International Journal of Innovation Management

This paper will present the development of an audit tool called the Innovation Compass. It will show how the tool was formulated through a research project, which was aiming to understand the innovation process within organisations. The creation of the Innovation Compass was driven by the research process and, as this paper will give an example of, validated through its application to case studies. The paper gives a greater understanding of the elements of the tool and, how it could be used and developed in other research projects considering innovation and New Product Development.

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.

This study applies the concept of industrial clusters to explain the development of technologically sophisticated region of Boston Route 128. It is argued that the success of Boston, Massachusetts, is rooted in innovation, entrepreneurial management and the policy towards technology commercialisation. To consider the argument, the paper proposes the cluster model to capture the specific features of Boston Route 128. It represents a model of the universities working with industries to form a cluster of high-technology-based firms. The venture capital accelerates the process of technology commercialisation, giving rise to a new Boston model of innovation management. Policy makers may use the Boston model as a benchmark to evaluate their performance in supporting high-tech industries.

The issue of the cooperation of private industrial firms with universities and the relevant transfer of knowledge is discussed here with special reference to the problems and opportunities that small and medium size enterprises face in such cases. A typology of barriers and facilitators within a broad network framework provides a structural approach to the description of these problems and opportunities. The longitudinal investigation of a case study enables an in-depth consideration of the evolution of barriers and facilitators of collaboration over time. The case indicates a fluid pattern of knowledge generation, transmission and absorption, which is then compared to (and contrasted with) the findings of the existing literature.

This research studies how innovation competences affect the stock of intangibles and facilitate the development of intellectual capital (IC). We develop a theoretical model with these constructs, in which we distinguish two dimensions within innovation competences — Schumpeterian and continuous improvement competences; and three dimensions for IC — human capital, structural capital and relational capital. Theoretical relations are tested in an empirical study carried out in 222 Spanish firms from the Biotechnology and Telecommunications industries. We prove that innovation competences positively affect the stock of intangibles and facilitate the development of relational capital, structural capital and human capital.