International Journal of Innovation Management

Innovation is widely recognized as a major driver of long-term corporate growth. Successful innovators who manage to dominate new markets enjoy Schumpeterian rents for their inventions. How then can a firm dominate a new market? Two streams of literature have proposed opposite answers to this question.

The First Mover approach indicates that by setting up a strong differentiation strategy, companies are supposed to create a new area where profits abound. This approach is supported especially by Kim and Mauborgne (2004) who coined the term Blue Ocean to describe it.

The Fast Second approach, defended by Markides and Geroski (2005), contends, on the contrary, that companies should not try to become pioneers, but should target the newly created market in second position, and colonize it.

But neither Blue Ocean nor Fast Second are able to convincingly explain successful market domination. Our study of 24 innovation cases suggests that innovation which leads to market domination is instead achieved by using four kinds of breakthroughs, separately of simultaneously.

Lean Transformation and Innovation have both been touted as strategies that are essential to the long-term survival of organizations. The question of whether the two approaches can be used simultaneously remains unanswered. This paper is the first step at deriving a theory of lean systems of innovation that combines the notions of lean enterprise transformation with that of innovation. The descriptive understanding of Rockwell Collins developed in this paper, draws on publicly available material to support the identifications of the key elements of a strategic system of innovation. Our analysis highlights the successful use of technology scanning, internal R&D, and open innovation within the innovation system at Rockwell Collins. Furthermore, the existence of a shared value proposition, a strong organizational culture that recognized and rewarded innovation, and the requisite organizational infrastructure serve as key enablers to architecting a strategic system of innovation that is reflective of lean enterprise thinking.

The paper describes findings from an interview study about intellectual property management practices in inter-organisational relationships. A total of 40 companies and public organisations in Finland and in the Netherlands were studied using semi-structured face-to-face interviews. The organisations represented different sizes and fields of industry. About 90% of the interviewed companies collaborated in their innovation efforts. However, the companies generally mentioned that the management of intellectual property and knowledge is very challenging when other actors are involved in parts of the innovation development process. Confidentiality agreements are typically used to ensure knowledge protection in these relationships. Patenting is important for about half of the companies, but joint patenting is not a common practice. Companies in Finland and in the Netherlands are seen to behave very similarly with regards to the collaboration activities and intellectual property (IP) management in these relationships.

Prior research has shown that the level of communication has an effect on the learning outcomes in R&D alliances and, subsequently, on performance. The level of communication depends on issues such as the systems that enhance knowledge sharing and the factors that deter knowledge flows, such as tacitness of knowledge and (deliberate) barriers set up to limit knowledge transfer. Innovations and value can only be created through sufficiently open knowledge sharing. But on the other hand, too open knowledge sharing might outrun the value gained by innovations if the knowledge lost would leave the knowledge sharing firm vulnerable. Yet, there is still a lack of understanding on which factors are responsible of the level of communication and to what extent. In particular, it has often been forgotten that HRM-related mechanisms are not only functional within firms, but also between firms. Thus, in this study, the HRM-related mechanisms that contribute to both of these areas are examined by using empirical quantitative data gathered from 83 Finnish R&D intensive firms.

The proposed consumer-driven innovation approach allows for the creation of individual communications with heterogeneous customers. It utilizes Rule Developing Experimentation (a modified conjoint analysis-based approach) to create a database of messages specific to the product and to segment consumers based on the patterns of individual utilities assigned to the different test elements. The paper introduces a new approach to identify a small subset of classification messages that allows for an actionable and parsimonious classification of any new population into pattern-based segments to achieve better targeting.

The approach is demonstrated by a case study of identifying segment membership for better messages targeting prospective customers of a KIA car dealership.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the existing methods of building new product concepts in a qualitative "two-case" case study with action research approach combined with method comparison. Companies need an effective method to create radical product concepts and product visions. The commonly used focus group method is too simplistic for achieving deep understanding about the user needs. Innovation competitions are seen as a solution to the following major industry challenges: ineffectiveness of traditional market research, structural innovation gap, closed innovation paradigm, and the low amount, low quality and low variance of innovation opportunities. A new design for next generation innovation competition, the "InnoCoop" method, is introduced. InnoCoop produces more holistic product concepts, involves management in participation, is active in terms of working methods, offers more surprise elements, and produces more creative ideas. Traditional method produces singular, but concrete ideas and is more passive in terms of working methods.

The promise of customers as an external resource for new-product development (NPD) has been recognized in theory and practice for a long time. Technological progress has increased the interaction between companies and users. Yet the involvement of users in NPD depends on the ability of decision-makers to act as boundary spanners. There is a cognitive distance between NPD decision-makers and users. The larger this distance is, the more novel information is contained in user inputs. True open innovation requires that these cognitive distant inputs are treated in NPD. We find that decision-maker openness is significant for NPD openness to be true. Successful collaboration in form of innovations builds on involvement of launching and lead users in NPD. Our analyses show that decision-maker openness facilitates the involvement process. Further, low decision-maker openness traps the implementation of open innovation.

In this paper, we empirically explain how scientific knowledge assimilated from academia affects corporate performance, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry of Japan. We use balanced panel data on 46 pharmaceutical firms in Japan for the period 1992–2005. Then, we introduce a new concept, propensity to capture basic research (PCBR), to index how much scientific knowledge firms have assimilated from universities and public research institutes. We use this index to verify whether absorption of such knowledge influences corporate performance. According to econometric analysis, PCBR is positively significant for patent applications and patent efficiency but not for number of approved drugs. This obviously implies that scientific knowledge assimilated from academia is effective for technological performance in firms. Moreover, the results suggest how R&D is structured in the organizational setup of Japanese pharmaceutical firms.

This study, through bibliometric data, adopts the concept of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) to apply in publication of scientific fields for observing the feature of scientific capacity of a nation. Following that, we utilize a hierarchical clustering method to conduct national clustering according to the RCA scores of publication in 24 scientific fields of each nation. A nation can thoroughly review its relative position, identify other nations with the same characteristics, and understand different clusters' features of scientific capacity. The result also provides a reference that enables researchers to review, explore, and learn about the factors behind the innovation system in the representative clusters or nations. By leveraging the clustering result, this knowledge also allows the nation to grasp opportunities to create innovation by cooperating with other nations that have different comparative advantages. As a result, by accumulating innovation capacity in these research network collaborations, the nation can maintain its innovation momentum and then forge into the innovation lead constantly.