Whom Should We Talk to? Investigating the Varying Roles of Internal and External Relationship Quality on Radical and Incremental Innovation Performance

Research suggests that close relationships with internal and external partners are likely to have a significant impact on new product development (NPD). What is unclear is how the effects of internal and external relationships influence development paths for different types of innovations. Prior literature indicates that the pathways for developing incremental innovations differ considerably from those for radical innovations. Thus it is plausible that the effects of external versus internal relationships vary across these two innovation types. This paper uses the 2012 Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS) data set to investigate the roles of internal and external relationship quality on the development of both incremental and radical innovations. The results find that internal and not external relationship quality is beneficial for the development of incremental innovations. When driven by internal relationships, a flexible NPD process is advantageous for the financial performance of incremental innovations. Meanwhile external and not internal relationship quality is valuable for developing radical innovations. External relationship quality results in process flexibility, leading to project execution success and subsequent financial performance for radical innovations. As expected, project execution success consistently leads to increased financial performance. These findings indicate the critical differences in types of relationship quality required when developing new products based on radical versus incremental innovations. © 2016 Product Development & Management Associatio

The Role of Innovation in Small Business Performance: A regional Perspective

The small and medium sized enterprise sector is seen as the engine of growth for an economy, in terms of generating innovation and employment growth. Firm entry can create pressure on incumbent firms and yet research on the transmission mechanisms, as they apply to small firms is less well understood, in part because of small firm ‘churn’ but also because they are less well represented in firm level survey data. The advent of the Longitudinal Small Business Survey (LSBS) goes a considerable way in allowing us to address this knowledge gap. This paper presents evidence using the latest waves of the LSBS data (2015-2017) combined with data on the regional environment in which small firms are located. We argue that city regional factors influence firm growth and performance and in particular the innovative environment of the firm. We find evidence of City Regional level effects but weak evidence in relation to specific channels for these effects, specialisation agglomerations appear to be positively associated with higher levels of labour productivity. Our findings suggest that more work is needed to understand what it is about the regional environment that fosters productivity improvements in small firms particularly in relation to innovation

Non-market Strategies and Building Digital Trust in Sharing Economy Platforms

Although research on non-market strategies and the sharing economy (SE) have grown exponentially, there remains limited insight on how actors in the sharing economy ecosystem engage in non-market activities to achieve their goals. In this paper, we develop and present digital trust building as a crucial building block of a successful sharing economy ecosystem. We develop a conceptual framework to highlight the different non-market strategies that sharing economy platform providers (SEPPs) cultivate and leverage trust for enhanced performance among stakeholders in the sharing economy

In‐store shopping hassles: Conceptualization and classification

A positive shopping experience provides retailers with a competitive advantage. However, retail environments pose numerous hassles that may negatively affect consumer experiences. Integrating perspectives from attribution theory and expectation theory, we examine the concept of shopping hassle and how it differs from that of retail service failure. Furthermore, we utilize qualitative approaches to explore what shopping episodes consumers perceive as hassles. Conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews in Study 1, we develop a classification framework of in-store shopping hassles. In Study 2, we use a critical incident technique approach to gain a further understanding of types of shopping hassle