Heuristics-in-use in industrial interfirm-collaborating clusters

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to help interfirm-collaborating cluster (ICC) executives examine the relevance of alternative decision rules in practical business contexts. Multi-party-implemented strategies and establishing multi-lateral collaborations are necessary actions for achieving success in new product development by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study explores interfirm decision-making heuristics relating to industrial ICCs. Design/methodology/approach – The study examines the relevancy to decision making in ICCs of heurstics such as “fast-and-frugal decision trees” (FFDTs) and “take-the-best” (TTB) to processing possibly influential decision-making cues. The study also examines simple heuristics versus the value of a “fully rational” approach to making decisions – calculating cue values, importance weights, multiplying values by weights, summing and selecting the option having the highest summed score. This study included interviewing executives of the pivotal firm in an ICC. Findings – This study reveals a decision-making solution for shortening the time and processes required in seeking new business collaboration partners in an ICC. This study not only develops a FFDT for six decision-making modules to quickly identify potential collaboration partners, but it also constructs a decision systems analysis (DSA) flowchart to effectively shorten the decision-making process. Research limitations/implications – This study is in accordance with the general type of industrial interfirm collaboration in Taiwan. The industrial interfirm collaboration could be further divided into the types of formal, semi-formal and informal industrial interfirm collaborations. Practical implications – This study argues that firms usually find it difficult to develop their own technology because of the high costs of research and development for SMEs. Therefore, firms need to collaborate with partners to maintain their competitive advantage. However, to collaborate, firms must learn to trust their collaboration partners, and the degree of collaboration also strongly depends on the degree to which they trust their collaboration partners. Originality/value – This study provides the efficient models of FFDT and DSA to quickly identify potential collaboration partners and to effectively shorten decision-making processes

Interorganizational network and innovation: a bibliometric study and proposed research agenda

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the latent structure of the literature on interorganizational network and innovation as well as to map the main themes and empirical advances in this research stream. Design/methodology/approach – Using bibliometric coupling, the authors analyze the citation patterns in 67 management studies regarding innovation networks, published in ISI-journals from January 1996 to October 2012. Findings – The authors identify the conceptual orientations that studies share. Bibliometric analysis allows us to draw an overview of how this field of research has developed, recognizing in essence six main clustered research themes: networks as a framework that sustains firm innovativeness in specific contexts; network dimensions and knowledge processes; networks as a means to access and share resources/knowledge; the interplay between firm and network characteristics and its effects on innovative processes; empirical research on networks in highly dynamic industries; and the influence of industry knowledge domain’s peculiarities on network dimensions and characteristics. Research limitations/implications – By providing a comprehensive survey of current trends in the literature on interorganizational network and innovation, the authors eventually identify the major gaps in our knowledge and help refocusing the current research agenda in this increasingly relevant research stream. Practical implications – The systematic introduction to the field of innovation networks is of notable interest to scholars and practitioners, who have (or desire to have) some awareness in the topic. Here, practitioners may find their compass to acquire some knowledge on innovation networks and orient their choices. Originality/value – First, the spatially organized picture of the intellectual structure of the literature the authors offer is the initial thought-out comprehensive introduction to the field of on interorganizational network and innovation. Second, by developing a thorough bibliometric analysis of the extant bulk of the innovation networks literature, the authors develop specific methodological contribution. Third, we are able to map the intellectual structure in a two-dimensional space to visualize spatial distances between intellectual themes