International Journal of Innovation Management

In recent years, the phenomenon of open innovation has been on the rise in established firms, especially in terms of collaboration with startups. While the success factors of open innovation endeavours have been researched intensively, how collaborations are established is not well understood. Furthermore, there is a lack of research regarding asymmetric partnerships in open innovation, occurring when incumbents and startups collaborate. This study used a qualitative research design to approach the question of how incumbents select startups as partners in open innovation. The data incorporate the perspectives of both incumbents and startups along with the views of external experts. The findings are consolidated into a process model of partner selection for open innovation.

Many innovations result from firms following theories and models of innovation such as disruptive innovation, blue ocean innovation, etc. Yet, there are many other innovations that are not developed through these models and rather stem from technological pushes and research and development efforts. The commercial success of these innovations is contingent upon existence of a good fit between the technological innovation and the accompanying business model. To date, this fit has been mostly sought through trials and errors. In this paper, we develop a framework for analytically choosing and aligning two important components of the business model — value proposition and target market — to fit the technological innovations. We illustrate the framework using case examples of products in the market.

Although the concept of open innovation has gained much attention in the field of innovation management, few studies have so far theorized how such initiatives are being enacted in practice. This study is based on an inductive empirical analysis of how AstraZeneca, a large biopharmaceutical corporation, implemented an open innovation initiative called BioVentureHub. In the paper we introduce a theoretical model of open innovation enactment based on four interrelated processes. Three of these processes — conceptualization, mobilization, and operationalization — include activities related to preparing for open innovation, what we call open innovation groundwork. The fourth process — facilitation — involves translating the groundwork into actual open innovation.

The study contributes to the broader open innovation domain by its detailed account and theorizing of how open innovation is established in practice. Our methodological approach complements the previous research on open innovation that mostly are based on retrospective accounts or are conceptual in nature. Moreover, the study contributes by illustrating a novel initiative from the life science industry, where open innovation is frequently discussed but where still only a few empirical examples are found in academic literature

Healthcare workers’ innovative work behaviour plays a key role in generating innovation. To date determinants of innovative work behaviour are not completely detected and there is a call for additional empirical evidence on organizational-level factors influencing individual’s innovation.

This study empirically explores the relationships between organizational climate, organisation’s openness to innovation, and innovative work behaviour in the context of a public sector healthcare organization.

A survey has been conducted on employees of a large Italian public sector hospital. Data collected on 560 professionals have been analyzed through Structural Equation Modelling technique.

The results show that organisational climate affects employees’ innovative work behavior both directly and indirectly through organisation’s openness to innovation. Specifically our findings highlight that organization’s openness to innovation partially mediates the relationship between organizational climate and employees’ innovative work behavior.

The results should lead managers to consider the importance of organizational climate and openness to innovation as effective levers to pull in order to improve employees’ innovative work behavior.

Previous studies often assume that business model innovation (BMI) is reflected in an entrepreneurial business model design. We assume that business model reconfiguration (BMR) takes place in more nuanced types and does not always lead to (radical) BMI. By undertaking a mixed methods study with 213 respectively 16 SMEs from the electronic industry, we uncover six basically different types of BMRs and discuss their performance implications. By this, we shape the current understanding of BMR and shed light on variety and implications of different types of BMRs. Our configuration study indicates that firms achieve superior performance when implementing a radically new business model reflected in a new configuration of all three components of the business model: value creation, value proposition, and value capture. Second, BMR can take place in types where only some parts of the business model are extensively changed, while others are only slightly adapted.

Buying companies increasingly need suppliers that significantly contributes to their innovation and capability resources. Customer attractiveness and the strategic fit with a supplier are likely to play an important role in new product development projects. However, no research has addressed and simultaneously investigated the interplay of strategic fit, customer attractiveness, and supplier’s contribution to buyer’s innovativeness. This study fills these gaps by carrying out a quantitative survey study among 81 members of the branch organization for the Dutch metal industry. The findings largely confirm the positive relations between the core concepts of this study. The results suggest that purchasing professionals should invest in customer attractiveness, rather than forcing business partners into coercive supplier development programs.

With the development of technological innovation and global economic integration, high-tech enterprises across the world have formed numerous innovation ecosystems with similar natural ecological characteristics. As a result, competition has shifted from single enterprise to supply chain network, and ultimately, to innovation ecosystem, which involves more participants and roles across multiple industries. The current study distinguished two innovation capabilities (internal innovation potential and collaborative open innovation), and two sources of innovation capabilities (internal integration and external integration) along with discussing the specific relationships among integration activities, innovation capabilities, and Hi-tech SMEs’ financing performance. It further explored how interactions between within and cross firm-boundary activities and collaboration exert influence on SMEs’ financing performance and manifested the importance of external collaborative networks to the competitiveness of SMEs.

A case research approach is employed for investigating and comparing managerial perceptions of the three types of innovation (service, product, and process innovations) within the context of cross-functional network of a European steel manufacturing firm. The insights result in the development of a typology of innovation projects based on origin, context, scope, benefits, and degree of complexity. The findings embedded in Resource Based View and Service Dominant Logic, reveal divergent aspects of the three types of innovation such as disparate reasons for undertaking each type of innovation and distinct internal and external success factors, as well as convergent aspects of the innovation types such as similar challenges. This research explores the three types of innovation in a single firm in a single study and provides a middle ground for the two extant schools of thought (one viewing product, service, and process innovations as entirely different processes and the other viewing all three as essentially same processes).

While investigating organisational factors related to a firm’s ability to innovate, this study identifies two new antecedents of absorptive capacity. Drawing from literatures on innovation management and organisational studies, the paper puts forward a model linking absorptive capacity to a unit’s cognitive diversity and cohesiveness, empirically testing their effects on potential absorptive capacity (PACAP) and realised absorptive capacity (RACAP). Statistical tests are conducted using original survey data collected in the healthcare industry. Future research and implications for practitioners are discussed.

Innovation-oriented firms encourage their staff to generate ideas, but lack the resources to sponsor them all. Entrepreneurially minded employees may respond to this discrepancy with creative deviance, i.e., pursue ideas despite managerial orders to stop. We elucidate this understudied flipside of corporate entrepreneurship by theorising and testing organisational and individual antecedents to creative deviance. Strain theory leads us to hypothesise that organisational support for innovation reduces creative deviance. Based on achievement goal theory, we conjecture that mastery goals foster creative deviance. These predictors are expected to interact in their impact on creative deviance. Data from 659 employees support our hypotheses. Our study contributes to corporate entrepreneurship theory by expounding an important, but so far understudied form of innovative behaviour, extends strain theory by showing how individual traits can reinforce or mitigate the structural strain created by organisations, and advances research on achievement goals by connecting mastery achievement orientation to deviant behaviour. In terms of practical implications, our study indicates how leaders may promote compliant innovation through organisational support and how they can increase person-job fit by screening candidates’ achievement goals during recruitment.