International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

Research on open innovation (OI) benefits has received growing interest from researchers and practitioners in the past two decades. But it lacks valuable frameworks that categorize these benefits. This paper aims to explore OI benefits since 2003 and to come up with a comprehensive framework categorizing them. To do so, the authors conducted a qualitative meta-analysis of 708 articles from the Scopus platform by mobilizing IRAMUTEQ 0.7 Alpha2 and NVivo12 solutions for text mining and qualitative content analyzes. The findings highlight six categories of the following interrelated OI benefits: (1) Performance, (2) innovation process, (3) market, (4) product and service, (5) knowledge, and (6) customer. This classification offers researchers constructs for potential models of OI impacts and brings innovation managers potential indicators for the dissemination and absorption of OI practices by organizations.

International business (IB) collaborations can create a difference in the performance of the firms. Some previous studies had doubt if this superior performance is due to the internationalization itself or is related to the characteristics of one of the partners. However, here it is argued that difference in performance can be due to the characteristics of dyad between the partners, i.e. cultural distance. We tested the role of cultural distance (cultural diversity) between partners, while considering a network of countries. Social network analysis (SNA) is applied by utilizing UCINET software. This study built a database of around six hundred thousand patents data from The United States Patent and Trademark Office, and analyzed innovations resulting from cross-cultural collaborations. The result illustrates that increase in cultural distance decreases the number (quantity) of innovations, but has an inverted U-shape relationship with the quality of innovations. Researches which studied the relationship between cultural diversity and innovation in IB, mainly either conclude diversity hinders innovation or promotes it. This study fills this gap by analyzing two important dimensions of innovation i.e. quantity and quality of innovation.

Multiple emerging technologies both threaten grocers and offer them attractive opportunities to enhance their value propositions, improve processes, reduce costs, and therefore generate competitive advantages. Among the variety of technological innovations and considering the scarcity of resources, it is unclear which technologies to focus on and where to implement them in the value chain. To develop the most probable technology forecast that addresses the application of emerging technologies in the grocery value chain within the current decade, we conduct a two-stage Delphi study. Our results suggest a high relevance of almost all technologies. The panel is only skeptical about three specific projections. As a consequence, grocers are advised to build up knowledge regarding the application of these technologies in the most promising areas of their value chain.

Digital innovations are happening all over the globe with the advent of technology. The digital platforms are not only introducing the traditional services online but are also continuously engaged in making frequent modifications to them in the form of incremental innovations. In our quest of creating a time horizon for innovation adoption, and determining levels of adopters of incremental innovations 837 participants from India were asked about their level of adoption of digital innovations. While most of the respondents did not seem affected by the digital transition, amongst the ones adopting these innovations are mostly Early Adopters and Early Majority. The study arrived at an adoption score for the respondents based on the time from the introduction of the innovation and their adoption. The time horizon suggests the increase in adoption of innovation with each new digital innovation introduced. In the case of incremental innovations, ten levels of adoption, and three categories consisting of the ten levels of adoption are formulated based on the LoA model. The users in India fall majorly on the Beginner category in which maximum is aware of the incremental innovations but are skeptical about using them. The study further suggests certain measures for the digital platform providers for each category of users to make them accustomed to the process of incremental innovations.

Knowledge and its transference are increasingly viewed as key factors of companies’ competitiveness. In this sense, our research aims to analyze how the knowledge transfer takes place between the higher education sector and the companies. Although there has been an increase in research related to University–Industry (U–I) cooperation, the existing literature is still relatively fragmented and lacks a comprehensive view. In this way, this study aims to fill this gap by reducing the existing gap in the literature. Thus, this study aims at identifying the different trends and themes prevailing in the literature on U–I cooperation. Through a systematic literature review, using a bibliometric analysis, we identify four themes: (1) Triple Helix, (2) Knowledge Transfer, (3) Determinants of Cooperation and (4) Strategic Alliances. This research makes several important contributions: this review helps highlight not only what the previous literature has analyzed about cooperation between U–I but also prepares the ground for the second wave of research on this topic, synthesizing the main gaps in knowledge and the emerging trends in studies. Another contribution is the challenge of several prevailing theoretical/conceptual assumptions in cooperation between U–I and offering new theoretical/conceptual perspectives that may shape future research on this topic. Last but not the least, this paper defines a roadmap for a future research agenda by proposing multiple directions that can open new avenues for future research and the construction of relevant and appropriate theories for measuring the contributions of cooperation between U–I.

Driven by the increased relevance of digitalised and hypercompetitive business environments, companies need to focus on IT-related innovation projects (ITIPs) to guarantee long-term success. Although prior research has illustrated that an appropriate team design can increase project performance, an approach for determining the economically optimal team design from an ex ante perspective is missing. Against this backdrop, we follow analytical modelling research and develop a model that determines the optimal team design for an ITIP by transferring central findings of previous research regarding relevant influencing factors, e.g., team size and academic background diversity, into an ex ante economic evaluation. Thereby, our model allows the comparison of different team designs (i.e., team compositions) with regard to the prospective monetary project performance. Generally, the results show that only about a fifth of the random team designs resulted in a positive profit. In contrast, the well-founded, optimal team designs proposed by our model led to a positive profit in almost 90% of all cases. Regarding the influencing parameters, we observe that team size is the most important factor since a deviation from the optimum has a much more significant effect on the expected profit than do other factors such as work experience. To ensure the real-world fidelity and applicability of our model, we discuss the underlying assumptions with two practitioners. Our contribution is manifold: Inter alia, from an academic perspective, we enhance existing research on team design by converting well-accepted qualitative findings from a frequently investigated field outside business administration (i.e., [social] psychology) into a quantitative model that allows for the ex ante economic evaluation of team design parameters. For practitioners, we provide a model that assists managers in designing ITIP teams that are more likely to deliver desired results. This model enables managers to avoid relying only on gut feeling when designing ITIP teams, as is currently often the case due to a lack of alternative approaches.

This study explores how training of facilitators and coordinators can promote the creation of high-performing innovation teams in SMEs, and analyzes why some trained teams are successful and others are not. Within a participatory action research framework, eight innovation teams were newly created in six SMEs in the Spanish service sector and were followed up over six months. Facilitators and coordinators underwent 12 h of training prior to creating new innovation teams in their own organizations, whose work was followed up over six months. Team processes and results were analyzed based on both quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews, incident diaries, and open questions) data that were gathered longitudinally across the study period. Our results showed that, despite complaints about poor management of face-to-face meetings, difficulties in the use of information and communication technologies and work overload are surmountable. The greatest barrier for innovation teams is a lack of commitment on the part of top managers and low involvement and participation by team members. Reflexivity, both inside and outside the team (i.e. in follow up sessions), was one of the most valued and useful strategies for innovation teams. Our findings highlight the importance of training programs that can provide both technical and emotional support to team facilitators and coordinators and enable SMEs to create high-performing innovation teams despite their limited financial and human resources.

Crowdfunding and open innovation make great contributions to the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem. In this study, we conduct exploratory research to put forward the mechanisms that are developed to benefit from crowds to carry out innovative projects in the context of open innovation and crowdfunding. Our main research problem is whether there is a digital platform that enables both knowledge/technology transfer and project collaboration of entrepreneurs and enterprises on project/idea development. We observe that a hybrid crowd innovation model is needed to create various collaboration and innovation opportunities between entrepreneurs, SMEs, start-ups and corporate enterprises. In this context, we put forth a conceptual framework to show that greater opportunities will emerge in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation if crowdfunding and open innovation hybridize. The main purpose of this study is to propose a conceptual framework within this scope and then to verify the framework by creating a model as a future study.