International Journal of Innovation Management

International competitiveness, accelerated by the impact of new technologies, has pressurised industry to meet the challenges for higher productivity, faster product cycles, higher levels of quality and lower costs in increasingly internationalised markets. Multi-functional teams have been heralded as a management solution and an innovative organisational approach to address these challenges. This paper summarises the findings from a research programme which aimed to identify the most appropriate team approaches for co-ordinating innovative product/process developments and for enhancing their success. It is based on case studies of environmental technology projects in 25 companies in the United Kingdom. Team approaches were broadly classified as "single-disciplinary", "multi-disciplinary" or "multi-functional" according to members' expertise and innovation function, which could be more or less integrated. The research findings emphasised the diversity of organisational teams which varied according to different projects, organisational, inter-organisational and market conditions, and were more complex when several departments, teams or companies were involved. The findings revealed that multi-functional teams were important in achieving success in open markets, because of their control over appropriate expertise, even though they did not guarantee commercial success. Integrated team approaches were not sufficient for achieving susscess, although most companies regarded their teams as necessary.

Using information compiled from the Internet, we find that the number of computational chemistry firms in each of the 10 OECD countries (The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia) is: (i) strongly correlated with the country's strength in computational chemistry science and with the extent of the national scientific networks; (ii) is weakly correlated with the size of the domestic markets; and (iii) not correlated with the extent of the infrastructure as measured by the number of supercomputers installed. These results show that the emergence of firms based on new science depends heavily on the strength of universities and public research institutes in the underlying sciences. This is particularly true for the leading country — the United States.

This paper focuses on conflicts of interest faced by technology-based firms which are embedded in an industry network. In the industry situation analysed here, issues have arisen as to how they can innovate effectively when judged from the perspective of their network partners while achieving their own internal objectives of growth and enhancement of innovative capability. The conceptual conclusions derived from the study are assessed for their generalisability to the global context of the oil industry, and to other industries in the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere. It is concluded that where a perceived conflict of interest arises in sharing leading edge technology, firms act in ways which are detrmental to the industrial network as a whole and, ultimately, to the technology leader firm itself. In order to maximise the returns to the technology-based firm, it must (i) select the group of clients/suppliers and portfolio of projects which offer the best spectrum of complementary resources in the light of its growth strategy; and (ii) structure its set of relationships to minimise the perceived risk to its competitive position. Thus, it must identify how to select, win and manage a portfolio of appropriately worded contracts, which collectively minimise its own and its multiple partners' conflicts of interest while ensuring that the required complementary resources will be forthcoming for current and future projects.

The marketing literature clearly indicates that one activity which is highly associated with the successful commercial development of new technology is the involvement of potential customers in the process as intimately and as early as possible. This paper summarises the literature on the value of customer involvement and concludes that the process of "co-development" has extra merit. This is not, however, universally employed by new technology originator firms. This paper also explores the apparent barriers to the involvement of customers and found that, among other things, trust seems to be an essential element in allowing technology originators to enter into necessary relationships with potential customers. It is likely that participants in such joint developments had experienced a number of similar, trusting business relationships. Those who rated themselves as being unwilling to divulge confidential information with potential customers, which is essential to the process, seemed to have few other trusting business relationships. The methodology that was used to explore the question empirically is described together with the fieldwork that was conducted. A single industry, the electronics industry, was examined in one state of Australia. The industry comprises small and medium-sized enterprises who trade with customers locally, nationally and internationally. A sample of 15 companies in the industry, as well as some of their customers, were subjected to purposive, in-depth interviews. The findings are drawn from this relatively small pool of qualitative data and the limitations of the study, as well as the areas for further research, are indicated at the end of the paper.

This paper examines the appropriation of IT-based innovations within firms. It argues that such innovations represent a challenge to the tendency in the existing literature towards the analytical separation of diffusion and implementation as distinct theoretical domains. In contrast, this paper develops a more transcendent analysis of such innovations by focusing on the cognitive translations and appropriations which link idea generation, diffusion and implementation. This analysis identifies the processes linking wider inter-organisational diffusion networks and intra-firm distributions of expertise as playing a crucial role in the appropriation of innovation. We refer to these as processes of articulation: a formulation which leads to a reappraisal of the networking activities of boundary-spanning individuals.