International Journal of Innovation Management

Creative deviance, i.e., the violation of a managerial order to stop working on a new idea, is an emerging topic in innovation research. Whereas the outcomes of this nonconforming behaviour are inherently ambiguous, its importance for corporations’ innovative capability is undisputed. We complement prior research on the organisational-level determinants of creative deviance by studying its individual-level antecedents. We hypothesise that risk propensity as a personality trait is positively related, whereas allocentrism as a personal value orientation and organisational commitment as a personal attitude are negatively related to creative deviance. Risk propensity is considered the strongest predictor, as it affects creative deviance both directly and indirectly through allocentrism and commitment. Data from 457 employees in a German high-tech corporation support our hypotheses. Our findings contribute to research on innovation management and organisational behaviour while yielding managerial recommendations for leadership and recruitment.

This study aims to enrich our knowledge of the influences that social networks and capabilities of entrepreneurial teams have on the engagement of external seed investors by exploring academic entrepreneurial teams. It analyses the capabilities and characteristics of social networks of entrepreneurial teams based upon resource-based view and the conceptual model of social networks. The results from an examination of the sample of 181 Spanish university spin-offs demonstrate that by exploiting social networks an entrepreneurial team can shape its capabilities which, in turn, improve its ability to access various types of external seed capital sources. Thus, the paper has implications for universities in training and policy development to support spin-offs’ activities, especially to build entrepreneurial teams with capabilities to pitch for external seed capital.

This study articulates and tests the direct and indirect relationships between the company’s innovation orientation (IO), its collection and dissemination (C&D) of external information among the organisational members, and the level of success of its innovation collaborations involving customers, suppliers, and research organisations. Our conceptual framework is developed based on an integration of the literatures on organisational capabilities, marketing, innovation, and management control. We empirically test these relationships on a sample of 117 small-to-medium enterprises (SME) operating in Low-to-Medium-Tech (LMT) manufacturing industries. Partial Least Squares (PLS) results reveal that the relationship between the firm’s IO and the success of its customer collaborations is partially mediated by the C&D of external information. We also find that the relationship between the firm’s IO and the success of supplier collaborations is direct, and that the C&D of external information has no effect on the success of such collaborations. Finally the relationship between IO, C&D of external information and the success of research organisation collaborations is found to be indirect. Overall, these findings suggest that developing successful innovation collaborations in LMT sectors requires that SME managers start by building an internal culture that promotes innovation, learning and openness to the external environment.

Patent ownership Fragmentation following the U.S. pro-patent shifts has built overlapping intellectual property rights or patent thickets. This has made the use of others’ innovations costlier due to transaction costs, licensing fees, and hold-up. Using panel data on 2,441 public U.S. manufacturing firms for 1976–2002, I find that patent thickets lower firms’ expected profit and their market value. I also find that firms with a large patent portfolio experience a smaller effect, likely because stronger bargaining position lowers the hold-up likelihood. There is no systematic time effect from patent thickets on firms’ market value with a large patent portfolio size.

External partners, such as suppliers, are important in the case of innovation by entrepreneurial startup firms. Due to their limited resources and liability of newness, these startups must rely on outside partners for resources and legitimacy to succeed and indeed to survive. Yet, few studies have specifically examined, or provided guidance on, how startups can increase supplier involvement in their innovation projects. Drawing from Transactional Cost Economics and supplier involvement literature, this study develops a contingency model, in which supplier’s equity share and supplier’s trust moderate the relationship of supplier’s involvement in a startup’s innovation with supplier’s specific investment and startup’s effort in qualification of supplier’s ability. We empirically test the model using data collected from 166 innovation projects of 166 startups. Our results show that supplier involvement is pivotal to startup’s product innovation performance, which is consistent with prior literature on supplier involvement. Interestingly, our results further reveal that supplier’s specific investment and startup’s effort in qualification of supplier’s ability lead to higher levels of supplier involvement only when supplier’s equity share and supplier’s trust are sufficiently high.

Practitioners increasingly use innovation contests to harness the knowledge of external crowds for internal innovation purposes in exchange for prize money. While some innovation contests have the objective to attract professional experts from distant fields to obtain technical solutions, other innovation contests primarily target customers or users in order to generate new product and service ideas. Hence, external crowds differ substantially across, but also within, innovation contests in terms of personal needs in the innovation domain. Drawing upon the private-collective model of innovation, we argue that participants’ “userness” in terms of personal needs gives rise to non-monetary reward expectations and collectively oriented participation as opposed to the private pursuit of monetary rewards emphasised in innovation contests. Hence, the effectiveness of monetary rewards in innovation contests is bound to certain participants and behaviours. In particular, participants weigh non-monetary rewards more strongly against monetary rewards (1) when their personal need in the innovation domain is high, and (2) when choosing to engage collectively in evaluating and commenting on other contributions as opposed to submitting own contributions. We find support for these hypotheses in an empirical study where user participation in a real innovation contest is regressed on survey-based measures of expected rewards that users perceive prior to the contest. The observed effect sizes of the proposed shifts from monetary to non-monetary rewards are so pronounced that for a given level of personal need and a given type of participation behaviour only either reward type is effective and a compensational relation between both types of rewards does not exist. Monetary rewards are even detrimental and lower user participation if the two proposed boundary conditions are taken together.

Even though the effects of leadership and affective commitment on innovative work behaviours (IWBs) have been thoroughly researched, little is known about the interactive effects of these factors on IWBs. Based on data collected from 263 respondents from public and private organisations in Lesotho, the present study examines if affective commitment moderates the relationship between leadership and IWB. Drawing on literatures across management and innovation research domains, the study proposes and finds evidence that affective commitment moderates the relationship between leadership and IWB such that the relationship is stronger for affectively committed employees, while being relatively weaker for less affectively committed employees. The results also reveal that while leadership and management level have the main effects on IWB, affective commitment has no effect on IWB. Overall, the study responds to calls for examining the joint effects of person and context characteristics on IWBs. Drawing on our results, we discuss implications for theory and practice.

Strategic orientations (SOs) and absorptive capacity can significantly enhance innovation capacity in manufacturing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This study explores the relationship of SOs i.e., Market Orientations (MOs), Entrepreneurial Orientations (EOs) and Customer Orientations (COs) to absorptive capacity on the one hand, and to innovation on the other hand. The study also delves into the issue of how absorptive capacity mediates the effects of SOs on innovation in manufacturing SMEs from emerging countries’ perspective. This study uses a cross-sectional design and quantitative data collected through a structured interview of top managers from 360 manufacturing SMEs. The findings show that MO, EO and CO have positive and significant effects on innovation and that absorptive capacity partially mediates SOs’ effects on innovation.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the difficulties that industry in general and agri-food firms in particular have when it comes to innovating. The focus of this analysis is temporal and it covers the periods 2004, 2008 and 2012. This allows assessing whether these difficulties have intensified, declined or remained stable. To this end, we have applied correspondence analysis, multivariate technique similar to principal components analysis designed to explore relationships among categorical variables. We have used the PITEC database, the Spanish component of the Community Innovation Survey from Eurostat. The results are differentiated according to ownership of the company. Finally, the results obtained for the industry in general and agri-food companies are compared. In both cases, the innovation has been affected by the economic crisis, but agri-food companies have performed better than other sectors, although the significance of the economic and financial obstacles depends on the characteristics of the company, its ownership and origin of capital.

This paper highlights the relevance of innovation in small firms based on university business incubators in Portugal. Ever since Schumpeter indicated innovation to be the main economic driver of economic development and a critical factor in the development and performance of companies, a number of authors have discussed this phenomenon but there is still no consensus on how it operates. Through statistical analysis, the study focuses on a sample of 243 Portuguese companies based on incubators linked to or promoted by universities. It was concluded that product innovation is most significant in an incubation environment, and also that the origin of businesses and the development of R&D activities determine the type of innovation generated. However, most of the companies surveyed are not engaged in R&D activities. We propose some policy measures and lessons for management.