by providing insight into a relationship yet unexamined; the role of RO as a moderator of the MO and performance relationship. Although the existing literature considers the role of environmental phenomena as moderators on the MO and performance relationship, the role of alternate orientations has not been studied. While customer value and dynamic resources are needed to succeed, can they each assist the other to perform better? Specifically, does the ability to better develop, deploy, and alter dynamic resources help a firm to better provide customer value to improve performance? This paper is the first to our knowledge to integrate literature from the two paradigms to assess this. Results show that both orientations, when analyzed individually, have a significantly positive effect on all three‐performance outcomes: financial performance, customer value, and innovation. Thus, support for each of the first six hypotheses is provided. The moderated regression provided support for two of the three hypotheses pertaining to this component of the study. It was found that an RO significantly moderates the relationship of an MO with customer value and financial performance but is unable to exert any moderating effect on the MO and innovation relationship because of the dominant role of the RO. Thus, RO appeared superior in delivering innovative outcomes relative to MO. From this, implications, limitations, and recommendations are discussed.
    July 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12045   open full text
  • The Impact of Word of Mouth Sources on the Perceived Usefulness of an Innovation.
    Tomoko Kawakami, Mark E. Parry.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 07, 2013
    This paper examines the role of three indirect mechanisms linking word‐of‐mouth communication with one of the most important innovation attributes influencing the adoption decision: perceived usefulness. The authors hypothesize that word‐of‐mouth (WOM) communication impacts perceived usefulness by influencing potential adopter perceptions of the credibility of innovation information, the size of the adopter population, and the availability of complementary products. To test these hypotheses, the authors analyze the survey responses of over 550 potential adopters of e‐readers and smartphones. In both product samples, the perceived credibility of WOM information is positively related with perceived usefulness, which is positively related with purchase intent. Consistent with theoretical arguments regarding the importance of access to expert information sources, findings indicate that, relative to personal WOM, written and virtual WOM have stronger relationships with consumer perceptions of the credibility of innovation information. In addition, in both samples, perceived usefulness is positively related with the perceived availability of complementary products, which is positively related with both personal and written word‐of‐mouth. Finally, perceived usefulness has (1) a direct relationship with the perceived size of the local adopter population in the e‐reader sample and (2) an indirect relationship with the same variable that is mediated by the perceived availability of complementary products in both samples. In turn, the perceived size of the local adopter population is positively related with exposure to personal word‐of‐mouth.
    July 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12049   open full text
  • Employing New Business Divisions to Exploit Disruptive Innovations: The Interplay between Characteristics of the Corporation and Those of the Venture Management Team.
    Dilene R. Crockett, Jeffrey E. McGee, G. Tyge Payne.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. July 03, 2013
    Established firms often create new business divisions in response to new ways of competing, such as those based on disruptive innovations. Using a sample of daily newspapers and their Internet divisions, this study examines the corporate characteristics of orientation, attention, and control and venture management team characteristics of vision, experience, and collective efficacy and their interactive effects on the overall performance of the new division. Findings demonstrate that vision and collective efficacy are related to venture outcomes, orientation affects the experience and vision to venture performance relationships, attention enhances the vision and collective efficacy to performance relationships, and decision autonomy influences the experience and collective efficacy to venture performance relationships. Overall, the results of this study imply that specific venture management team characteristics and corporate characteristics may be tailored to improve chances of meeting specific performance targets and achieving overall venture success.
    July 03, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12034   open full text
  • Clinging to Slim Chances: The Dynamics of Anticipating Regret When Developing New Products.
    Kumar Sarangee, Jeffrey B. Schmidt, Jeffrey P. Wallman.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2013
    This paper focuses on the effects of anticipated regret during large‐scale investment projects—namely new product development. Anticipated regret means worrying about the future, and decision‐makers experience it prior to both making a decision and knowing the outcome of that decision. It is forward‐looking while actual regret is backward‐looking. Decision‐makers must make project continuation/termination decisions with conflicting pressures. If they continue it, they might receive disconfirming information in the future and therefore regret their decision. If they stop it, they also might regret that decision later, too, if they subsequently conclude it was an error to do so. We term these conflicting pressures anticipated “keep” and “drop” regret, respectively. In the main study, nearly 300 individuals completed a decision‐making exercise in which a failing new product development project was evaluated, and various factors were measured, including both types of anticipated regret at multiple points in the project. The results show that decision‐makers anticipate regret when making project continuation decisions, and anticipated keep and drop regret exert pressures that differ in direction and magnitude. Most interestingly, anticipated drop regret does not diminish as the failing project progresses whereas anticipated keep regret increases as more negative information is received over the course of the project. A second, smaller study was conducted using a different population, and the results of the main study were replicated in this supplemental study, thereby adding confidence in these findings.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12041   open full text
  • Technology Acquisition in Family and Nonfamily Firms: A Longitudinal Analysis of Spanish Manufacturing Firms.
    Josip Kotlar, Alfredo De Massis, Federico Frattini, Mattia Bianchi, Hanqing Fang.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2013
    Technology acquisition from external sources has been identified as a critical competence for sustained success in innovation, and research has paid a good deal of attention to studying its advantages, drawbacks, determinants, and outcomes. Traditionally, research has modeled the choice to acquire technology from outside a firm's boundaries as the result of a trade‐off between the benefits of external acquisition (e.g., higher return on investment, lower costs, increased flexibility, access to specialized skill sets, and creativity) and its drawbacks (e.g., opening the market to new entrants, risk of imitation of core competencies, and reduced value appropriability). Yet, this view does not capture the behavioral considerations that may potentially encourage or discourage managers from sourcing technology outside the firm's boundaries. This behavioral aspect is especially important if one wants to understand the conduct in external technology acquisition of family firms, which are found to favor strategic actions that preserve the controlling families' control and authority over business, even at the cost of giving up potential economic benefits. Thus, external technology acquisition is likely to be interpreted differently in family and nonfamily firms. Despite its importance, how the involvement of a controlling family affects decisions in technology and innovation management and specifically external technology acquisition is an overlooked topic in extant research and requires further theoretical and empirical examination. This study attempts to fill these gaps by extending the tenets of the behavioral agency model and prior research pointing to particularistic decision‐making in family firms to uncover the behavioral drivers of external technology acquisition in family and nonfamily firms. Theory is developed that relates performance risk, family management, and the contingent effect of the degree of technology protection on external technology acquisition, and the hypotheses are tested with longitudinal data on 1540 private Spanish manufacturing firms. The analyses show that managers are more likely to acquire technology from external sources through research and development contracting when firm performance falls below managers' aspirations. Family firms are generally more reluctant to acquire external technology, and the effect of negative aspiration performance gaps becomes less relevant as family management is higher, which is attributed to family managers' attempts to avoid losing control over the trajectory that technology follows over time. However, family firms become more favorable to considering the adoption of an open approach to technology development when some protection mechanisms (specifically, the filing of patents on the firm proprietary technologies) increase the managers' perceptions of control over the technology trajectory. As such, this study makes a contribution to the understanding of the behavioral factors driving external technology acquisition, and it offers important insights regarding technology strategy in family firms.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12046   open full text
  • A Review of Longitudinal Research in the Product Innovation Field, with Discussion of Utility and Conduct of Sequence Analysis.
    Helen Perks, Deborah Roberts.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2013
    This paper examines how longitudinality is investigated in innovation research. A review of longitudinal methods in innovation articles, published between 2000 and 2011, is undertaken. Our findings show that longitudinal approaches to data collection are gaining some credence, in line with increased criticism of the overuse of positivist methods to study process‐based phenomena. However, results demonstrate a dearth of systematic longitudinal analytical methods employed in product innovation research. Static analytical methods are prominent. These inevitably lead to static presentation of results, and this is borne out in our findings. Second, the paper discusses the conduct and utility of a specific technique for product innovation research: sequence analysis. By drawing on two studies, which apply sequence analysis in product innovation research, sequence analysis is shown to be a useful technique to achieve rigor in analyzing longitudinal data. The paper concludes by discussing how such systematic methods for analyzing longitudinality in the innovation field demand greater usage and exploration.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12048   open full text
  • Achieving Customer Satisfaction through Integrated Products and Services: An Exploratory Study.
    Jawwad Z. Raja, Dorota Bourne, Keith Goffin, Mehmet Çakkol, Veronica Martinez.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2013
    Complex products such as manufacturing equipment have always needed maintenance and repair services. Increasingly, leading manufacturers are integrating products and services to generate increased revenues and achieve customer satisfaction. Designing integrated products and services requires a different approach to new product development and a clear understanding of how customers perceive the value they obtain from actual usage of products and services—so‐called value‐in‐use. However, there is a lack of research on integrated products and services and how they impact customer satisfaction. An exploratory study was undertaken to understand customers' views on integrated products and services and the value‐in‐use derived from such offerings. As value‐in‐use and its impacts are complicated concepts, a technique from psychology—Repertory Grid Technique—was used to gather data in 33 interviews. The interviews allowed a deep understanding of customer views on integrated products and services to be obtained, and a systematic analysis identified the key attributes of value‐in‐use. In order to probe further, the data were then analyzed using Honey's procedure, which identified the impact of the attributes of value‐in‐use on customer satisfaction. Two key attributes—relational dynamic and access—were found to have the most influence on customer satisfaction. This paper contributes to the innovation field by identifying customer needs for integrated products and services and how these impact customer satisfaction. These are key points and need to be fully considered by managers during new product and service development. Similarly, the paper identifies a number of important areas for further research.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12050   open full text
  • Why and How Combining Strong and Weak Ties within a Single Interorganizational R&D Collaboration Outperforms Other Collaboration Structures.
    Ingo Michelfelder, Jan Kratzer.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2013
    The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate why and how an ambidextrous interorganizational R&D collaboration outperforms other collaboration structures in the creation of innovation. This research effort contributes to a growing stream of research in social network theory suggesting that the contradictory theories of the strength of weak ties and weak network structures on the one hand and the theory of strong ties and closed network structures on the other have a mutually reinforcing effect on innovation outcomes if combined rather than considered separately. An in‐depth exploratory single case study approach within an innovatively organized national R&D collaboration allowed giving further evidence for such a superior innovation performance and for this research to contribute to theory by demonstrating why and how such a combination may lead to higher innovation output and how this effect can be actively reinforced. It is suggested that the combination of strong and weak ties should occur at the individual rather than at the project or firm level. The authors distinguish between the additive effects of the respective innovation benefits of strong and weak ties, a positive interaction effect in the portfolio of dyadic ties of an individual and a second multilevel interaction effect of weak ties embedded in the ambidextrous network structure. Referring to previous empirical findings, intellectual property regulation and structural interdependency between network members showed a higher impact than trust with regard to leveraging weak ties and are important sources for achieving the multilevel interaction effect. Managerial implications of this research are that a large network will outperform several smaller, independent networks given that the right structure and processes are in place. Direct implications for the architecture of an ambidextrous R&D collaboration are discussed, and a framework for a new form of technology R&D collaboration called “semi‐open organization” is presented, which places itself between the extremes of traditional R&D in closed organizations and completely “open innovation” approaches.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12052   open full text
  • Where Do Breakthroughs Come From? Characteristics of High‐Potential Inventions.
    Donna J. Kelley, Abdul Ali, Shaker A. Zahra.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 27, 2013
    Breakthrough technological inventions create the foundation for many innovative opportunities. Through novel scientific fundamentals and unique combinations of knowledge, they form a new basis for technology development and innovation, shifting their industry's mindset about what is feasible and valuable. Prior research has, to date, characteristically taken an organizational‐level perspective on technology breakthroughs, seeking to explain the occurrence of breakthroughs as a function of firm‐level characteristics and processes. This tells us less, however, about the underlying knowledge structures of the technologies themselves. This research is based on the assumption that an examination of the knowledge foundations of high‐potential inventions can enrich our understanding about the underlying features of innovations that transform industries and advance societies. In this manner, we can clarify how certain technologies are advanced and extended, providing the basis for future discoveries. Our analysis focuses on high‐potential patents: those having the highest number of forward citations in a given class. We conduct this analysis on a sample of 298 breakthrough patents and two comparison nonbreakthrough groups in drug and semiconductor classes. Our results show that breakthrough technologies, compared with nonbreakthroughs, are more likely to build on: (1) the past technological developments of others, by backward citing and embodying knowledge from prior discoveries (earlier patents), but not one's own previous developments; (2) the latest technologies, by backward citing recent patents; (3) geographic proximity, evidenced by the fact that the focal patents backward cite patents from one's own country; and (4) greater technological breadth, evidenced by the fact that knowledge captured in the patents encompasses a larger number of technical fields. Based on these results, we frame the occurrence of breakthroughs as involving a process where these significant developments happen early in the progress of a technology, but after some relevant knowledge has accumulated. This reinforces the concept that a learning effect needs to occur before breakthroughs can happen. In addition, our findings suggest that the knowledge underlying breakthroughs is likely to come from other organizations or individuals, rather than the developing entity. They also incorporate broader insights from technological diversity but do not exhibit geographic diversity. Instead, they are associated with geographic proximity, which may better enable knowledge sharing and integration given the reliance on other entities and diverse knowledge.
    June 27, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12055   open full text
  • Managing the Unexpected Across Space: Improvisation, Dispersion, and Performance in NPD Teams.
    Massimo Magni, Likoebe M. Maruping, Martin Hoegl, Luigi Proserpio.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    Organizations are increasingly moving toward a team‐based structure for managing complex knowledge in new product development (NPD) projects. Such teams operate in an environment characterized by dynamic project requirements and emergent nonroutine issues, which can undermine their ability to achieve project objectives. Team improvisation—a collective, spontaneous, and creative action for identifying novel solutions to emergent problems—has been identified as a key team‐situated response to unexpected challenges to NPD team effectiveness. Geographic dispersion is increasingly becoming a reality for NPD teams that find themselves needing to improvise solutions to emergent challenges while attempting to leverage the knowledge of team members who are physically distributed across various locations. However, very little is known about how teams' improvisational actions affect performance when such actions are executed in increasingly dispersed teams. To address this gap in the literature, this paper draws on the emerging literature on different forms and degrees of team dispersion to understand how team improvisation affects team performance in such teams. In particular this paper takes into account both the structural and psychological facets of dispersion by considering the physical distance between team members, the configuration of the team across different sites, as well as the team members' perception of being distant from their teammates. Responses from 299 team leaders and team members of 71 NPD projects in the software industry were used to analyze the relationship between team improvisation and team performance, as well as the moderating effect of the three different conceptualizations of team dispersion. Results of the study indicate that team improvisation has a positive influence on project team performance by allowing team members to respond to unexpected challenges through creative and timely action. However, increasing degrees of team member dispersion (both structural and psychological) attenuate this relationship by making it difficult to have timely access to other team members' knowledge and by limiting real‐time interactions that may lead to the development of creative solutions. The results of this research offer guidance to managers about when to balance the desire to leverage expertise to cope with unexpected events. Moreover, the present paper provides directions for future research on improvisation and team dispersion. Future research is encouraged to investigate factors that may help highly dispersed teams to overcome the shortcomings of team dispersion in dealing with emergent events.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12043   open full text
  • External Venturing and Discontinuous Strategic Renewal: An Options Perspective.
    Sandip Basu, Anu Wadhwa.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    This study examines the relationship between a firm's venturing activities and its undertaking of strategic renewal. The study was motivated by some important gaps in the corporate entrepreneurship literature on venturing and renewal. The extant literature has not focused on the different types and dimensions of firms' renewal activities. In particular, discontinuous renewal involving shifts in firms' core businesses is not well understood. Moreover, the conditions that drive firms to undertake strategic renewal have not been examined. For example, it is not known how venturing increases or reduces the benefits of undertaking renewal. This study focuses on a discontinuous form of renewal involving major changes in firms' core businesses and examines firms' external venturing activities that complement their internal development. We examine corporate venture capital (CVC) investments, which are direct minority equity investments made by established companies in privately held ventures. Discontinuous renewal is conceptualized as resulting from a set of related, and often sequential, managerial decisions. The first managerial decision is to initiate growth in a business that is relatively newer or smaller for the organization. The second decision is to move away, or even withdraw completely, from the current core business that enabled prior growth and prosperity for the firm and served as its primary revenue earner. Employing a real options perspective, we argue that CVC investments create growth options in new and existing businesses but do not result in firms' withdrawal from existing businesses. Therefore, we expect CVC activity to be negatively associated with the likelihood of a firm undertaking discontinuous renewal. We also propose that the benefits of withdrawing from existing businesses are even lower, and the costs even higher, for firms in dynamic industries and for firms that possess strong internal capabilities. The predictions of the study are tested using longitudinal data on 477 firms from the 1990 Fortune 500 list for the period 1990–2000. We find support for all our predicted hypotheses. These results help address important limitations in the corporate entrepreneurship literature. The study also contributes to the real options and organizational capabilities literatures.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12039   open full text
  • Corporate Entrepreneurship: State‐of‐the‐Art Research and a Future Research Agenda.
    Andrew Corbett, Jeffrey G. Covin, Gina C O'Connor, Christopher L. Tucci.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    There is no abstract available for this paper.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12031   open full text
  • Patenting Activities and Firm Performance: Does Firm Size Matter?
    Petra Andries, Dries Faems.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    Whereas prior research has provided valuable insights into the willingness of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and large firms to engage in patenting, a comparison of the performance implications of patenting activities across small and large firms is still lacking. This gap is important because SMEs and large firms, having different resources and capabilities, might benefit from patenting activities in different ways. In particular, SMEs can be expected to benefit less from patenting activities in terms of protection against imitators than large firms. On the other hand, the propensity and ability of SMEs to license out their patents and generate additional revenue streams might be relatively higher than that of their large counterparts. This paper studies the impact of patenting on licensing, innovation, and financial performance for both SMEs and large firms, using multiple‐group path analyses on a sample of 358 manufacturing firms. Contrary to expectations, this study demonstrates that not only large firms, but also SMEs benefit from patenting in terms of commercializing product innovations. Moreover, for both SMEs and large firms, such increased innovation performance in turn contributes to higher profit margins. Patenting activities also increase the ability of SMEs and large firms to license out knowledge to external parties, and this positive effect is significantly stronger for large firms. However, neither in SMEs nor in large firms, these outward licensing activities generate short‐term financial benefits. Finally, the study demonstrates that patenting activities do not trigger significant cost disadvantages for either SMEs or large firms. Jointly, these findings provide unique insights in the value‐generating and cost‐increasing effects of patenting, suggesting that not only large firms, but also SMEs should consider patenting as a viable strategy to fully reap commercial benefits from their innovation activities. At the same time, they temper open innovation scholars’ expectations regarding the financial benefits of licensing out knowledge. Overall, these findings point to opportunities for optimizing the intellectual property management of both SMEs and large firms.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12047   open full text
  • Don't Trust Trust: A Dynamic Approach to Controlling Supplier Involvement in New Product Development.
    Lydie P. M. Smets, Kim E. Oorschot, Fred Langerak.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    Prior literature stresses the importance for manufacturers to use formal and informal controls to coordinate collaborative new product development activities with suppliers. In doing so, the existence of trust between manufacturers and suppliers is believed to play a key role because it enables manufacturers to reduce investments in formal controls and rely more on less costly informal controls. Manufacturers and suppliers don't suddenly trust each other though: trust typically grows over time as the partners get to know each other. Trust may also decrease if manufacturers overuse formal controls or if suppliers underperform. These fluctuations in trust over the course of supplier–manufacturer relationships complicate the so‐called trust–control nexus and raise important questions about the impact of trust on the efficiency and effectiveness of formal and informal controls as coordination mechanisms. Therefore, this study examines how manufacturers should balance formal and informal controls over time to reap the full benefits of collaborative product development with suppliers. For that purpose, a conceptual and system dynamics model are developed, which incorporate the links among formal and informal controls, trust, and the supplier's development performance. In an empirical validation in the context of the shipbuilding industry, the results reject the notion that manufacturers must lessen formal controls and increase informal controls with trust. Instead, it is most efficient and effective to invest always in formal controls, particularly process control, to coordinate supplier involvement in new product development. These results have important theoretical and managerial implications: Informal controls are not as profitable as expected.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12051   open full text
  • Should System Firms Develop Complementary Products? A Dynamic Model and an Empirical Test.
    Jan Ende, Ferdinand Jaspers, Serge A. Rijsdijk.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    While Nintendo develops many video games internally, Apple is only marginally involved in the development of iPhone applications. This paper addresses the question: to what extent and how should system firms be involved in the development of complementary products for their “core products”? These core products may include video consoles, electronic book readers, etc. This is a highly relevant question, because the success of core products depends strongly on their complementary products, e.g., video games and electronic books. This study proposes a dynamic model for the degree that system firms should be involved in complementary product development by considering, as contingency factors, the novelty of the core, and the novelty of the complementary products. Both novelties influence the degree to which system firms should be involved in the development of complementary products. In terms of a system firm's involvement, this study makes a distinction between the degree of integration and the degree of ownership. The degree of integration reflects the extent to which the system firm is actively involved in the coordination of the complementary product, e.g., to ensure that the complementary product is optimally aligned with its core product and that the full potential of the core product is achieved. The degree of ownership reflects the extent to which the system firm finances the development of the complementary product and therefore, the degree of formal control authority over the complementary product. This model was tested using data from a survey of 99 development projects for mobile telecommunications applications. The results reveal that integration by the system firm contributes to the performance of complementary products for new core products but has a negative effect if a new complement is developed for a mature core product. In addition, ownership contributes to performance if both the core and complementary products are new. In other circumstances, a clear effect of ownership by the system firm on performance is not found. The implications of our findings are that system firms should be strongly involved in complementary product development when they introduce a new core product, and even more so if the complementary products are new. However, they should decrease their degree of involvement over time as the core product matures and, again, even more so if the complementary product is new. The paper concludes by providing practical implications for system firms in the mobile telecommunications industry and beyond.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12053   open full text
  • Seeking Simplicity in Complexity: The Relative Value of Ease of Use (EOU)‐Based Product Differentiation.
    Paul F. Burke.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    Models of category acceptance and diffusion, including Davis's technological acceptance model (TAM), have established that ease of use (EOU) is a significant determinant of technological product adoption. This supports user‐centered design philosophies, where aspects of cognitive attractiveness (e.g., logical to use) and emotional attractiveness (e.g., lack of frustration in use) are essential, and contrasts traditional design practices where physical attractiveness dominates concern. These studies consider the impact of EOU on category (primary) demand. It is unclear whether firms should incorporate EOU into design and positioning strategies to differentiate their products from others in the same category that perform better on functional features. A random utility theory‐based choice model is used to measure the relative value of EOU. In a new product category (DVD recorders; n = 496) and one that is more established (cell phones; n = 202), consumers were found to forgo functional features in preference for products better rated on EOU. With implications for segmentation, those seeking simplicity were older, female, educated, and with less product knowledge, while those already owning a complex phone made replacement decisions with less concern for EOU. The findings support EOU‐based differentiation strategies as a legitimate alternative to other forms of differentiation.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12056   open full text
  • Shouldn't Customers Control Customized Product Development?
    Lydie P. M. Smets, Fred Langerak, Serge A. Rijsdijk.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    Nowadays, customized product development (CPD) is increasingly prevalent in business‐to‐business settings, which has motivated manufacturers into development approaches wherein the customer plays an active role. When the customer is merely viewed as a passive receiver of the customized product, the manufacturer won't be able to truly empathize with the customer and might lack important suggestions to create and improve the customized product. It is, after all, the customer that holds pertinent development information and/or expertise. Yet, customers are not always motivated to participate and often need to be convinced about the manufacturer's ability to develop customized products in a timely and cost‐effective manner. Prior literature on interorganizational relationships suggests the use of formal control, i.e., process and/or output control, to fashion activities in line with expectations so that development goals can be attained. Thereupon, this study posits that the customer's use of such formal controls may stimulate customer participation in CPD. In addition, this study investigates whether manufacturers can indeed benefit from customer participation in CPD through improved new product performance. To accomplish the research objectives, survey‐based and accounting data are collected on 63 collaborative CPD projects between a plastics manufacturer and its industrial customers. In conjunction with an add‐on experimental study regarding the effect of formal control on customer participation, this study reveals that the customer's use of formal control significantly increases the level of customer participation in CPD. Additionally, this study confirms that customer participation positively impacts new product performance. Together, these results imply that letting the customer use process and/or output control helps the customer to believe more in the pursuit of CPD goals and successful product customization, thereby encouraging the customer to participate more actively in CPD. Besides, the findings imply that increased access to market and customer need‐related information obtained through customer participation is indeed critical for successful CPD.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12057   open full text
  • How Do Consumer Characteristics Affect the Bias in Measuring Willingness to Pay for Innovative Products?
    Reto Hofstetter, Klaus M. Miller, Harley Krohmer, Z. John Zhang.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. June 25, 2013
    Getting the price right is essential for successful new product introductions. An accurate estimate of consumers' willingness to pay is a crucial part of this task. Measurement of willingness to pay for innovations, however, often yields biased results. In this paper, we investigate consumer‐related characteristics and motives that might underlie this bias. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model, we develop a conceptual model to identify consumer characteristics relevant for preference measurement for innovative products. In doing so, two main factors that potentially influence hypothetical bias are distinguished: ability and motivation. Our conceptual discussion and empirical results demonstrate that the validity of willingness to pay statements is higher among consumers who show a high ability to assess the new product's utility and who are truly interested in purchasing the new product. Counter to intuition, willingness to pay statements from innovators, consumers with good product category knowledge, or consumers who perceive the new product to be highly innovative are relatively more biased and should be interpreted with caution. This research is among the first to look at consumer characteristics rather than methodological issues when it comes to measuring consumer willingness to pay for innovative products. Our conceptual discussion and empirical examination of the drivers of hypothetical bias can be used to refine the validity of the results of the direct willingness to pay approach. These findings should help improve new product pricing surveys and open new avenues for research in measuring consumer preferences.
    June 25, 2013   doi: 10.1111/jpim.12040   open full text
  • The Impact of Innovative Culture on Individual Employees: The Moderating Role of Market Information Sharing.
    Yinghong (Susan) Wei, Hugh O'Neill, Ruby P. Lee, Nan Zhou.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. November 20, 2012
    Current innovation literature provides a very limited understanding of the potential impacts of innovative culture on employees. Building on resource‐based view theory, the authors investigate theoretically and empirically how a perceived innovative culture can be a building block for a firm's competitive resource and advantage by creating superior employee‐level outcomes and how a market information‐sharing process may moderate these effects. The authors identify three distinct types of individual‐level outcomes stemming from an innovative culture. The three outcome variables—job satisfaction, organizational dynamism perception, and firm performance perception—reflect employees’ psychological and cognitive reactions to the process of creating organizational innovation and innovative culture. The authors collect survey data from 3960 individual employees in China. Their findings first show that a perceived innovative culture significantly and positively affects employees’ job satisfaction and perceptions of organizational dynamism and firm performance. Moreover, organizational dynamism perception plays an important mediating role among three employee‐level outcomes by converting job satisfaction into firm performance perception. The authors also find support for the direct, positive effect of a perceived market information‐sharing process on job satisfaction but not on perceptions of organizational dynamism and firm performance. Most importantly, their findings on the significant moderating role of a market information‐sharing system contribute to innovation theory by emphasizing the importance of the innovation/marketing interface: bundling market information sharing and innovative culture together enhances employees’ positive attitudes and perceptions. This result also suggests that examining only the direct effects of innovative culture and market information sharing may lead to incorrect conclusions as to how to manage the cultural infusion process: the market information‐sharing process shows only a weak effect on job satisfaction and no effect on perceptions of organizational dynamism or firm performance. Organizational designs should ensure simultaneous consideration of both variables in the cultural transformation process to enhance employees’ derived benefits in the process of creating an innovative culture. We offer a new insight: a perceived market information‐sharing process may strengthen the effect of an innovative culture on employees’ job satisfaction and organizational dynamism perception, while it may weaken the effect of an innovative culture on firm performance perception. This more nuanced view of market information sharing in the cultural infusion process presents new wisdom and calls for further studies in entrepreneurial innovation.
    November 20, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5885.2012.01000.x   open full text
  • Perspective: New Product Failure Rates: Influence of Argumentum ad Populum and Self‐Interest.
    George Castellion, Stephen K. Markham.
    Journal of Product Innovation Management. October 25, 2012
    A persistent myth in product innovation and management is that the failure rate of new products is 80% or higher. How does this false idea continue to displace the conclusions of empirical studies since 1977 that the new product failure rate is 40% or less? We examine the influence of a fallacy that encourages people's unthinking acceptance of ideas on new product failure rates and whose appeal rests primarily on an emotional, rather than a reasoned, argument. Self‐interest also plays a major role in keeping this myth alive.
    October 25, 2012   doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5885.2012.01009.x   open full text