International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

While scholars have long emphasized the role of firms’ CEOs in shaping innovation outcomes, the question of underlying mechanisms remains widely unanswered. In light of this, we stress that the relationship between organizational aspects (e.g. resource allocation or culture) and product innovation should not mark the end of an intellectual quest. Instead, these enablers are also particularly contingent upon the corporate leaders. Based on 81 empirical studies, we reveal the impact of CEO characteristics (demographics, personality, and cognition) and leadership on firm-level variables that enable product innovation. Finally, we outline fruitful avenues for future research and provide managerial implications.

Many studies uphold information systems (IS) capabilities as a key factor in creating customer capital. This study explores this topic further by proposing a multiple mediation model. Hence, the study fills a conspicuous gap in the literature through its analysis of the mediating roles of green innovation product and environmental uncertainty. The study employs partial least square variance-based structural equation modeling to a sample of 425 participants from a variety of firms. From the findings of the study, we infer that green innovation performance — to a greater extent — and environmental uncertainty — to a lesser extent — play mediating roles between IS capabilities and customer capital.

International technology-based collaborations require that industry managers adequately deal with multiple factors. This is particularly the case in the pharmaceutical industry where strict standards, advanced technologies, and complex managerial aspects exist. This paper studies the critical factors affecting international technology transfer (TT) projects in the Iranian pharmaceutical industry. To this end, it adopted a qualitative method to investigate participants’ experiences and their viewpoints regarding the factors contributing to TT success. The main finding of the research revealed that, among others, supportive governmental policies and large market size were the main environmental factors which facilitate TT processes. Findings also showed that there are some imperative issues such as regulatory frameworks, lack of intellectual property regimes, and political factors which have to be taken into account in the process of TT.

A broadly based, quantitative, empirical study of 208 R&D projects within the national laboratories (NLs) of a technology latecomer country (TLC) finds that the performance of R&D projects within the NLs of that TLC is highly dependent on the pathway by which knowledge enters the R&D project group that delivers the project or on how it is created therein. Performance also depends upon the mission of the NLs with which the project is aligned. These findings suggest that managers of R&D project groups within the NLs in this TLC can take a nuanced approach to organizational learning. They can improve the performance of individual R&D projects by emphasizing the knowledge pathways that have the greatest positive impact on the mission that is most important to the project. The study’s findings also provide theoretical insights that go beyond the context of NLs in TLCs. They explain why vicarious learning cannot be associated positively with team performance, and they suggest that contextual learning is positively correlated to team performance under specific circumstances, only. Moreover, the findings imply that extant theory on organizational learning is insufficiently granular to explain the apparently complex relationship between group knowledge and group performance.

This study proposes a value chain model for business incubation. It describes both an incubated start-up’s development of its own product and business and the incubator’s development of the start-up from entrance to exit as a “product” of the incubator. The reported research is based on qualitative content analysis of 15 start-up cases in a Norwegian business incubator. The reported research enhances our theoretical understanding of start-up development processes within an incubator and provides a framework that will be useful for incubator management to guide incubatees through their venture creation process.

This study examines how characteristics of chief technology officer (CTO) drive radical innovation of the firm. Using data of 140 firms in US manufacturing industries, this study finds that the characteristics of the CTO explains a significant proportion of a firm’s relative radicalness even after controlling for CEO and top management team (TMT) characteristics, organizational capabilities, and other firm characteristics. Specifically, a CTO’s diverse functional experience increases a firm’s radicalness. In terms of individual prior functions, marketing experience was significantly related to radical innovation. In addition, the CTO’s diverse industrial experience increases the firm’s radicalness. In contrast to the existing theories, the CTO’s education level, tenure and age showed insignificant effects. However, the number of degrees in engineering and science showed significant effect on the performance of radical innovation. These results of the analysis on firm-level radicalness provide implications for both academics and practitioners.

Thermoelectrics, an energy-conversion technology, has been developed for its potential to support portable electronics with an innovative power source. Primarily focusing on the metropolitan market in Thailand, the study, thus, aimed at the market insight into portable electronics users’ characteristics and opinions of thermoelectric-generator (TEG) technology commercialization. The business research was conducted to analyze their behaviors for power-supply lacking problems, encountering heat or cold sources, purchasing decision for a TEG-based charger and key decision factors. For practical applications, an innovative TEG-based charger should be more flexible by harnessing various heat or cold sources from ambient situations to generate electrical power.

In this paper we aim to identify if the cloud computing was a key component for a challenger company developing an innovation that resulted in consequences for an incumbent one. To analyze that we use a multi-phase process of innovation perspective. The results demonstrate that cloud computing had a decisive role in allowing the challenger company to develop its innovation, which resulted in consequences for the incumbent one that now tries to imitate the innovation developed to maintain its competitiveness.