International Journal of Innovation Management

In today's business and academic arenas, design is more and more viewed as an important strategic resource. In fact, over the last couple of years, we have seen a real explosion in business and research literature that see scholars and companies alike trying to continuously link design to innovation and business strategy. With this paper, our intent is to understand how companies can take better advantage of this strategic resource, and in particular develop a set of organisational guidelines that can support them in this quest. To accomplish this, we analysed the innovation processes of a set of leading design driven companies in the furniture industry to identify how they develop product innovations. What we found is that they adopt particular practices and innovation approaches by collaborating with a series of interpreters; moreover they structure themselves in what we have defined as linguistic network that can vary according to specific configurations. The focus of this paper is therefore on defining and making explicit the characteristics of the linguistic network able to improve a company's capabilities to access diffused knowledge about socio-cultural models and increase the "exposure" toward context evolutions.

Studies on innovation and creativity have been quite rare, thus far in the sport management literature. In this study, a comparative analysis was conducted between two great inventions — Tsukahara's Vault and Fosbury's Flop. Mitsuo Tsukahara and Dick Fosbury responded to open-ended questions designed to capture various dimensions in the development of their innovations. A content analysis was conducted on the data obtained through this semi-structured interview technique. The comparison between these two cases revealed an amazingly similar pattern in the structure of the innovative process. The major conclusion drawn from this analysis is that the principles of optimisation and creativity-enhancement should be conceived as being complimentary, in the promotion of innovative processes in various areas.

In times of increasing use of project-based structures, the capability of managing and organising projects becomes critical for competition. Previous research has documented the problems and possibilities of cross-project learning and various mechanisms that organisations can use to stimulate and facilitate learning. Moreover, research on project competence and project capabilities has positioned these capabilities within a knowledge-based theory of the firm. This paper tries to integrate these streams of research and attempts to broaden our current conceptual frameworks of how firms develop project competence. Based on an exploratory multiple-case study of six firms, it is suggested that a more fine-grained analysis of competence dynamics is required. We identify three different learning processes that contribute to the competence dynamics operating in project-based organisations. The first one labelled "shifting" revolves around the major shifts in the project operations of the firm. It is suggested that such major shifts play an important role in laying the foundation and rejuvenating the challenges of project organising. The second learning process identified, labelled "adapting", focuses on the continuous learning that takes place within project operations of the firm, between project generation, project organising, project leadership and project teamwork. The third and final learning process — "leveraging" — emphasises the role of knowledge transfer across projects; across similar projects, across different types of projects. It is suggested that empirical research into competence dynamics in project-based organisations should consider all three types of learning processes and further develop our understanding how these processes are linked to each other.

Innovation could be recognised as a key success factor in an increasingly competitive, global economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations among market orientation, innovation strategy, innovative capability and innovation success in small and medium-sized business in developing countries. This study builds a model related to the most important factors that influence mostly innovative capability of firms, such as market orientation, technological orientation and innovation strategy. Then it examines the relationships between these factors and the innovative capability. A practical research was carried out in the Turkish software industry. Analysis, futurity and proactiveness dimensions of innovation strategy influence the innovative capability of software firms. Also, only customer orientation component of market orientation influences the innovative capability of the firms. Effects of other factors are not significant. Results of this study could lead to effective management of innovation for the software firms and benefits for the firms' managers.