Do industry downturns affect whether firms should innovate?

__Abstract__ It is almost taken as religious dogma that innovation in business is an inherently good thing. Adapt or die, we are endlessly told. Change or perish. Only the fittest will survive. But what form should innovation take

Environmental capabilities and corporate strategy

Green thinking that would have met with nothing but contempt three decades ago is now firmly on the agenda of corporate boardrooms. Green thinking is increasingly having a clear impact upon how companies in a wide range of sectors across diverse geographies formulate and implement their long-term strategy and short- to medium-term tactics

Why external R&D collaboration is not always good for business

For the past 15 years, companies have been told that they should open up their labs and learn to conduct research in more co-operative ways. Most authorities agree that collaboration helps bring in fresh perspectives, extends budgets further by enabling companies and institutions to pool their resources, and generally accelerates their pace of innovation. But does it really

Postcards from the Edge: A Review of the Business and Environment Literature

Environmental issues, while of growing interest, have been outside the main focus of business scholarship. This position on the periphery may have been a good thing. It allowed scholars of business and the environment to consider unusual theories and evaluate overlooked phenomenon. In doing so, they created a body of research that provides new insights on two topics of mainstream interest -- the sources of competitive advantage and the origin and function of self-regulatory institutions

Market Feedback and Team Commitment in Radical Product Innovation Process

Previous research has considered how exploratory market learning processes moderate market and technological uncertainty in radical product development. Scholars argue that new product development (NPD) teams may increase the chances of success of radically new projects by acquiring, assimilating and implementing new information from market feedback. However, research has not tackled how information is assimilated by the NPD team and to what extent the process of information implementation occurs. In this article, we begin to fill the need for such research by investigating the interaction between internal team values (beliefs and possibly ideology) and external market feedback / information in radical projects. Via the lens of a 2-year longitudinal participant-observation study, we suggest that information assimilation is not automatic, but rather influenced in interesting ways by internal team values. The findings imply that shared team values act as a selective assimilation mechanism determining whether a development team will act on user feedback. Furthermore, the type of information (e.g., functional vs. conceptual feedback) processed by the development team acts as a moderating factor on the relationship between the team values and information processing

The influence of industry downturns on the propensity of product versus process innovation

This article sheds light on how industry fluctuations affect firms' propensity to innovate. We test two seemingly conflicting arguments that suggest how firms are more or less inclined to engage in innovation activities during industry fluctuations. By studying a panel of 622 Italian manufacturing firms during the period 1995-2003, we show how differentiating between product and process innovation may help reconcile the theory of opportunity cost of innovation with the cash-flow effect argument. We find that industry downturns are related to product and process innovation in different ways: firms tend to invest in product innovation rather than process innovation in downturns. The findings have implications for both theory (showing when the opportunity cost of innovation dominates) and research design (showing the importance of both the input and output measures in innovation studies and how they might influence the results

The Strategic Determinants of Tardy Entry: Is Timeliness Next to Godliness?

Previous research has considered extensively the causes and effects of market entry order and timing. It has neglected, however, the timeliness of such entry — the degree to which a firm delivered a new product on the date it had set for its release. In this article, we begin to fill the need for such research by evaluating some strategic explanations for why a firm might miss a scheduled entry date. We then test whether such “tardy entry” influences sales performance in the new market

Does the apple always fall close to the tree? The geographical proximity choice of spin-outs

ABSTRACT Previous studies suggest that spinouts will locate in close proximity to the firm from which they spawn. As a result of this process, clusters of entrepreneurial activity tend to develop around a few strong parent firms. But do all spinouts really stay close to home? We demonstrate that spinout firms choose heterogeneous technological and market strategies, and hypothesize that firms with more aggressive strategies have a greater need to maintain local relationships. We find supporting evidence of our theory by analyzing the location, technology, and market decisions of intra-industry spinouts in their first year in the disk drive industry.

The influence of industry downturns on the propensity of product versus process innovation

This article sheds light on how industry fluctuations affect firms' propensity to innovate. We test two seemingly conflicting arguments that suggest how firms are more or less inclined to engage in innovation activities during industry fluctuations. By studying a panel of 622 Italian manufacturing firms during the period 1995-2003, we show how differentiating between product and process innovation may help reconcile the theory of opportunity cost of innovation with the cash-flow effect argument. We find that industry downturns are related to product and process innovation in different ways: firms tend to invest in product innovation rather than process innovation in downturns. The findings have implications for both theory (showing when the opportunity cost of innovation dominates) and research design (showing the importance of both the input and output measures in innovation studies and how they might influence the results)