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We study the perpetual American call option pricing problem in a model of a financial market in which the firm issuing a traded asset can regulate the dividend rate by switching it between two constant values. The firm dividend policy is unknown for small investors, who can only observe the prices available from the market. The asset price dynamics are described by a geometric Brownian motion with a random drift rate modeled by a continuous time Markov chain with two states. The optimal exercise time of the option for small investors is found as the first time at which the asset price hits a boundary depending on the current state of the filtering dividend rate estimate. The proof is based on an embedding of the initial problem into a two-dimensional optimal stopping problem and the analysis of the associated parabolic-type free-boundary problem. We also provide closed form estimates for the rational option price and the optimal exercise boundary.

A linear unbiased and square mean optimal estimation is obtained for the mild solution process of a stochastic evolution equation with an infinite-dimensional fractional Brownian motion as noise and the noise in the observation process is a finite-dimensional Brownian motion. An innovation process is introduced and the estimation is obtained as a solution of a stochastic differential equation with a finite-dimensional noise. By using an approach based on the equivalence with a deterministic control problem, the estimation for the Fourier coefficients of the signal process is also determined.

The Accelerated Radical Innovation (ARI) methodology, an integrated approach to shepherding radical innovation from initial concept through commercialization, was compared to the approach used by an investor-funded seed-stage innovation incubation firm. Similarities include traversal of the same major stages of innovation, emphasis on front-end analysis before escalating commitments, and using an extended "probe-and-learn" process. Key differences were in emphasis. The ARI model relies on analysis and intelligence gleaned from external sources, while ConduIT views each innovation project as unique, requiring tailored responses that will not be found elsewhere. And while the ARI model relies on a structured process, ConduIT favors a more intuitive, people-centered approach. The message for ARI is to become more flexible and adaptable to each innovation's uniquenesses. For ConduIT the challenges are increasing portfolio turnover and scaling up, which will require a more repeatable, teachable, standardized process such as the ARI model.

Challenges in innovation processes have influenced the development of agile methods, which are lighter and nimbler tools for development projects. This study elucidates the possibilities of agile methods for enhancing the effectiveness of innovation processes with the aim of quickly and successfully commercializing new technology. The focus is on different process phases of commercialization, from identifying the business potential to finalizing the innovation commercialization plan. As a result of the study, a novel, rapid, and agile process was created to improve the effectiveness of the technology-based innovation process, supporting the creation of more sustainable and valuable business models.

Purpose: Important determinants of new product development success fall into five main areas encompassing strategic leadership, competitive intelligence, management of technology, specific characteristics of the company's innovation process, and the company's absorptive capacity to use available knowledge to produce and commercialize new products. Unfortunately the existing knowledge on each of these five areas is not being shared by researchers in the other areas, thus the models are focused on the particular research area. This study tests these constructs as a set of determinants of product innovation success.

Design/methodology/approach: A field test using a mailed questionnaire to collect a relatively large sample of manufacturing companies has been used to test the proposed model. To eliminate possible multicollinearity among the independent variables, a multivariate regression analysis was used.

Findings: The results provide clear evidence about the importance of competitive intelligence, strategic leadership, competitive intelligence, management of technology, specific characteristics of the company's innovation process, and company absorptive capacity with company success in new product development.

Research limitation/implications: Despite the relatively broad scope of the proposed model, other factors may also be important and should be included in future studies.

Practical implications: The items used for measuring the main constructs provide further and more specific insights into how managers should go about developing these areas within their organizations.

Originality/value: While the study is grounded in the literature of what until now have been five separate areas of knowledge, it proposed a unique integrated model for these areas important to new product development.

To understand the characteristics of ASEAN countries that are conducive to unique innovation, a series of idea generation and selection experiments were conducted in three emerging countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, which were compared with one developed country, Japan. The experiments consisted of one-day-workshops held in each of the four countries. Two significant differences were found between emerging and developed countries. First, participants from the ASEAN countries proposed ideas that entailed a lower investment risk than did the Japanese participants. Secondly, the ASEAN participants were more confident in their idea selection than the Japanese participants were. The results suggested new possibilities for the development of strategies encouraging collaboration between emerging and developed countries in innovation management.

This article critically examines the relationship between institutionalization and the innovation process, traditionally regarded distinctively, leading to theoretical and methodological biases. It is also difficult to find how empirical research implements institutional theories. Drawing on the innovation and institutional theories, and a systematic literature review on ICT usage in the agricultural advisory system (AAS), our study reveals that ICT is becoming established within AAS. Two dominant isomorphisms guided ICT usage in AAS: coercive and normative isomorphism. We argue that the institutionalization process is a continuum of the innovation process. From this perspective, technology is conceptualized as potentially useful knowledge that undergoes a series of changes during its institutionalization. We propose an analytical framework that could induce further theoretical refinement and progress.

During the recent health crisis, certain small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) successfully developed and commercialized new products, sometimes outside their usual business sector. What practices were adopted to carry out these product innovations? To answer this question, an exploratory case study was conducted with two SMEs to learn about their motivations, practices and challenges. The results show that they engaged in innovation to survive, using a succinct and flexible innovation process, combining the principles of the stage gate system with certain aspects of the Xpress and Agile versions. During a crisis, SMEs can deploy an innovation process quickly and with agility if resources and skills are accessible and collaborations possible.

This paper suggests that the innovation process has intensified as a result of the application of new digital technologies. These technologies that simulate, model and integrate, intensify the innovation process through facilitating economy of effort and definiteness of aim. Of all the many analytical lenses used to examine innovation, the most valuable in accounting for this "automation of innovation" is Rothwell's concept of the 5^th Generation Innovation Process. Our paper revisits this element of Rothwell's (1992) prize-winning article in R&D Management. It reviews the use of a range of enabling technologies and strategic management practices for the automation of innovation that were either in gestation or unknown at the time of Rothwell's paper. Rothwell's speculation about the increased "electronification" of the innovation process, and of related technological and strategic integration, has proven to be correct. The use of the new "lectronic toolkit" can transform the innovation process by facilitating the transfer, transformation and control of information. Using insights from contemporary innovation and management research, this paper examines the benefits and limitations of these digital technologies in dealing with the challenges of innovation of reducing costs and increasing speed, predictability and strategic organisational integration. It presents a conceptual framework for assessing the intensification of innovation and outlines some strategic managerial precepts that will facilitate effective use of these technologies. The paper concludes with speculations about future developments in the intensification of innovation and its impact for strategic management, together with questions for further research.

With the emergence of knowledge management (KM) as a new discipline for studying what needs to be done in order to get the most out of organizational knowledge resources, linking knowledge management and innovation becomes a necessity. Nevertheless, there are few studies that address the relationship between KM and innovation. While the thing- and process-oriented approaches adopted in these studies are helpful in understanding the relationship between knowledge management concepts and innovation concepts, they have failed to account for the impact of this relationship on the effectiveness of the innovation process. In order to study this impact, cognitive fit theory is used to develop a model that describes how the compatibility between knowledge manipulating activities and the type of knowledge associated with innovation will affect the success of the innovation process.

Corporate incubators for technology development are a recent phenomenon whose functioning and implications are not yet well understood. The resource-based view can offer an explanatory model on how corporate incubators function as specialised corporate units that hatch new businesses. While tangible resources, such as the financial, physical and even explicit knowledge flow, are all visible, and therefore easy to measure, intangible resources such as tacit knowledge and branding flow are harder to detect and localise. Managing the resource flow requires the initial allocation of resources to the corporate incubator during its set-up as well as a continuous resource flow to the technology venture and, during the harvest phase, also from it. Two levels of analysis need to be distinguished: (1) the resource flow between the corporate incubator and the technology venture and (2) the resource flow interface between the corporate incubator and the technology venture. Our empirical findings are based on two phases: First, in-depth case studies of 22 companies through 47 semi-structured interviews that were conducted with managers of large technology-intensive corporations' corporate incubators in Europe and the U.S., and second, an analysis of the European Commission's benchmarking survey of 77 incubators.

Risk is central to innovation, but in order to be theoretically interesting and of practical use, the relation between risk and innovation needs to be investigated in more specific situations. This paper explores the risk conceptions of innovators in two large corporations and identifies three themes that illuminate the relationship between risk and innovation in the corporate setting. The first relates risk to the issues of boundaries and control over parts of the innovation process; the second shows how risk is primarily related to innovation as process and not as output, and the third shows how a flexible view of business models can be used to manage risk in corporate innovation.

To be able to utilise opportunities in a radically changing business environment, various organisations are transforming their practices towards open innovation processes. Openness does not, however, mean any kind of looseness in innovation management but calls for coordination and facilitation. The challenge for the management in the open innovation process is to find out the appropriate methods and practices for the utilisation of external knowledge resources. One of the first attempts, this study brings two widely utilised innovation management methods — scenarios and the group decision support system (GDSS) — to the open innovation context and suggests guidelines for the management of the open innovation process in an inter-organisational context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the type of factors that facilitate two key aspects of the innovation process, idea generation and idea implementation. It is common in innovation research to collapse the two together which in some cases may lead to erroneous conclusions if the two aspects relate differently to organizational antecedents. Employing a mixed-method approach using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews the study examined and further explored whether individual, group and organizational level factors relate differently to the two innovation aspects. The questionnaire findings showed that individual level factors had a stronger influence on idea generation than idea implementation and vice versa for group and organizational factors. A similar pattern emerged in the interview findings where the factors that influenced idea implementation fell mainly into group and organizational typologies. The implications of these findings for organizations and research are considered.

In recent years crowdsourcing has increased in popularity as a method for gathering ideas for new innovations and providing solutions to existing problems. This means that firms apply the wisdom of crowds to certain tasks and challenges. Various crowdsourcing initiatives and platforms seem to provide new channels and ways to enable this in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine how business-to-business (B2B) firms can interact with different groups of contributors in order to receive new ideas, feedback and solutions for improving their products and services. Based on theoretical conceptualization, combined with empirical evidence, we propose a layered framework for approaching crowdsourcing in a B2B context. The empirical results of this paper reveal benefits but also practical challenges to overcome before crowdsourcing can be effectively utilized in the B2B sector.

Business model innovation is becoming a central research topic in management. However, a lack of a common understanding of the nature of the business model leads to disregarding its multifaceted structure when analyzing the business model innovation process. This article proposes a more detailed understanding of the business model innovation process by drawing on existing knowledge from new product development literature and examining the front-end and the back-end of business model innovation of three leading Danish newspapers. We studied how changes introduced during the development of digital news production and delivery have affected key components of these business models, namely value creation, proposition, delivery and capture in the period 2002–2011. Our findings suggest the need to distinguish between front-end and back-end business model innovation processes, and to recognize the importance of organizational learning when incumbents are faced with disruptive technologies.

Innovation processes result from a series of decisions and these are influenced by the perceived risks and success metrics faced by the decision-maker. Aiming to understand whether innovation risks and success metrics change during and between innovations, four hypotheses were developed and a questionnaire-based survey was adopted targeting managers of mechanically based manufacturers. Respondents were asked to indicate the importance of perceived risks throughout specific innovations for four domains of risk: marketing, technical, organizational and financial. Respondents were also asked to identify changes in type and magnitude of innovation risk and success metric. Descriptive and statistical tests were conducted to analyse the data. The results suggest that innovation risk changes in type and magnitude during and between innovations and success metrics change in type and magnitude during innovation. This study calls for situation specific research to provide helpful advice to practitioners.

Open innovation holds great potential for improving the efficiency of companies' innovation processes, but also presents substantial risks. A key issue in innovation management is finding the right balance of openness, i.e., determining how open companies should be in their innovation activities. However, academics and business practitioners hold conflicting notions of what constitutes open innovation practice and of how "open innovation companies" are defined. In this paper, we present three in-depth case studies of global R&D-intensive companies, where we find that the firms' perception of their openness differs from their actual situation (as determined by the innovation practices that they apply), and that each company has a different view as to what constitutes open innovation. We claim that resolving conceptual ambiguity and differentiating between openness (as a philosophical aspect) and open innovation (as a way of structuring the innovation process) in research is critical in order to clarify the current state of open innovation research and enable the communication of results to practitioners.

To survive competition, it is vital for firms to be innovative. As a firm's cultural predisposition, organisational innovativeness provides an environment that fosters innovations and thus actively supports new product or service development. The purpose of this study is to measure organisational innovativeness and its multiple dimensions from a cultural-strategic perspective on a multifaceted formative scale which we develop theoretically and by means of qualitative interviews. Furthermore, we empirically validate the newly developed construct by investigating how innovativeness and its dimensions translate into innovation success by examining the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance in depth. Our findings suggest that a strategic focus on innovations, an extrinsic motivation system, openness in communication, as well as management encouragement are all dimensions of organisational innovativeness. Further, our results support the need for a proficient innovation process as a mechanism to systematically and continuously translate innovativeness into successful innovations. Innovation process proficiency fully mediates the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance, while the contingency factor competitive intensity enhances this performance impact.

A rich body of literature has emerged from research on Western new product development (NPD). However, the impact of country- and culture-specific influences on these processes has not been examined in detail yet. Hence, this study identifies the differences in NPD practices between the Indian and German research and development (R&D) subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs). Data have been generated by interviews with R&D executives in both countries across multiple cases. The study samples strategic, organisational, and operational aspects and indicates differences in process coordination, reward systems, NPD creativity techniques, market orientation, and the average age of NPD teams. Other aspects, such as top management support, the use of structured NPD processes, and the use of heterogeneous NPD teams, show no substantial differences between the countries. Our findings suggest that, while some aspects are universally applicable across cultural frontiers, Western companies must understand India's different expectations regarding NPD and adjust their practices accordingly.