Journal of Product Innovation Management最新文献

The environmental crisis is one of global society's most extreme grand challenges. One of the supply-side factors that can help cope with it is corporate environmental innovation. Based on the upper echelon and value belief theory and with significant empirical analyses, our results strongly support that the presence of women on the board positively impacts innovation aimed at environmental sustainability. The results are based on a sample of 19,800 firm-year observations of 2966 unique firms in 54 industry groups domiciled in 52 countries for the 2003–2019 period. The global distribution of the firms means that the sample is diverse enough to examine our main hypotheses. In addition, we show that culturally masculine societies, as captured by their grammatical gender marking, have a negative impact on such innovation. The masculine culture also moderates the impact of gender board diversity on innovation for environmental sustainability. Our results are robust to a battery of empirical tests and definitions, including instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching causality tests. We further explored firms' attitudes toward innovation for environmental sustainability by adding a qualitative case study research design to our quantitative analysis. That was based on semi-structured interviews with board members and executives. The case studies provided additional support to the results in the quantitative analysis part. This study's empirical results have various broad theoretical and practical implications for board composition, taking into account the linguistic environment of the firm.

Innovation experts posit that digital technologies—such as additive manufacturing (AM)—can address societal challenges and change the nature of work and collaboration. In recognition, this special issue encourages researchers to investigate how AM can be leveraged to reduce environmental externalities and devote greater attention to the production of 3D printed items. This article integrates academic research on new product development and the cradle-to-cradle philosophy with insights gleaned from long-term case observations across a series of large-scale AM projects to advance that 3D printing can unleash three pivotal adaptations to the traditional conception-development-launch ecosystem. Specifically, our direct participation in designing and building multiple 3D printed products reveals that: (1) spent products can possess valuable ingredient materials that can be repurposed, (2) the reduced structural strength of the reclaimed material can be a positive force insofar as spawning innovation in a new product category, and (3) manufacturing should appear as an independent stage in new product development. On this last point, our completed projects align with recent observations that newer AM technologies can make prototyping and manufacturing products easier, faster, and less expensive. Accordingly, we advance a cyclical sustainable innovation process, which consists of ideation, development, AM output (i.e., manufacturing), and material reclamation. This research is both theoretically meaningful and pragmatically useful. It addresses knowledge gaps regarding AM in the academic literature and spawns new research questions for innovation scholars. For managers, it provides a path to supplant the wasteful take-make-dispose production model with the more efficient and effective take-make-transmigrate approach that we deem an innovation loop. Specifically, our final built project—a 3D designed and printed chair that uses polymers from the spent chassis of a 3D printed car—serves as a proof of concept that AM can be a catalyst to a paradigmatic shift in how products are made.

Just over two decades ago, in a Perspective article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), Tomkovick and Miller, called for the professionalization of new product development (NPD). Professionalization of innovation management (as the broader function in which NPD is embedded) was posited to require a combination of scientific knowledge coupled with specific expertise. We revisit that call to (1) assess whether innovation management has established itself as a formal, professional function similar to human resources or marketing, and (2) critically discuss whether (and if so, how) the professionalization of innovation management impacts both academic research and professional practice in the field. We suggest four tests as hallmarks of a profession and apply them to the emerging field of innovation management. Based on our findings, we propose a set of actions for innovation management academics and practitioners. We also recommend directions for future research to promote discussion on this topic within the JPIM community.

Scientists, economists, and politicians increasingly recognize that Indigenous peoples possess invaluable knowledge and practices that have the potential to drive innovation to solve critical global challenges. Indeed, thousands of important drugs—including lifesaving cancer treatments—have their origins in centuries old Indigenous knowledge and practices. Similarly, Indigenous practices have fueled the fast-growing regenerative agriculture industry that is able to yield windfall profits while sequestering carbon and enhancing biodiversity. Referred to in policy circles as biocultural innovation—a form of innovation that occurs at the intersection of the biosphere and ethnosphere—hundreds of diverse examples from a wide array of industries have been documented outside of the innovation literature. However, innovation scholars have yet to recognize or embrace biocultural innovation. We argue that this major oversight hinders practice and leaves untapped potential for solving issues such as slow or unsustainable economic growth, ecological decline, and inequality. To address this gap, we provide a clear definition of biocultural innovation, differentiate it from other innovation domains, and establish its conceptual foundations. Informed by economic theorizing that views the ethnosphere and biosphere as assets, we propose that these assets share four traits: functionality, potentiality, vulnerability, and inseparability (“FPVI shared traits”). Due to their immense biocultural diversity, we assert that these assets carry an “option value” representing enormous innovation potential that can be converted, conserved, or constructed to solve global challenges (the “3Cs”). We conclude by identifying promising avenues for future research on biocultural innovation and a call for action on how to unlock economic and social value while supporting biocultural assets and Indigenous rights.

Innovation-focused co-creation between companies and individual external contributors is accompanied by the challenge of managing intellectual property (IP). The existing literature presents scattered evidence of various elements of the arrangements adopted by companies to manage their IP (such as a high or low degree of IP control, monetary or non-monetary compensation, non-disclosure agreements, additional agreements, and the waiver option) in different co-creation settings (including crowdsourcing contests, virtual communities, single expert sessions, and lead user workshops). However, the existing literature exhibits little understanding of how particular IP arrangements influence co-creation project performance in specific settings. Drawing upon contingency theory and configurational theory, we provide a framework that explains both the effectiveness of different IP configurations and the moderating role that co-creation settings may have on the relationship between IP arrangements and project performance. By the means of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of 116 co-creation projects, we determine the impact of various IP arrangements on project performance in different co-creation settings, and we show how this effect differs across those settings. Our study also demonstrates that IP matters for success in co-creation, while highlighting the interdependence of multiple elements of IP arrangements and their joint influence on co-creation project performance. Our study thus fills the gap in the literature where previous research failed to embrace the context-dependent and multidimensional effect of IP arrangements on co-creation project performance. Additionally, this study offers best-practice guidelines for managers for designing IP arrangements to meet the specific characteristics of their co-creation projects and to ensure their success.

In the crowdsourcing challenges, crowd members can interact with each other by, for example, chatting, exchanging feedback, providing advice, discussing, and commenting on ideas. These social interactions shape a network structure, which is a set of social relationships developed by crowd members. This study aims at investigating how occupying diverse network positions within a crowdsourcing challenge network increases the members' likelihood to succeed in a competition. Leveraging prior literature on social networks and crowdsourcing research, we theorize how central and structural hole network positions influence the crowd members' likelihood of winning crowdsourcing challenges by leveraging the knowledge and information flows that they can access through such network positions. To empirically test the developed hypotheses, we built a crowdsourcing challenge network shaped by 2479 members registered in the 99designs crowdsourcing platform. We found that both occupying a central position and assuming a structural hole network position within the crowdsourcing challenge network showed an inverted U-shaped effect on the success of crowd members. The results of this study contribute to previous crowdsourcing literature and provide critical implications for crowd members and managers organizing crowdsourcing competitions.

Digital manufacturing technologies offer many opportunities for established companies to innovate. They promote data-driven gains in operational efficiency and enable the transformation of current business models or the creation of entirely new differentiation opportunities. However, many digital innovation projects in manufacturing fall short of their initial ambitions and result in incremental improvements to an existing manufacturing system, if at all. To understand the reasons for the discrepancy between initial ambitions and achieved outcomes, we conduct a longitudinal qualitative study based on a collaborative research project with eight companies and additional expert interviews. Applying a paradox lens, we identify three tensional knots that reveal interrelated, multiple tensions of digital innovation management projects in established manufacturing firms: (1) amalgamating physical and digital assets, (2) innovating in an existing modus operandi, and (3) integrating internal and external stakeholders. These tensions result in the simultaneous occurrence of dynamic and conflicting forces that turn digital innovation projects in manufacturing away from their high initial ambitions. Our findings explain why digitizing the manufacturing system is a non-trivial endeavor for established firms, which need to balance the complexities inherent in digitization efforts and manage conflicting goals. For managers, the findings provide ways to manage the interrelated tensions in their digital innovation efforts, enabling them to better capitalize on disruptive innovation ambitions.

While extant research shows a curvilinear relationship between aspiration performance gaps and innovation input, we know far less about how vocational experiences of key firm decisions makers may shift this relationship. We propose the concept of executives' vocational socialization and explore how it influences the relationship between firms' aspiration performance gaps and innovation input from the perspectives of the behavioral theory of the firm and upper echelons theory. We theorize that two aspects of executives' vocational socialization, namely, executives' technical career experience and firm tenure, strengthen the inverted U-shaped relationship between the negative aspiration performance gap and innovation input and weaken the U-shaped relationship between the positive aspiration performance gap and innovation input respectively. We test these hypotheses using a panel dataset of 1158 listed firms in China from 2008 to 2017, and the empirical results from switching regression and fixed-effect models support our hypotheses. Our study contributes to research on the aspiration performance gap, innovation input, and behavioral theory of the firm.

Prior research has highlighted the performance implications of R&D alliances for innovation outcomes and the financial returns of firms. However, research on R&D alliances has yet to offer insights into how the premature termination of such alliances, before fulfilling their predetermined innovation objectives, affects the shareholder returns of the firm. Applying transaction cost economics (TCE) theory and real options (RO) logic to a post-formation alliance setting, we posit that premature termination of R&D alliances prompts relative volatility in investors' prospective benefits and risks. Employing an event study analysis method and using a sample of 116 premature alliance termination announcements in the biopharmaceutical industry, we observe an average negative abnormal stock return of 3.21% for focal firms. Further, our analyses reveal that investors respond even more adversely to alliances terminated unilaterally by the partner of the focal firm in which they invested than those terminated through mutual agreements or by the focal firm itself. Also, we find that alliance duration from formation to termination mitigates the negative effect of termination on shareholder returns.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill, with severe consequences on economic and health systems, requiring the identification and implementation of innovative solutions. This study's aims are threefold: first, to examine the impact of balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity on for-profit organizations' innovation performance related to pandemics; second, to uncover whether and to what extent such innovation performance contributes to tackling global health grand challenges (i.e., mortality rate, risk of infection, and life expectancy) associated with pandemics; and, third, to investigate the moderating role of social equalities in health in the relationships between innovation performance and health-related outcomes associated with pandemics. To uncover how for-profit firms tackle the health-related consequences of pandemics, we examine whether they have introduced product innovations to the health sector, defined as the market introduction of a new or significantly improved good, that have helped address the health challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a panel dataset (1974–2020) with 15,062 firm-year observations from the United States, we show that both the separate and the synchronous implementation of the balanced and combined dimensions of ambidexterity have a strong positive effect on firms' innovation performance and, particularly, innovation initiatives related to the pandemic. The results also reveal that innovation activities (i.e., granted patents and citations focused on COVID-19) negatively affect mortality rate and risk of infection, as well as the positive impact of innovation on increasing life expectancy, with social equalities in health moderating this relationship. Taken together, we make novel contributions to the literature on how to tackle the health-related consequences of pandemics through innovation and provide actionable managerial guidance on how firms can enhance innovation performance.