International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

The research goal of this paper is to explore and explain the relation between ambiguity management and contextual ambidexterity in innovation. Based on qualitative analysis of case data, a model is presented showing how managing ambiguity is an underlying process of contextual ambidexterity. Requisite variety, perspective-taking and interpretive skills help generate ambiguity to achieve exploration, while analytic skills help reduce ambiguity to achieve exploitation. Contextual ambidexterity is achieved through a process of alternating between generation, sustention and reduction of ambiguity. High ambiguity tolerance (AT) emphasizes exploration, while low AT emphasizes exploitation. The findings contribute to a more detailed theoretical understanding of the contextual ambidexterity concept and can help practitioners to achieve contextual ambidexterity in their innovation projects.

This paper explores the process of technological change in the payment system. In particular, the study aims to gain understanding if Bitcoin would bring about a paradigmatic shift toward a cashless society. The analysis is based on the technology S-curve and Schumpeter’s model of economic development. It is interesting to see that the swing of S-curves is not strong enough to cause a paradigm shift according to the Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction. The study also compares Bitcoin with PayPal, a similar digital currency and major online payment system, to gain insights of the new challenge toward a cashless economy. The parallel S-curve trajectories of electronic money innovations signify a move from a cash-based economy toward a less cash society.

Contrary to mature IT innovations, fashionable IT innovations are hyped but lack institutionalization. Since an appropriate evaluation of these innovations is rather complex, companies often choose fixed investment strategies that neglect effects of organizational learning through continuous innovating. Hence, we develop a dynamic optimization model that determines the optimal budget allocation to mature and fashionable IT innovations by considering organizational learning. Furthermore, we evaluate various investment strategies both from an ex ante and an ex post perspective. Thereby, we focus on a company’s innovativeness and draw conclusions about the superiority of different investment strategies regarding expected NPV and its volatility.

Innovation has been considered as one of the key drivers of economic development for any nation. In the rural context, the innovation concept is applied with the intention to determine new ways to solve traditional and emerging problems that the rural people face. The innovation network concept has in the rural context become extremely important because it assists to complement scarce resources and create new opportunities for rural development base by establishing a relationship between rural actors with other actors. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to identify variables of innovation network and to conceptualize innovation network in the rural context. The study has been executed through a field survey of the rural entrepreneurs, through interviews and closed ended questionnaires in rural regions of Gujarat in India. This paper has used exploratory factor analysis in order to investigate factors that might explain the underlying belief of rural entrepreneurs about innovation networks. The paper finds out three factors, namely: (a) innovation network with a private organization, (b) innovation network with NGOs, and (c) innovation network with public organizations. The finding of this study revealed that production enhancement, information accessibility, skill development and entrepreneurial opportunities are considered the most important criteria for conceptualization of innovation network in the rural context. This study allows for implications to be made for rural entrepreneurship development and policy formation. In future research there remains the scope to incorporate larger sample data, greater number of variables of innovation network and conduct the study in other countries.

Modular product architectures offer a solution for the trade-off between offering the market a wide variety of products and improving a company’s internal cost situation. However, individual cost effects that determine the extent to which modularity should be applied to product architecture are widely unknown in industry. In this paper, we develop a conceptual approach to provide suggestions for improving an examined modular product architecture from a cost perspective. Our work makes an important contribution: The conceptual approach accentuates which steps are necessary in order to recommend whether the product architecture’s current degree of modularity should be enhanced or diminished.

This study combines product architecture and competitive action by using a survey of the Taiwan IT industry. The analytic framework is applied to the theory of situational management to observe whether there is a good fit between product architecture (modular or integral), and inter-firm competitive action (homogeneous or heterogeneous), which corresponds to the level of business performance. This study thus seeks an in-depth understanding of the relationship between product architecture and competitive action, as well as confirmation for the development direction and competitive model of Taiwan’s IT industry, where some important characteristics have been found. First, to establish the competitive advantages, the product architecture needs to match the competitive action. Second, a firm usually adopts homogeneous action when its product architecture tends to be modular products; inversely, it usually adopts heterogeneous action when its product architecture tends to be integral products. Third, homogeneous competitive action has a mediating effect on modular architecture and business performance. Overall, this study provides a theoretical analytic framework to better understand the interactive relationship between product architecture and competitive action.

Recent innovation diffusion in organisations literature suggests that innovation diffusion dimensions and characteristics are not independent of each other, rather organisational internal environment interacts with both an organisational external environment and an innovation’s characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of the framework consisting of organisational innovation dimensions and characteristics within Saudi Arabian organisations. We test this model with survey data from a large-scale survey of 223 Saudi public and private project-based organisations, these organisations had either adopted, or intended to adopt, the project management office (PMO). To obtain a broad representation of respondents, and to minimise bias, the survey did not target any specific industry. Statistical analysis, specifically exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were conducted to ascertain the factors underlying each construct. Structural equations modelling (SEM) was sequentially utilised to determine the factor structure of the model and to assess the relationships between model constructs. This paper took an initiative step towards a conceptual framework for organisational innovation diffusion, represented by the PMO. Its results revealed that perceived organisational innovation climate functions as a gateway to the organisational innovation diffusion. It was also found that technology mediate the relationships between socio-culture and organisation climate for innovation. More importantly, PMO complexity was not related to the intention to implement the PMO. The quantitative study showed that the framework is a useful tool for studying the diffusion of organisation innovation. The model can potentially form the foundations of a framework for organisations seeking to enhance the organisational innovation diffusion that could in turn strengthen their business performance.