International Journal of Innovation Management

Industrial biotechnology is the application of biotechnology for the environment friendly production and processing of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, materials, and bioenergy. The commercial development is mainly driven by multinational enterprises (MNEs), whereas small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contribute primarily to the technological development. The challenge is that generally a technology transfer gap exists between basic research and development (R&D) at universities or research institutions and the commercialisation of the results by established companies. Based on the analysis of 17 case studies from the industrial biotechnology sector, this paper investigates the technology transfer role of spin-offs from universities and research institutions to close the technology transfer gap. Different technology transfer models have been used between established companies and spin-offs after further developing the technology following the spin-off process. Whereas MNEs are very active in making new technologies available both by acquiring spin-offs or engaging them as service providers, SMEs, due to limited financial resources, are more focused on research cooperations with spin-offs, especially by engaging them as service providers.

The purpose of this study is to identify informational elements used in customers' perceptions of a service organisation's innovativeness, specifically in the context of higher education. With data collected from 445 university students, the results show that the information is related to service offering and contact personnel. Essentially, it is possible to say that core service (curriculum) goes along with main staff responsible for providing core service (faculty members). These two inseparable elements exert a predominant effect on customers' perception of innovativeness. For a higher education institution, it is obvious that the key role of the training provided should be highlighted in the institution's strategy to influence or modify the decisions of various groups. Support staff responsible for providing peripheral services should not be neglected in this strategy because of their inherent role in the process of core service delivery. The limitations and research implications of the reported study are also discussed.

Innovation contests allow companies to involve the general public or specific target groups in solving innovation problems. The increasing importance of innovation contests suggests the need for further research on why people become involved in non-compulsory innovation activities, such as innovation contests. The purpose of this paper was to examine which motivation orientations explain such participation and the quality of the ideas submitted. Drawing on motivation theories, this paper discusses the links between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and problem-solver participation as well as solution quality. Our findings suggest that different levels of participation are driven by different motivation orientations. Low performers participated in contests based on a rational understanding of the extrinsic benefits and perceived effort required, as did non-participants. However, such extrinsic reasoning is insufficient for high-performer motivation; high performers participate in the task due to its intrinsic value. These findings have important implications for both researchers and practitioners.

This paper investigates the development of breakthrough technological innovations by analysing the individual, organisational, and contextual forces and dynamics shaping their emergence. To this end, I use a longitudinal case study of Fiat Group's development of common rail technology for diesel injection systems. Thereby, by presenting and discussing its story and evolution, I contribute to the existing literature on innovation offering a multilevel perspective of the diverse and heterogeneous factors interaction to generate breakthroughs.

In an important effort to understand what enhances innovation, the extent to which innovative actions rest on organisational values, beliefs and interests is particularly crucial. This study analyses the impact of organisational culture — specifically, the firm's entrepreneurial and market orientation — on different innovation dimensions. It also considers the role of business size in the relationship between organisational culture and innovation. An empirical study with a sample of 440 variously sized enterprises from five industrial sectors in Spain demonstrates the relationship between market orientation and entrepreneurship and innovation. Business size does not cause the relationship, though it moderates the relationship regarding management and marketing innovations.

Co-creation is a special type of collaboration that co-opts individuals in an innovative way for creating value. Engaging in co-creation can result in mutual benefit for the participants as they obtain favourable end results or exchange knowledge and skills but may be challenging when an individual may not be ready or willing to co-create. This makes it imperative that an individual's readiness to co-create (RTCC) is understood and factored into the management of co-creative processes. Drawing from research on readiness to collaborate, factors that determine RTCC are examined in this article. Specifically, the relationship between constructs of individual value system (IVS), organisational value system (OVS), contextual-environmental conditions (EC), intrapersonal characteristics (IntraCharac), interpersonal characteristics (InterCharac), and RTCC are examined. Post confirmatory factor analysis indicated that most of the variables of the six constructs had loaded on a particular factor except for IntraCharac that loaded only 2 variables. Based on these results, multiple regressions were performed, which indicated that environmental conditions and InterCharac did have significant influence on RTCC whereas IntraCharac did not have a strong effect. Managerial implications and potential future research directions are also highlighted.

In this paper, we analyse the diffusion mechanism of wind power over the last two decades in the leading countries, namely China, the United States, Germany, India and Spain. For each country, three prominent models of technology diffusion (Logistic, Bass and Gompertz) were fitted and the best model is identified based on AIC, BIC and adjusted R² criteria. The selected diffusion model in each case is then characterised with respect to the policy mechanisms. Often, research follows the "one size fits all" approach and tends to propose one model to define diffusion for all. Here we find that it is not necessarily true. The study then proposes the causal relationship between parameters of the selected model and corresponding policies along with the socioeconomic structure for a country to corroborate our findings. Further, forecasts were generated to predict the saturation point of the diffusion path and solutions are proposed to expand the diffusion curve.

Service firms need to continuously innovate their service offerings in order to remain competitive in constantly changing market conditions. Successful innovators utilise current information technology (IT) to access service innovation capacity and knowledge which can be located internal or external to their organisation. In this paper, we develop and test a theoretical framework that explains how IT can contribute to service innovation performance, and finally, to service provision performance. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, we differentiate between sensing (SN), seizing (SZ), and transformation (TF) as the key abilities in service innovation. With our theoretical model, we can explain almost 40% of the variance in service innovation performance (SIP) (R² = 0.3955) and provide evidence for the multi-faceted and significant effects of IT. In particular, we are able to show a significant influence of inter-organisational IT support on SN and SZ abilities while organisational IT support has a significant impact on TF abilities.

The formation of idea generation groups through the combination of dyads, rather than individuals, is examined. The results show that pairwise group structuring is an effective method by which to reduce evaluation apprehension within idea generation groups composed of managerial participants in a controlled experimental environment. The integration of solitary ideators into an interactive group in nominal group technique (NGT) is shown to be problematic in terms of participants' evaluation apprehension. The study's sample consisted of 72 middle and upper managers from a broad range of functions and industries. This demographic is heavily involved with cross-functional collaboration in industry. The results open up a new research area and suggest that pairwork within groups be leveraged to optimise creativity in groups by addressing common problems such as evaluation apprehension, the common knowledge effect, hidden profile and free riding.

New product development (NPD) is a path not a destination; a path that organisations, more than ever, should follow to survive in the present unpredictable and dynamic market. Prospector organisations, especially those whom are leaders in their own industrial sector, implement some factors to improve new product success rate. In this regard, by applying a sequential mixed method approach, 13 key factors are identified and categorised into managerial, structural and organisational, process and environmental factors. Through identifying, analysing and verifying importance of these factors, this research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical studies and practical subjects of NPD.

Alliance portfolios are an important source of competitive advantage for firms. Diverse resources of partners contribute to enhancing firms' performance, but relationships among the firms' partners also influence the performance. This paper, employing an embeddedness lens, aims to examine how these relationships influence the firms' innovation performance. We confirm two-sided effects of embeddedness within alliance portfolios. While the focal firms increase the size of their portfolios, dense relationships among their partners increase the performance and competitive relationships weaken the performance. For the empirical test, we collected data on 1863 technology alliances between US biotechnology and multinational pharmaceutical companies. This study highlights how firms have to consider relationships among their partners when configuring their alliance portfolios to maximise innovation performance.

As innovation is often created in networks, a company's business partners influence its innovative outcome. Although many studies investigate innovation networks as a means to explore and exploit external knowledge, virtually no research has focused on the characteristics of external partners — in particular their innovativeness. This study considers axial and lateral corporate partners and investigates the differential impact of the partners' innovativeness on a company's knowledge stocks (market, technological, organisational, process, and product knowledge).

Drawing on the literature on inter-organisational networks and using survey data from the manufacturing industry, the results extend theory by revealing that not only relationships with partners but also their properties — partner innovativeness — are important for a company's knowledge stock. In essence our results suggest that the innovativeness of a firm's axial and lateral partners positively yet diversely influences its various knowledge stocks.

Trust within teams is a central performance driver in product innovation. In this paper, we examine the antecedents to and performance implications of trust in firms engaged in radical innovation compared to those working towards incremental innovations. Our findings suggest that systematic processes and structures are significantly linked to trust in firms conducting radical innovation, but not so in firms conducting incremental innovation. Our findings also indicate that trust is significantly linked to business performance in radical innovation firms, although we do not find that the link between trust and performance is stronger for radical innovation firms, compared to incremental innovation firms. A central contribution of our study is therefore a better understanding of how trust operates differently in radical innovation firms, compared to incremental innovation firms. Our findings are of interest to research on radical innovation management, as well as to researchers studying the role of trust in a context of product innovation.

The concept of absorptive capacity was introduced by Cohen and Levinthal in 1989 as an important condition for high innovativeness. Since then it has been enhanced through reconceptualisations and extended by various empirical studies. Despite the growing interest in the concept, the processes and practices of absorptive capacity have largely remained a "black box". To fill this gap, the paper develops a practice-based approach of absorptive capacity and provides an in-depth empirical investigation to shed more light on the practice of knowledge absorption. Drawing on the case studies of two German high-tech firms, the paper focusses on practices designed by the management to facilitate knowledge absorption and shows how these practices were actually enacted. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the complex construction of absorptive capacity and gives useful insights for a successful management of knowledge absorption.

Research suggests the firm's structural and contextual attributes that foster ambidexterity, but theory and testing on their combined effects on knowledge creation, ambidexterity and financial performance remain rather poor. By using a theoretical perspectives built on organisation design and the knowledge-based view of the firm, this article takes into consideration firms' exploration attainments and exploitation initiatives in relation to both their ability to create knowledge in innovation processes and their capacity to apply it into product innovation. Using data from a survey on 112 hi-tech firms in Italy, results show that organisational context attributes influence firm's degree of ambidexterity in knowledge creation in the innovation processes, but it does not have a direct influence on the actual degree of ambidexterity in innovation development. A fundamental condition to ambidexterity in innovation development is the structural separation of exploration and exploitation innovation initiatives. Specifically, we found that structural separation of these initiatives within the organisation directly affects ambidexterity and leads to higher sales growth than when firms achieve ambidexterity through an appropriate organisational context solely. These findings provide a rich explanation of the way firms develop ambidexterity and can obtain superior economic performance from it.