Journal of Product Innovation Management最新文献

Innovation partnerships frequently experience tensions due to differences in partners' organizational logics. The literature recommends that partners adopt collaborative, empathetic mindsets but even so, tensions can threaten outcomes and partnership continuation. Difficulties can be exacerbated when firms engage stakeholder organizations in sustainability-oriented innovation projects, where each partner is seeking their own combination of social, environmental, and economic objectives. This study explores strategic responses to these differences in logics through eight case studies of sustainability-oriented innovation engagements between a focal business and an external organization. The key finding is that partners can respond to their differing logics by shaping a new “engagement logic” that guides members of both (or all) organizations. A logic frame with four value-related dimensions—value salience, instrumentality, temporality, and language—allows a subtly idiosyncratic engagement logic to be created that is acceptable to both parties. This classification of ingredients of a logic frame forms a wider contribution to the institutional-logics literature. A complementary range of logic practices is identified, covering logic emergence, logic enactment, and boundary defining. The engagement logic aids the partnership by contributing to four partnership-level generative outcomes: partnership commitment, capability integration, scope flexibility, and system orientation. A notable finding is the presence of a logic boundary, specified in work, time, and space, enabling the engagement logic to co-exist with organizational logics; a research direction is whether this boundary also exists in logics at organizational and field levels. The study shows partnerships to be a new context within which novel logics can emerge, contributing to an understanding of how logics evolve.

Tolerating failure has gained recognition as a crucial catalyst for product innovation. However, there is a limited understanding of how and under what conditions project leaders' perceptions of failure normalization—the norms regarding failure in their work environment—can enhance product innovativeness in the context of new product development (NPD). Drawing upon sensemaking and motivation theories, we propose a moderated mediation model to address this research gap. Data were collected from 181 high-tech ventures in China, with responses gathered at three different time points from matched respondents. Utilizing moderated path analysis and the Monte Carlo method, our findings reveal that failure normalization primarily fosters product innovativeness by facilitating learning from failure. Importantly, this positive effect is contingent upon the project leader's passion for inventing. A profound passion for inventing significantly enhances NPD leaders' motivation to learn from failures, thereby acting as a pivotal factor that determines whether failure normalization promotes or impedes product innovativeness. This research thus elucidates the previously inconclusive relationship between failure normalization and product innovativeness as presented in the literature. It underscores the dual importance of organizational culture (specifically, failure normalization) and individual motivation (specifically, the passion for inventing) in driving learning and innovation within the NPD process. The practical implications of these findings are significant for high-tech ventures seeking to enhance their NPD outcomes. Specifically, cultivating an organizational culture that perceives failure as an opportunity for learning, coupled with recognizing and fostering the passion for inventing among NPD project leaders, can boost NPD product innovativeness.

Innovative firms, like startups, are increasingly making use of technology broadcasting to explore market applications for their technology. While findings from previous studies suggest that these firms can get access to a large pool of suggestions for market applications through technology broadcasting, we lack empirical evidence on whether firms that use technology broadcasting will actually be able to process and explore these suggestions. The current study points to the distinct role of firms' domain-specific and general knowledge base in this respect. It proposes that technology broadcasting is positively related to the number of market applications a firm explores. Moreover, it hypothesizes that this relationship is weakened by the firm's domain-specific knowledge and strengthened by its general knowledge base. We use Poisson analyses on hand-collected survey and secondary data on a sample of 205 Flemish startups. We find that technology broadcasting is positively associated with the number of market applications a firm explores. Furthermore, this positive relationship is stronger with increasing general knowledge, but weaker with increasing domain-specific knowledge. These findings advance our understanding of the boundary conditions of technology broadcasting. Additionally, our study contributes to the open innovation literature which has called for more attention to the challenges an organization faces in managing its external knowledge search. Finally, our study provides important practical insights for innovative firms that are trying to find market applications for their technology.

Technological innovation is critical for high-tech new ventures (HTNVs), and the position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has become increasingly crucial in top management teams (TMTs). Drawing upon the upper echelons theory and the attention-based view of the firm, we examined a sample of 429 HTNVs in China between 2014 and 2019 to test whether and how appointing a CTO and the CTO's characteristics affect the new ventures' innovation activities. The results show that having a CTO position promotes HTNVs' exploratory innovation activities but does not affect exploitative innovation activities. While a longer CTO tenure positively affects exploratory innovation, it hinders exploitative innovation. In addition, a CEO serving as the CTO in a HTNV has a negative effect on exploitative innovation activities but no effect on exploratory innovation activities. This effect is contingent on the CEO's technological background and whether the CEO owns shares in the HTNV. The findings of this study enrich the literature on the upper echelons theory, the attention-based view, and entrepreneurship and innovation and provide rare empirical evidence on whether and how appointing a CTO, CTO characteristics, and the interaction of CTO characteristics and CEO characteristics affect HTNVs' innovation activities in emerging markets.

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized the profound impact of digital technologies (DTs) on reshaping organizations' value propositions and their ability to create, communicate, and deliver value to stakeholders. Given this heightened attention, it is imperative to comprehensively examine how DTs affect marketing innovations. This study reports the results of a systematic review of empirical research on DTs' role in marketing innovations. Specifically, it identifies a comprehensive list of technologies and investigates their relevance in enabling innovative approaches within marketing research, strategy formulation (segmentation, targeting, and positioning), and implementation (product, promotion, place, and price). The study synthesizes emerging themes in the literature, pinpoints research gaps, proposes a 3As framework for classifying DTs in marketing, and delineates future research directions in this pivotal domain.

Innovation politics impact the development and introduction of innovations, yet knowledge about the influence of specific political behavior or behavioral patterns remains blurred. Based on a literature review and the articles in this Special Issue, we propose a three-part framework that identifies the building blocks of political behavior in innovation: what motivates actors to be political, the different types of political actors, and the effect of various political behaviors on innovation outcomes. Emphasizing the evolving landscape of innovation politics, the framework aims to highlight research gaps and guide future studies toward improving our understanding of the functional and dysfunctional aspects of innovation politics.

In search of innovation and market success, firms have started to empower their customers in many ways, from customizing and self-producing their own products (products made for one) to selecting and designing products for the broader marketplace (products made for many). This power shift has important behavioral and psychological consequences for customers and, hence, has attracted considerable interest from academics and practitioners alike. However, the literature is scattered, provides inconsistent findings, and lacks both a comprehensive conceptualization and empirical overview. Specifically, extant literature neglects the situational nature of customer empowerment, equalizing inherently different customer empowerment activities while failing to consider the divergent effects on participating versus observing customers (i.e., customers who do not participate in the new product development process themselves). This limits advancement of the field, and impedes integration with the related fields of innovation, marketing, and consumer research. To facilitate a better understanding of the psychological and behavioral consequences of customer empowerment, we systematically review literature in the field and develop a conceptual framework that integrates different customer empowerment situations and their respective psychological (e.g., firm perceptions and feelings of empowerment) and behavioral (e.g., product preferences and willingness-to-pay) consequences. Using this framework, we structure previous research, highlight similarities and differences across customer empowerment situations, and set the stage for future research. By taking a customer perspective, this research advances our understanding of why some customer empowerment strategies are more successful than others (and under which circumstances). On a broader level, we show that adopting a behavioral and psychological perspective may be a promising way to study innovation.

In industrial product development with customers, it is well-known that lead userness is associated with novel and commercially attractive products. We take a next step by analyzing if lead userness is related to product development that potentially affects industry-level practices. Our main hypothesis is that lead userness results in the pursuit of Schumpeterian product opportunities: disequilibrating, radical, rare, and based on new knowledge and creative activities. In contrast, at low lead userness, more Kirznerian product opportunities are expected—which maintain industry standards. The hypothesis is supported by data from 139 high-tech small firms. Next, we anticipate that factors related to the selection of lead users, and the effective processing of their inputs, moderate the connection between lead userness and Schumpeterian opportunity. As for selection, we find a stronger connection when firms collaborate with “new” customers. Conversely, when involved customers have been business partners already for a long time, the pursuit of Schumpeterian opportunities is mitigated. Also, tentative evidence is found that the connection between lead userness and Schumpeterian opportunity amplifies when involved customers are less dominant market players. Finally, when it comes to processing lead users' input, we report tentative evidence that firms' R&D intensity should be higher (indicating ability to process lead users' inputs and make continued development efforts). Our findings help to explain why lead users have been associated with industry dynamics, and provide guidance to identify “relevant” lead users when firms seek product opportunities that potentially disequilibrate their industry.

Firms that capture the benefits of innovation opportunities ahead of their rivals achieve superior rates of organic growth. These growth leaders don't wait for opportunities to appear before reacting. Instead, they systematically search for opportunities to select for development. Qualitative case analyses of four growth leaders found that each used two types of heuristics or rules of thumb while capturing innovation opportunities. Their top-down strategy heuristics were revealed with a wide-spectrum framework that reimagined and stretched each dimension of their strategy. Growth leaders also used bottom-up process heuristics to routinize and share their approaches to capturing innovation opportunities throughout their organization. These heuristics are a useful lens for studying innovation practices and suggest fruitful avenues for further research.