International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

A meta-synthesis approach was used to identify, synthesize, and categorize appropriately factors in the literature that contribute to design documentation quality. The categories include factors on quality attributes, quality indicators, and quality-influencing factors. Findings indicate that the quality of design documentation in practice is unsatisfactory, therefore, there is a need for collaboration between the owner, designers, and end-users to improve design documentation quality. The results offer pragmatic data on design documentation quality in the construction industry between the years 1992 and 2019. However, further research on the significant impacts of poor-quality design documentation on construction projects is recommended.

A meaningful gamified solution design is not limited to the use of points and rewards, but rather focuses on the intrinsic motivations for a more engaging user experience. Furthermore, the implementation of this concept is subject to difficulties given the lack of unified, effective, and efficient tools that are integrated into a process that covers the life cycle of a product or a service. Indeed, the existing gamification frameworks are limited to guidelines and recommendations that set up game elements for specific needs and contexts. However, the methods and the best practices that can lead to a meaningful gamified solution still cannot be concluded. Moreover, the user experience is currently a fundamental concept that has changed the focus on the processes of a generation of products and services; putting the user at the center of the design process. The main objective of this paper is to study the relevance of adapting or adopting UX design elements to improve the design of gamified products. To this end, a systematic mapping of the literature was carried out with a selection of 77 articles published between 2010 and March 2021. The results obtained enabled the identification of the adaptation or adoption proposals related to the following three levels: (1) UX design process and framework, (2) UX design process phases, in particular the phase of understanding the user need and usability testing, and (3) user’s research tools such as the persona, the journey map, and the questionnaire. The adaptation of these design elements was not systematic and depended on the context of the study.

Innovation outsourcing creates two critical risks for a client firm. The first risk arises when a client discloses his/her technological knowhow and intellectual property (IP) with the service provider but the latter misappropriates the IP toward its own commercial benefit. Second, in the absence of perfect monitoring, the service provider might exert suboptimal effort on the innovation project. Management of client’s technology and innovation effort of agent are both crucially important in innovation outsourcing. It is shown that client can deter these risks by designing an appropriate contract. Two distinct regimes are considered. In Regime1, the client operates in an environment where IP cannot be protected. In Regime2, client’s IP is fully protected either due to strong legal enforcement or due to availability of a technological solution. First, it is found that an incentive payment scheme linked with project outcome can mitigate the shirking problem. Second, in Regime1, the client must provide higher compensation to the agent when compared to Regime2. A carrot and stick strategy involving higher incentive payments along with reduced sharing of background IP can deter the opportunistic behavior of the service provider. Third, if the cost of operating in Regime2 is prohibitively high, then the client can operate in Regime1 and yet obtain higher profits. In such a scenario, the client must use the carrot and stick strategy. Finally, due to predominant motive to reduce costs, clients might not be compensating their service providers appropriately. Such myopic cost-cutting strategy would exacerbate the IP misappropriation and suboptimal quality problems associated with outsourcing.

This study investigated the factors that influence Ghanaian entrepreneurs to adopt e-commerce. Cross-sectional data was gathered from 520 entrepreneurs in the most populous and industrious regions in Ghana. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) was employed to effectively understand the unexplored phenomenon of e-commerce adoption among Ghanaian entrepreneurs. Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the hypothesized relationships. The findings indicate that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence (SI) positively and significantly influenced the behavioral intention (BI) to adopt e-commerce. Facilitating conditions (FC) and BI had a significant positive relationship with the adoption of e-commerce.

In recent years, technology firms have been facing a highly competitive environment on a global scale. The firms are accelerating to establish R&D sites abroad in order to access global knowledge resources. In this context, global R&D projects have become more complex and R&D bridge managers (BMs), who facilitate global research collaboration, play a pivotal role here. This study aims to investigate the difficulties that BMs are facing and to explore the roles of BMs in global R&D projects. We interviewed nine BMs who have facilitated global R&D projects and propose a model depicting four common and critical difficulties present in facilitating research collaboration between teams in the home country and foreign R&D teams. The unique contribution of this paper focuses on the individual managerial level, while most previous studies on global R&D mainly focused on an organizational level.

In developing countries, firms usually have limited capital, infrastructure, and institutions for technological learning. Hence, knowledge of firms about external and internal learning mechanisms as well as using other firm’s experiences lead to reduced cost and time of technological learning. Present paper contributes to renewable energy firm’s knowledge by analyzing cause and effect relationships of internal and external technological learning mechanisms. For this purpose, internal and external technological learning mechanisms were extracted by literature review. Then, cause and effect relationships of learning mechanisms in Iranian renewable energy firms were investigated by the DEMATEL method. The results indicate that firms should use a combination of internal and external learning mechanisms to enhance their technological capability. Moreover, intramural research and development, trial and error, reverse engineering of competitor’s products, imitation of competitors, and licensing agreement have been the most frequent technological learning mechanisms used by Iranian renewable energy firms. These are the issues that need to be addressed by renewable energy firms and policymakers in developing countries.

This research aims to evaluate the impact of lean product development (LPD) and lean startup (LS) practices on startup performance. A survey with 114 responses from Brazilian startups in the Information Technology sector evaluated the direct effects of LPD and LS on organizational performance, as well as the potential cross-effects between them. The assumptions were validated using a structural equation modeling for data analysis, which confirms that the adoption of these methodologies has a positive significant impact on startup performance, especially the practices involving teamwork and the design of minimum viable products.

India — the land of frugal innovation — is striving hard to catch up on its innovation capabilities. However, its inability to achieve balances on multiple fronts even 74 years after its independence indicates the presence of some underlying problems of competitiveness —both at the macro- as well as micro-levels. In this study, we build upon and extend the competitiveness Assets–Processes–Performance (APP) framework and try to diagnose such problems at the micro-level (i.e. firm level). We specifically try to understand the effect of environmentally sustainable practices (ESPs) on the relationship between innovation capabilities and export competitiveness (EC) of firms. Methodologically, we draw insights from both the theoretical (extant literature) as well as the observational (comprised of a purposive sample of select firms) realms. Our findings indicate that firms of Indian origin (FIOs) which are ahead of the rest in terms of their ESPs, fare better in terms of their EC. We propose a conceptual framework, wherein we posit that ESPs can moderate the relationship between innovation capabilities and EC. We also draw implications for theory and practice and discuss the avenues for future research.