Customer Interaction and Innovation in Hybrid Offerings:Investigating Moderation and Mediation Effects for Goods and Services Innovation

Hybrid offerings are bundles of goods and services offerings provided by the same firm. Bundling value offerings affects how firms innovate, interact with customers, and customize their goods and services. However, it remains unclear how customer interaction might drive the innovation performance of various bundled components. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of customer interactions and service customization on both goods and services innovations in a hybrid offering context, using a unique data set of 146 information technology and manufacturing firms. Customer interaction appears beneficial to both goods and services innovation in a hybrid offerings context, but service customization has different direct effects on goods versus services innovation. As a potential mediator, customer knowledge mobilization resources exert different effects on the goods and services elements of hybrid offerings. Furthermore, for high-interaction customers, medium levels of technical modularity lead to most favorable innovation outcomes for services innovation. The results thus suggest that providers of hybrid offerings should foster customer interactions, to drive the innovation performance of the good and service components, while still making sure to implement service customization strategies. These findings have notable implications for service innovation research

When Does Distributed Innovation Activity Make Sense? Location, Decentralization, and Innovation Success

Companies face an expanding set of choices about where to locate their innovation activity, both within their home countries and abroad. This location choice also requires firms to make a simultaneous choice about the organizational structure of innovation activity : almost by definition, multiple locations per firm imply some degree of decentralization. Using firm-level data on innovation output and the location of research and development (R&D) activity, we shed new light on the question of whether firms that have multiple locations also have greater innovation success. Our results indicate that, on average, having distributed R&D activity is beneficial in terms of the extent and breadth of innovation success, and the effect is strongly related to the knowledge sourcing strategies that firms employ. These results are consistent with the interpreta-tion that R&D location decisions are driven by the desire of firms to access a broad set of external sources of knowledge for innovation activities. We also find that the benefits of multiple R&D lo-cations do not apply to novel (new-to-the-market) innovations. Our results suggest that when analyzing technological innovation, it is important to distinguish between novel and imitative innova-tions, since their determinants may differ.research and development, innovation, organisation, decentralisation, knowledge sourcing

Organization of knowledge exchange: An empirical study of knowledge-intensive business service relationships

This article empirically examines, the structure of relationships between business service firms and their clients, in particular, the allocation of control rights to the intellectual assets created in joint projects. Business service firms are a distinctive case because their 'product' is essentially knowledge, and in many cases this knowledge is partly tacit and collectively generated and applied. It is proposed that allocation of the rights to intellectual assets in service relationships has a bearing on the creation and deployment of knowledge. Therefore, from the perspective of a service firm, contractual arrangements need to be aligned with the nature of its knowledge base. Knowledge base is characterized here by the firm's service strategy and by its learning strategy. Estimation results using a survey dataset of 167 business service firms provide support for the conjecture. Service firms that provide expert skills or learn incrementally are less likely to retain control rights to their intellectual output. A possible interpretation is that control rights are less valuable to knowledge service providers, whose activities are based on tacit and non-replicable knowledge resources, than to firms with organizationally controlled and replicable resources.Knowledge, Intellectual property rights, Incomplete contracts, Supply relationships,