Journal of Product Innovation Management最新文献

In family firms, innovation poses distinct challenges due to the social complexity resulting from the intertwining of the family and business systems. While prior research has focused primarily on the powerful role of the dominant family coalition in leadership positions, much less attention has been paid to middle managers who must navigate the social complexity in family firms to implement management innovations. Through a multicase study of two highly innovative family firms, we theorize and demonstrate how middle managers engage in coalition building to address the social complexity in family firms when pursuing management innovation by creating a new organizational unit dedicated to managing innovation at the corporate level. Our study shows that middle managers change the social evaluation of the transfer of political capital from the dominant family coalition through enforcement and detachment. Subsequently, they convert, invest, and then mobilize different sources of political capital to gain power through pragmatic persuasion and altruistic evangelizing. Finally, we find that the dominant family coalition employs two distinct modes of political stewardship with respect to family and nonfamily middle managers.

This study investigates the sources of disruptive innovation. The disruptive innovation literature suggests that these do not originate from existing customers, in contrast to what is predicted by the user innovation literature. We compile a unique content-analytical dataset based on 60 innovations identified as disruptive by the disruptive innovation literature. Using multinomial and binomial regression, we find that 43% of the sample disruptive innovations were originally developed by users. Disruptive innovations are more likely to originate from users (producers) if the environment has high turbulence in customer preferences (technology). Disruptive innovations that involve high functional (technological) novelty tend to be developed by users (producers). Users are also more likely to be the source of disruptive process innovations and to innovate in environments with weaker appropriability. Our article forges new links between the disruptive and the user innovation literatures, and offers guidance to managers on the likely source of disruptive threats.

The open innovation paradigm emphasizes that firms can improve their innovation performance by collaborating with other firms. However, there is no consensus in the open innovation literature regarding what drives firms' implementation of inbound and outbound open innovation and how the two types of open innovation influence innovation and firm performance. The present meta-analysis synthesizes previous research to advance our understanding of open innovation by reexamining its antecedents and its moderating effects on innovation and firm performance. Using data from 157 articles, our results show that appropriation strategy, formal organizational structure, learning culture and top manager competence drive inbound open innovation, while innovation strategy, appropriation strategy, learning culture, and top manager competence drive outbound open innovation. In addition, we find that absorptive capacity positively moderates the positive impact of inbound and outbound open innovation on innovation performance. However, industry type (i.e., high- and low-tech) is not found to moderate the effect of open innovation on innovation or firm performance, suggesting that both high- and low-tech firms can equally reap benefits from open innovation. Furthermore, this study also partially supports the moderating effects of firm size and cultural value (individualism vs. collectivism) on the open innovation—performance relationship. These findings collectively suggest that the effects of inbound and outbound open innovation on performance are subject to contextual factors. Although this meta-analysis does not allow us to generate new theories in the open innovation literature, it offers valuable insights to both academics and practitioners regarding factors affecting the implementation of open innovation and its performance implications.

Although informal firms are rare in developed economies, they are prevalent in emerging economies and create significant competitive pressure for formal firms. Recent literature has focused on the effects of informal competition on product innovation, but the results have been inconsistent. This discordance motivated this study. Drawing on insights from competitive rivalry, this study investigates how informal competition affects formal firms’ product innovativeness (i.e., whether to develop new-to-market products or not). Using a sample of firms operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, we find that if formal firms encounter intense competitive pressure from informal firms, they are less inclined to develop new-to-market products. Furthermore, credit constraints strengthen the adverse effect of competitive pressure from informal firms on the development of new-to-market product innovation, but state legitimacy weakens this effect. This investigation provides insight into the barriers to innovation in emerging economies and adds to the existing literature by highlighting the need to consider the varied effects of informal competition on different types of product innovation.

Corporate entrepreneurship is infused with power. Prior research has begun to shed light on the role of power in innovation contexts. Yet, we know much less about the day-to-day enactment of mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship, which, despite its partial subtlety, is no less consequential regarding decisions on pursuing or abandoning innovative ideas. This paper extends the literature on corporate entrepreneurship and power by exploring the discursive practices through which managers and employees of a corporate accelerator disciplined venture founders in the pursuit of innovative ideas. Based on a Foucauldian discourse analysis of ethnographic data, we show how a clash of entrepreneurship discourses invokes the day-to-day performance of three discursive practices—observing, exercising, and punishing—through which the accelerator's staff ensured that venture founders would adopt a dominant entrepreneurship discourse, with important implications for decisions on pursuing innovative ideas or not. These findings deepen our understanding of enacting mundane power in corporate entrepreneurship as well as the enablers and outcomes of such power enactment. We also outline the practical implications for emerging corporate innovation settings such as accelerators.

To date, innovation management research on idea evaluation has focused on human experts and crowd evaluators. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), idea evaluation and selection processes need to keep up. As a result, the potential role of AI-enabled systems in idea evaluation has become an important topic in innovation management research and practice. While AI can help overcome human capacity constraints and biases, prior research has identified also aversive behaviors of humans toward AI. However, research has also shown lay people's appreciation of AI. This study focuses on human crowdvoters’ AI adoption behavior. More precisely, we focus on gig workers, who despite often lacking expert knowledge are frequently engaged in crowdvoting. To investigate crowdvoters' AI adoption behavior, we conducted a behavioral experimental study (n = 629) with incentive-compatible rewards in a human-AI augmentation scenario. The participants had to predict the success or failure of crowd-generated ideas. In multiple rounds, participants could opt to delegate their decisions to an AI-enabled system or to make their own evaluations. Our findings contribute to the innovation management literature on open innovation, more specifically crowdvoting, by observing how human crowdvoters engage with AI. In addition to showing that the lay status of gig workers does not lead to an appreciation of AI, we identify factors that foster AI adoption in this specific innovation context. We hereby find mixed support for influencing factors previously identified in other contexts, including financial incentives, social incentives, and the provision of information about AI-enabled system's functionality. A second novel contribution of our empirical study is, however, the fading of crowdvoters’ aversive behavior over time.

Framing is a powerful tool shaping innovation success, failure, and transformation. However, innovation framing is not recognized as a unified domain of research and the extant literature is theoretically fragmented across diverse fields. Inconsistencies in definition and operationalization of constructs stall theoretical advancement of innovation framing theory and practice. Importantly, an understanding of the underlying mechanisms enabling framing to mediate innovation outcomes has been missing. Using a systematic literature review (SLR), we integrate diverse theoretical perspectives. Stemming from this, we develop a unified conceptual framework of innovation framing. In so doing we make three vital contributions to the field. First, we develop a typology of construct categories of innovation framing, defining these framing concepts and identifying their theoretical basis. Next, we emphasize the importance of key mechanisms (sensemaking, interpretive flexibility, consensus) in explaining innovation outcomes. Our third contribution identifies innovation stage-specific differences in the role of framing processes, frame types and characteristics, and the temporal elements of these. Finally, we discuss the implications of our research for innovation practitioners, while concluding with a detailed agenda for future innovation framing research.

Why are some firms more resilient when systemic shocks like the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) or COVID-19 pandemic set in? We approach this question by arguing that a firm's pre-shock strategic emphasis on innovation can mitigate the consequences of such shocks by facilitating stability and flexibility, major components of organizational resilience, as the shock sets in. We test our arguments empirically by analyzing data from 2003 to 2011 on as many as 994 firms from the S&P 1500 to identify the causes of their resilience during the 2008 GFC. Our findings indicate that pre-shock product introductions and, to some extent, top management's focus on innovation can facilitate stability and flexibility when a shock occurs, while R&D intensity and patents, other dimensions of a strategic emphasis on innovation, do so only when firm profitability before the shock is low. In this way, we direct innovation research's attention to the additional performance benefits of innovation activities when shocks occur and reveal which dimensions of a strategic emphasis on innovation buffer the negative consequences of a shock, thus providing insights into how innovation helps firms be resilient. Further, our theorizing and empirical findings unveil an intriguing paradox: While existing research tends to find positive associations between innovation and profitability in “regular” times, strong pre-shock profitability impairs innovation's ability to unfold its effects fully at shock onset.

Chen, Yongjian, Nicole Coviello, and Chatura Ranaweera. 2021. “When Change is All Around: How Dynamic Network Capability and Generative NPD Learning Shape a Firm's Capacity for Major Innovation.” Journal of Product Innovation Management 38(5): 574–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12595.

On page 581, a paragraph break was missing between Hypothesis 4 and the subsequent discussion of Hypothesis 5. Specifically, Hypothesis 4 states that “Higher levels of external dynamism strengthen the relationship between a firm's dynamic network capability and generative NPD learning.” The text that follows Hypothesis 4 should have started a new paragraph, marking the beginning of the discussion for Hypothesis 5.

This correction addresses a formatting error and does not affect the content of the article.

We apologize for this error.

Grand challenges vary across industries and call for firms to craft a responsible innovation response to effectively address them. However, key questions concerning why firms embrace responsible innovation and the process by which they respond to grand challenges have yet to be fully answered. We integrate an issue-selling theoretical lens and the customer role from an innovation perspective to theorize about the different influencing motives that customers exert on their corresponding supplying firm to craft a more responsible innovation response to grand challenges. Based on qualitative data collected in almost a 10-year period from multiple respondents across eight customer firms and two supplying firms, we identify three core motives—regulatory, business opportunity, and socio-environmental motives—that propel customers to influence supplying firms to craft different forms of responsible innovation responses. Our research also reveals three vital socio-human capital pathways—human capital, socio-behavioral, and relationship—which, in turn, foster a co-active engagement in addressing grand challenges innovatively and responsibly. In so doing, this research advances novel theorizing on co-active engagement in responsible innovation where the customer acts as the primary champion and the supplier as the implementer. We discuss the important implications for customers and other stakeholders.