International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

Dealing with knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) has become an important strategy for many firms. Services that heavily rely on professional knowledge are needed by Japanese manufacturing corporations (JMCs) for solving different problems. This article explores the impact of the utilization of KIBS on the innovation of JMCs in Japan. The goal of the paper is threefold: first, we focus on the different divisions of JMCs that have dealt with KIBS and analyze the impact of KIBS on their innovation respectively; second, we separate the types of innovation into radical innovation and incremental innovation and then analyze what and how the service delivery method contributes to each type of innovation; and finally we discuss in more depth the details of an efficient service delivery method. The results show that first, KIBS contribute more to the radical innovation of a client rather than incremental innovation and second, face-to-face is the most efficient method of service delivery from KIBS to the JMCs.

Is there a benefit to encourage more surrogates to take scientific discoveries to commercial markets in lieu of technologists or in support of technologists? This paper reports on a survey that contrasted two groups of technology entrepreneurs. The first group includes technologists who start companies based on their technology whereas the second group is made of surrogate entrepreneurs who "adopt" someone else's technology and build companies around them with or without the help of the original technical innovator. The results indicate that technologists favored technology issues whereas surrogates were more interested in market issues. These behaviors led to differences in the groups' emphases, success factors, and funding. The recommendations for R&D organizations include a prescription for encouraging more surrogate entrepreneurs to move technological innovations into successful companies.

A qualitative empirical study explores the psychological process by which transportation consumers adopt alternatives to single occupancy vehicles. The study's findings give rise to the Motive-Technology-Belief (MTB) framework, a theory that conceives of technology adoption in terms of three mental structures: motives are inner mental reasons; technologies are tools that pertain to motives; and beliefs are associations between motives and/or technologies. Their behavioral interactions are governed by three conscious processes: selecting is the process of choosing a tool in response to an immediate need; evaluating is the process of forming beliefs about tools; and maintaining is the process of determining the functional status of tools. They are augmented by five unconscious auxiliary processes: perceiving, focusing, framing, consolidating, and acting.

The primary contribution of this paper is the first coherent theory that explains some of the inner mental processes pertaining to technology adoption. However, the study described in this paper also combines existing theory with original field research to lay the foundation for a more comprehensive causal theory of the adoption process that will provide a step-by-step explanation of how events or life experiences cause a consumer's beliefs about a technology to change over time. Finally, the study identifies evaluating, selecting, maintaining, and the auxiliary processes that govern motivation as fundamental "microlaws" of innovation i.e. regular rules describing the generating processes of emergent innovations.

Open source (OS) has raised significant attention in industrial practice and in scholarly research as a new and successful mode of product development. This paper is among the first to study open source development processes outside their original context, the software industry. In particular, we investigate the development of tangible products in so-called open design projects. We study how open design projects address the challenges usually put forward in the literature as barriers to the open development of tangible products. The analysis rests on the comparative qualitative investigation of four cases from different industries. We find that, subject to certain contingencies, open design processes can be organized to resemble OSS development processes to a considerable degree. Some practices are established specifically to uphold OS principles in the open design context, while others starkly differ from those found in OSS development. Our discussion focusses on different aspects of modularity as well as the availability of low-cost tools.

The approaches to support innovation in industry, including ICT tools, have experienced tremendous changes in last decades and are likely to be a subject of further evolution. Many research trends could be observed that are likely to provide new innovation approaches and effective means to support such new innovation processes. This paper provides an overview of some of the key trends in product/process innovation in industry. The emphasis is on new approaches for innovation that are already emerging and will find their wide application in industry. Special emphasis is made upon ICT as a key facilitator of the innovation process in future.

A production function is used to estimate total factor productivity and the contribution of R&D to growth. The impact of R&D is found to be higher than in most prior studies, for two reasons. First, the R&D stock is larger, due to the use of a longer time series with base values starting in 1921, and the assumption of no technical depreciation of knowledge. Second, the elasticity of R&D increases over time. In accounting for post-WWII growth, the results for 1948–1980 are consistent with earlier findings. Technical advance accelerated dramatically in the 1960s, but collapsed in the mid-1970s. Starting in the early 1980s, however, the production function suggests a new interpretation. There was a stronger rebound in total factor productivity, lasting roughly through 2000. Thereafter, total factor productivity decelerated sharply in 2001–2007. The contribution of R&D to growth has varied over time. The largest effect occurred in 1948–1960. The impact of R&D fell off in the 1970s, and picked up to a smaller but still significant effect starting in the 1980s. Despite the larger stock and the increasing elasticity, R&D is found to have contributed on average less than half of total factor productivity.

The network effect is a key factor influencing the development of e-business and technological innovation. At the same time, compatibility decisions can determine the success or failure of businesses and technologies. This study explores the compatibility strategies in the context of network effects using a two-stage game-theoretical model for a duopoly. In the first stage, two firms make their compatibility decisions, and in the second stage, two firms are engaged in Bertrand price competition. Major findings are (1) other things being fixed, two firms are more likely to be compatible with each other when they have similar market shares, (2) the compatibility decisions of firms will not be influenced by consumers' switching costs, (3) the order of their compatibility decisions will not change the resulting equilibrium, and (4) based on firms' compatibility decisions, the Bertrand price competition may still lead to market failure, necessitating governmental intervention or regulations.

As most of the high-technology companies are trying to be more demand driven, technological innovation and diffusion become important forces in markets today. They critically affect the fortunes of consumers, firms, and nations. Despite research across many disciplines, many important questions remain unanswered. Effects of fluctuating price and quality on the consumer adoption decision for multi-generation innovation are some of such important research areas in this field. High-technology product comes in generations that consist of substitutable product ranges; consumers' preferences tend to reflect external and internal factors that change over time. Often, two successive generations under the same product category compete in the market. It is anticipated by the consumers that the later generation possesses more advance features. Yet it becomes difficult for the marketing managers to decide on the optimum-level values of marketing mix variables for two competing products under its stable. This paper studies optimal control policies for quality and price when two technology generations are present in a dynamic market and also suggest a policy for the optimal launching time of an advanced generation. Lots of work has already been done to study the optimal policies on explanatory variables such as price, promotional effort, quality, and time for new products. In comparison high-technology products have received less attention. The profit functional used for optimal control in this paper combines well-known diffusion models and the cost function that is capable of estimating the future profit trends. The diffusion model uses the relationship between the repeat purchasers and the new purchasers to study the overall diffusion of a new technology over multiple generations.

Most assessments for R&D programs are conducted for on-going or finished programs. In order to streamline national R&D programs, Korean government is making a challenging attempt. It enacted a law for ex ante evaluation for national R&D programs and KISTEP, which specializes in evaluation and planning for R&D programs, took charge of the important role.

KISTEP created and developed guidelines for feasibility analysis on each category of R&D program. Many kinds of R&D programs, such as constructing facilities for nuclear fusion and developing IT components by organizing consortiums, were analyzed from the viewpoint of technology experts and policy makers. Various impacts expected to be made by R&D programs were crucial elements for the analysis too.

This paper presents processes for the feasibility analysis of R&D programs, cruces of the processes, and how we have improved the assessment system. It also provides how the assessment system contributed to the innovation of national R&D programs.