International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Professor M. Atilla Öner, who passed away in the most fruitful times of his scholarly life on the 29th of August 2018. Prof. Öner graduated in the first place of the Engineering Faculty at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey in 1978. Continuing in the path of engineering, he completed his academic degrees of M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Yale University. He went back to his home country following his Ph.D. and worked in the industry leading several R&D projects for more than a decade from 1985 to 2000. While he had gained intensive practical experience in the real sector, he never disconnected his ties with academic life. Prof. Öner taught courses in the field of technology management at Boğaziçi University and advised projects at the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey during these times as an adjunct faculty. As of 2000, he permanently moved to academia to achieve his tremendous passion for teaching and research at the Department of Business Administration at Yeditepe University in İstanbul, Turkey. He was a Professor of Technology and Operations Management and served as the managing director of the Management Application and Research Center at Yeditepe University. He contributed to the scholarly work in the fields of methodology, technology road mapping, R&D management, and technology management. He supervised several MS/MBA and Ph.D. theses on national innovation systems, pilot national (sectoral) foresight studies, system dynamic modeling of R&D management, project management, and public policy issues. He was an associate editor of Technological Forecasting and Social Change and served on the editorial board of Foresight, Futures, International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management.

Managing knowledge is a critical challenge for organizations while it is a major potential for gaining competitive advantage. This empirical study confirms and improves a framework which proposes a link between knowledge management enablers and knowledge creation process. The model introduces improvements on the process-oriented perspective of knowledge by using the knowledge creation model by adding business strategies and market dynamism to the model. As an inter-mediator, new product development is accepted. This research provides a structural equation model (SEM) that can be referred by academicians and enables managers a tool that can be used for seeking sound strategies.

As industries hold the opportunity to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) driven innovation, their success to a significant extent will depend on the value the new technology generates for different business stakeholder groups. This is in turn dependent upon how management can embrace these techniques and change as companies will frequently need to transform both internal processes and offerings to customers in order to reap the benefits of AI. AI is a growing research area currently concentrated around technology and modeling of techniques and yet only few examples and limited research are available, on how AI technology enables new capabilities that can impact the value delivered as well as radically transform it. We thus need to understand what new capabilities these technologies bring about and how they are used. Based on three concrete empirical quasi-experiments, interviews conducted with start-ups and a Swedish industrial manufacturing firm dealing with outdoor power products (like grass-cutters, chain-saws, concrete-saws, etc.) for professional and consumer use and using an analytical framework derived from the Resource Based View, this paper explores capabilities enabled through Edge AI and the competitive advantage these may offer. Specific capabilities (self-calibration, enhanced-sensing, selective-capture and reputation) are identified and implications for theory are discussed, pointing out the importance to consider this type of technology not only as a resource, but rather as a dynamic capability in itself.

To look into the assumed difference between East and West in acceptance and use of robots, we performed a content analysis on 120 papers about social robots in two Asian-English (China Daily and The Japan Times) and two Western-English newspapers (The Guardian and New York Times) written between 2009 and 2018. From these papers, we drew a number of statements ($N=118$). We analyzed tone of voice (TOV) as well as the positive or negative framing of the consequences of the implementation of social robots in society, economy, health, and safety. Intercoder reliability $\mathrm{\text{was}}>0.7$, according to Krippendorff’s $\alpha$-reliability. Western newspapers presented significantly more negative social frames, negative fairness-and-equality frames, and negative safety-and-health frames than did Eastern papers, which presented significantly more positive economic frames than did Western papers. Western newspapers expected more negative social, health, safety, and equality issues than did the East. The West anticipated little economic benefit. The East expected little harm to society, safety, health, and equality but rather foresaw beneficial economic outcomes.

Co-innovation between suppliers and their customers provides important benefits but is not without challenges. Especially in technologically complex industrial context co-innovation projects need careful planning and preparing. Through eight cases, this qualitative study takes the perspective of the supplier and empirically identifies three types of supplier-customer co-innovation projects and for each project type, the supplier’s co-innovation goal, potential matching customer relationships, and related managerial benefits and challenges are described. The results contribute to the co-innovation research by presenting a framework for matching supplier’s co-innovation goals to customer relationship types, which brings out the variety of co-innovation projects that even a single supplier can face and must manage.

An important but unexplored research issue is understanding how digital innovation ecosystem and a quintuple helix model can support the promotion of Circular Economy. Circular Economy, however, is intrinsically linked to the innovation issue. It can occur in a productive and consumption system under the form of a new product, process, organizational or marketing model. In the meantime, the digital innovation ecosystem debate was enriched by the social and environmental sustainability perspectives that are the pillars of the Circular Economy theory. Despite this, the research has failed to achieve full comprehension of digital innovation ecosystems’ dynamics and processes for the Circular Economy, by highlighting the need for deeper understanding. Under the above assumptions, this paper presents the evidence of a single and extreme case study related to the Italian Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ICESP). This is shown as good practice of a digital platform for stakeholders’ engagement, supporting the creation of a digital innovation ecosystem focused on the Circular Economy. We conclude by deriving implications for researchers and policy makers’ agendas.