Journal of Product Innovation Management最新文献

How do the attributes of a firm's top management team (TMT) influence corporate entrepreneurship across organizational and national contexts? Drawing on upper echelons theory and the managerial discretion perspective, this meta-analytic study examines the dynamic relationship between TMTs' attributes and corporate entrepreneurship, focusing on the moderating role of managerial discretion arising from organizational and national-level factors. To provide insights into the micro-foundations of firm behavior, we explore how key TMT attributes—diversity, size, transformational leadership, tenure, general human capital, and entrepreneurial human capital—affect corporate entrepreneurship. A comprehensive meta-analysis of 57 primary studies reveals that the effect of a TMT's attributes is context-dependent and is significantly influenced by the approach to managerial discretion taken by the country in which the firm operates. By showing that transformational leadership and the TMT's entrepreneurial human capital and size affect corporate entrepreneurship, while attributes like tenure, diversity, and general human capital have limited or no impact, our findings challenge the prevailing view that a standardized approach to the TMT's composition drives corporate entrepreneurship. The study also underscores the role of the national-level managerial discretion and finds that firms in institutional environments that feature low managerial discretion must align their TMT strategies with local institutional contexts to maximize their corporate entrepreneurship. These findings advance upper echelons theory by demonstrating that managerial discretion acts as a boundary condition in shaping how the TMT's attributes influence corporate entrepreneurship based on the national context. This research contributes to the fields of strategic and innovation management and offers practical insights for leaders who seek to harness the full potential of their TMTs.

Not all firms exhibit the same level of commitment to green new product introductions (GNPIs), yet our understanding of the factors underlying these disparities remains incomplete. Prior research has primarily focused on firm-level factors, paying little attention to individual-level antecedents of GNPIs. This imbalance in the GNPI literature contrasts with the broader innovation and general management literature, which displays an ever-growing interest in the “human side of innovation,” acknowledging the relevance of Chief Executive Officers' (CEOs') political ideologies for organizational outcomes. Addressing this imbalance, our study examines the relationship between CEOs' political ideologies and their firms' GNPIs, along with the conditions that shape this influence. Grounded in social identity theory, our study first argues that the more liberal CEOs are, the more GNPIs their firms are likely to generate and that this association is amplified by CEO power. It then proposes that the more liberal CEOs are, the more likely they are to respond to adverse situations beyond their control (a Republican presidency or lower levels of consumer green sentiment) by initiating more GNPIs. It finally posits that the more liberal CEOs are, the fewer GNPIs they tend to initiate in response to adverse situations for which they are accountable (involvement in sustainability-related scandals). We integrate data from seven databases into a longitudinal dataset comprising 89 firms and 192 CEOs over the period 2010–2020 to test our theoretical framework empirically. Time-lagged panel regression analyses strongly support our theoretical arguments. Our findings contribute to the emergence of an individual-level, microfoundational perspective on sustainable innovations, our knowledge about the organizational implications and boundary conditions of CEOs' political ideologies, and the treatment of multiple identities within social identity theory, especially the relationship between political and occupational identities. The implications of our findings extend to business practitioners, offering valuable insights for CEOs, boards of directors, and investors.

Science-based ventures (SBVs) are crucial vehicles that bring new technologies from the lab and to the mainstream market. During this journey, innovation narratives play a crucial role in coordinating innovation. Innovation narratives are linguistic representations that actors use to make sense of innovation activities, events and actions. In other words, they are stories that drive sensemaking, which is a critical element in avoiding conflicts in product innovation process and securing coordinated activities between diverse actors. However, as SBVs shift markets and undergo radical changes, they may have to update narratives to fit these changes. Yet, little is known about how innovation narratives and coordination evolve during this journey. To improve knowledge on this matter, I conducted a 24-month study of a science-based venture crossing over to a commercial market. I find that during this transition, innovation narratives shift from being shaped by progressive storytelling, where the benefits of becoming commercial and hiring nonacademics is highlighted, to being shaped by retrogressive storytelling, where incumbents and newcomers use their respective pasts to develop divergent narratives, and finally to appearing as disintegrated storytelling, where narratives compete and hinder coordination in innovation processes. Building on these findings, I construct a process model of how innovation narratives evolve and disintegrate as SBVs scale. This article contributes to knowledge on innovation management by illustrating how innovation narratives affect coordination in innovation processes, as well as how they may evolve during organizational change. Furthermore, this article illuminates the challenges that SBVs face to their innovation processes when scaling.

This study explores the translation of agile management practices (agile) into a traditional industry context. Using a case study of agile adoption in a development project in a large traditional company of the aerospace and defense industry, this research investigates how the translation process unfolds by studying how both idea and context are adapted to create shared meaning. This research makes two main contributions. First, this research introduces translation theory to the innovation management literature and details its applicability in explaining variations in outcomes of applying management practices in new organizational contexts. Our research suggests that this constitutes a complementary theoretical lens to diffusion theory, enabling the explanation of the process to create shared meaning when idea and recipient context have a low level of compatibility. Second, this research shows the process of translating agile into a traditional context through a non-linear joint creation of meaning. The process was shaped largely by the experience and resolution of project-external (i.e., with the surrounding organization) and project-internal conflicts, which in turn motivated the idea or context to adapt. The study identifies two central concepts, namely isolation, and shielding, which determine how the translation process unfolds and how meaning is created. Managerial implications based on these contributions are presented and discussed.

The effects of the knowledge environment on a firm's ability to acquire, assimilate, transform, and utilize new knowledge—its absorptive capacity (AC)—to produce innovation (INN) have been largely overlooked in prior literature. Drawing on the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, we conduct a meta-analysis summarizing findings from 145 empirical studies on 434,985 firms with 798,650 firm-year observations. We distinguish between knowledge-rich environments with abundant, easily accessible information; knowledge-protected environments with high levels of intellectual property rights protection; and knowledge-intensive environments with high levels of reliance on knowledge. Our study assesses the impact of the environment on the AC–INN relationship. First, we confirm that knowledge-rich environments create more opportunities to reap innovation benefits from AC compared to knowledge-scarce environments. Driven by the development of communication technologies and increased information sharing, the effects of AC on innovation are almost twice larger in the smartphone era as they were during the preinternet or early internet era. Second, our analysis indicates that high levels of knowledge protection, as seen in North America and Europe, while safeguarding intellectual property, also dampen positive effects of absorptive capacity on innovation. In environments with less knowledge protection, the effects of AC on innovation are stronger. Finally, our findings suggest that AC is beneficial across industry sectors, but its effects are stronger in less knowledge-intensive sectors. The mean effect size in low-tech manufacturing and services is two times larger than in high-tech industries. Beyond contextual effects, we assess AC's effects on two major creativity outputs: invention, as a breakthrough scientific discovery, and commercialization, as a socially usable and marketable product. Our findings show that AC overall boosts innovation and is more strongly associated with commercialization than with invention. The implications of this study aim to inform practitioners and policymakers and advance future research on knowledge environments.

Research about innovation management explores how the future is created—who is creating it (organizations, collaborations, etc.), for what aims (customer satisfaction, market performance, etc.), and with what broader effects (social, environmental, etc.). With this extended essay, we explore the potential futures of innovation management research in three ways. First, we briefly review the history of past research agendas and priorities published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), highlighting three broad topic areas (technological, social/environmental, and organizational) that have emerged over time and their potential disruptive implications for innovation management research. Second, we describe the outcome of a gathering of leading scholars in innovation management tasked with the challenge of identifying critical research paths for our field. This collaboration resulted in five “deep dive” essays into areas ripe for innovation management research in the years ahead: liquid innovation, artificial intelligence in innovation, business model innovation, public value innovation, and responsible innovation. Third, we reflect on this expansive effort and offer a discussion of implications (tensions, challenges, and opportunities) for future innovation management scholarship.