International Journal of Innovation Management

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.

Customer co-creation is a phenomenon, whose relevance for innovative technology-based services (TBS) has been acknowledged both by scientific and management practice. However, empirical research on this topic is scarce. Above all others, the lack of a good metric for this construct to establish a common ground for empirical research has hampered progress to date. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a construct measuring the willingness of a customer to engage in co-creation (hereafer, WCC) of innovative, TBS.

This article provides a thorough literature review on customer co-creation, proposes a scale to measure the willingness to co-create (WCC) innovative, TBS and reports the results of a validation process using expert judges, an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The results of our studies show that the scale has good psychometric properties and that its relationships with other constructs and consumer adoption behaviour conform to theoretical expectations.

The paper explores process management standards in software development organisations. It centres on the question how organisations manage the compliance with process standards as well as the need for ongoing technical innovation at the same time. It refers to former studies where it was concluded that process management standards tend to crowd out technical innovations in organisations. By reconsidering the coupling approach of Orton and Weick (1990) we show based on four case studies that it does not apply to those organisations which allow innovating activities being loosely coupled or decoupled from the reigning standard script. These organisations sustain their chances for incremental and fundamental technical innovations. Dealing with loosely coupled or decoupled innovating activities implies a dialectical standard management. It means that potentially contradictory and conflict-ridden activities like standardised practices and innovating activities are manageable by specific institutional, temporarily limited and formal/informal solutions. Furthermore, we scrutinise in this paper the decoupling discussion of some parts of the standard management literature. Standard decoupling is often seen as an unfortunate, but necessary solution to cope with external pressure for internal standardisation. In contrast to this, we develop an understanding where standard decoupling is not defined as a set of activities without affecting the 'technical core' of an organisation. (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000b; Meyer and Rowan, 1967). Rather, decoupling is seen as a temporary and locally limited situation of an innovating subsystem within an organisation where it is allowed to detach from reigning standardised practices and to test and develop innovative ideas under less formalised conditions.

Firms increasingly enter into business alliances in an effort to manage the innovation process and with a view to achieving better outcomes. The process therefore likely benefits from greater alliance learning, which can help transform alliance creativity and absorptive capacity into innovative outputs and thus a sustainable advantage for the alliance firms. Survey data collected from 389 Australian firms confirm that alliance creativity and absorptive capacity affect alliance innovation through the mediating role of alliance learning. In contrast, a test of an alternative moderating perspective reveals that alliance learning does not play a significant moderating role in these relationships. Although this study uses a cross-sectional, key-informant design, it offers important insights for research and practice.

The purpose of the paper is to give an in-depth account of how Volvo Group is working with enabling open services innovation in the organization. It shows that implementing servitization and open innovation within an engineering-based industry such as heavy vehicles manufacturing, is a matter of substantial 'groundwork' on several levels. This 'groundwork' involves substantial analytical work as well as vast mobilizing of internal organizational support. The paper also empirically connects the notions of open innovation and servitization in a theoretical discussion. The article contributes to the emerging field of open innovation by providing an empirical case from a multinational corporation acting within a 'traditional' industry. It highlights the strong efforts organizations are facing when enacting servitization and open innovation strategies within established practices.

The dynamic business environment is seen by many as requiring a significant change in our thinking about leadership. Shared leadership is one alternative to the 'classic' vertical model and implies that either no individual performs all of the leadership functions or that within an organisation, there is a set of individuals who collectively perform such functions. This emerging model of leadership is seen to be of particular relevance to the management of new ventures; however, both the construct of shared leadership and leadership within new ventures remain under-researched areas. This paper reports the results of a pilot study that employed a case study approach to analyse the factors integral to the appointment of a CEO, the criteria upon which founders and CEOs make their decisions and the process by which decisions are made after a CEO has been appointed.

It has been documented in the prior research that there is a gap between technology development and product development. We explore a set of propositions through review of previous research and a case study from the semiconductor industry. Although the literature suggests that for successful integration of technologies into products, formal technology integration process and technology portfolio management are highly recommended to prevent a misalignment between technology development and product development processes, our results are indicating that formality of these processes may not be necessary. However, recognition of the importance of the integration process and development of organisational capability to allow the process evolve with various statuses of technological readiness as well as organisational maturity, are critical to successful NPD.

In the framework of disruptive technology, a new product plays the role of a disruptor when it improves quality and captures exisiting consumers from the incumbent. While the profit of the new product typically increases as it moves into the more lucrative segment of the market, such an upstream movement leaves more consumers at the low end unserved, who may become a potential market for even newer products that will disrupt the new product. In this paper, we use modelling approach to study how the firm may deal with this dilemma. In our model setting, we are able to show that the disruptor may balance its profit and risk of being disrupted by appropriately slowing down its migration into the high end. If migration to the high end is strategically important and should not be slowed down, the firm can still defend against disruption by offering a low end product, which is a better option than pure price cutting. Finally, we find that the accessory dimension makes it more likely to have disruption, which explains why new disruptors tend to be superior on accessory dimensions. The firm has more incentive to invest in cost reduction rather than to improve an accessory dimension, because cost reduction helps in capturing more wealthy customers, while improving an accessory dimension helps in capturing more poor consumers. So the disruptors are more likely to focus on disrupting because it is more profitable, rather than investing to improve the accessory dimension to defend against newer disruptors. The existing literature on disruptive technology has so far focused on the interaction between the product that disrupts and the product that is disrupted. Our analysis sheds light on a different angle of the phenomenon, that is, how a product that disrupts and that is disrupted simultaneously.

The intense global competition, rapid technological changes, and higher consumer demands along with increasing uncertainty and risk; all threaten the life of the companies and force them to be more creative and innovative. Thus, business world needs innovative ideas more than ever. Hence, companies struggle to increase their innovative capacities in order to be more competitive. At the same time, performing innovation is not an easy task, it is a process that requires tremendous effort and changes in several parts of business.

The number of studies on innovation has increased. Different aspects of innovation from theoretical and practical points of views have been studied so far. This study aims to investigate the effect of knowledge sharing enablers on innovation capability along with the relationship between innovation capability and innovation performance. The findings from the research revealed that some of the components of knowledge sharing enablers have positive effect on the innovation capability, while others have not. Also, remarkable findings on significant positive affect of innovation capability on innovation performance were obtained.