Journal of Product Innovation Management最新文献

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.

Developing innovative, eco-friendlier products that gain traction in the mass market remains a persistent challenge for many firms. To bring consumers to choose “greener” alternatives over conventional products, firms need to overcome prevailing product evaluations that favor traditional solutions. Research on valuation entrepreneurship examines the strategies that actors apply to induce changes in established evaluations. Adding to the emerging literature on valuation entrepreneurship, our study analyzes how the car maker Tesla, Inc. used product design—material artifacts' properties of form and function—to advance the public perception of battery electric vehicles (BEVs). When Tesla entered the market, several firms had tried to promote BEVs as a way of making private mobility more environmentally friendly, but with limited success. In contrast, Tesla produced well-received BEVs that generated enormous consumer interest and led to a more favorable assessment of BEVs as a whole. Drawing on 54 interviews and nearly 2000 pages of archival data, our abductive study identifies three product design strategies that increased the appeal of Tesla's initial models: (1) incorporating discontinuous technological solutions; (2) optimizing the products on traditional evaluation criteria (e.g., driving performance, comfort, space, status); and (3) creating an ecosystem of complementary products. Since some design choices came at the expense of a minimal environmental footprint, they risked attracting blame for compromising on the environmental performance of potentially eco-friendly cars and for committing “greenwashing.” To minimize this risk, Tesla complemented its design strategies by employing three strategies of reputational politics to avoid such blame. After Tesla's initial, lavish models had improved the public perception of electric cars, Tesla and other car makers were able to sell less excessive and more sustainable BEVs in much greater quantities than ever before. Our findings contribute to three literature streams and generate valuable insights for management practice.

Scientific research demands robust findings, yet variability in results persists due to researchers' decisions in data analysis. Despite strict adherence to state-of the-art methodological norms, research results can vary when analyzing the same data. This article aims to explore this variability by examining the impact of researchers' analytical decisions when using different approaches to structural equation modeling (SEM), a widely used method in innovation management to estimate cause–effect relationships between constructs and their indicator variables. For this purpose, we invited SEM experts to estimate a model on absorptive capacity's impact on organizational innovation and performance using different SEM estimators. The results show considerable variability in effect sizes and significance levels, depending on the researchers' analytical choices. Our research underscores the necessity of transparent analytical decisions, urging researchers to acknowledge their results' uncertainty, to implement robustness checks, and to document the results from different analytical workflows. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations and guidelines on how to address results variability. Our findings, conclusions, and recommendations aim to enhance research validity and reproducibility in innovation management, providing actionable and valuable insights for improved future research practices that lead to solid practical recommendations.

This paper builds theory on theatrical cultural design in corporate venturing units, such as manifested in playful esthetics (foosball tables and beanbags), startup lingo, or youthful behavior (building with Lego bricks and informal dressing). We develop a set of propositions, illuminating how theatrical cultural design can (de)legitimize corporate venturing units, highlighting three different functions: attention-direction function, social categorization function, and escapist function. In addition, we explain how such changes in legitimization can influence the resilience of corporate venturing units. Our framework contributes to an emergent debate on innovation theater by pointing to the possibility of innovation theater as a constructive process in contemporary innovation management practices.

Although the literature's case and longitudinal studies provide ample evidence of organizational routines that foster creative behaviors, it still lacks an integrative model of organizational creative capabilities (OCCs) and the quantitative evidence to validate such a model. This research is aimed at conceptualizing and developing a reliable and valid scale for OCCs. First, we define the OCC construct's domain by conducting an extensive literature review. We then generate a list of items for the five dimensions of OCCs through a qualitative study involving a group of 24 practitioners (Study 1a) and by surveying nine senior researchers (Study 1b). We refine the OCC scale using a sample of 269 responses collected in France and Canada (Study 2), and we conduct a first-order confirmatory factor analysis (Study 3). Finally, we perform a second-order confirmatory analysis (Study 4a) on samples of 220 responses collected mainly in the United States and Europe, generalize our results to a sample of 205 responses, and strengthen the predictive validity (Study 4b). Our results provide significant evidence that OCCs can be conceptualized around five dimensions: internal socialization routines, idea management routines, external openness routines, creative equipment routines, and internal agility routines. Furthermore, the research confirms the scale's good psychometric qualities, thus ensuring that researchers can be confident in the reliability of any future academic research design using the scale. We also validate the OCC scale's predictive validity by verifying that a five-dimensional reflective scale with 16 indicators has a significant positive effect on the creative outcome. This OCC scale can be used by practitioners to better understand the organizational routines they have to develop in order to strengthen their organization's creativity. It also provides a way for longitudinal studies to observe how OCCs evolve over time.

A review of research on innovation and new product development points to certain foundational issues of concern such as the use of (1) different definitions of constructs germane to the field (e.g., definitions of innovation, innovativeness, and specific types of innovations), (2) different construct labels to refer to specific innovation types, and (3) the same construct label to refer to different innovation types. Over the years, scholars have cautioned that a body of research in a field of study that is based on different definitions of constructs germane to the field would slow the advancement of knowledge. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this Catalyst paper is to initiate a conversation on the prospects for mitigating the definitional quagmire in research on innovation and new product development by developing an inclusive definition of innovation that can be used as a template for defining various types of innovations uniformly. Toward this end, the paper proposes an inclusive definition of innovation based on idea, outcome, and value creation as the defining or essential characteristics of all innovations. Definitions of 10 specific types of innovations defined in a consistent manner, employing the proposed inclusive definition of innovation as a template are also presented. All else being equal, consistency across research studies in the definitions of constructs employed can be conducive to the advancement of knowledge in a field of study in several ways such as streamlining the curation of the research-based knowledge, facilitating the grounding of new research in prior research (i.e., curated knowledge), and eliminating differences across studies in the definitions of key constructs employed as a potential confound on the research findings.