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

The innovation-economic growth nexus: Global evidence

This paper extends the line of research attempting to link innovation to economic growth by addressing some unexplored questions Using global patent data this paper empirically investigates the importance of both the quantity and quality of innovation on economic growth controlling for past measures of inventive inputs Moreover our research examines how innovation Inputs can be translated Into per capita growth under the various economic structures and stages of economic development Based on a sample of 58 countries for the period 1980-2003 our empirical results indicate that countries hosting firms with higher quality patents also have higher economic growth Furthermore we have some evidence that those countries that Increase the level of patenting also witness a concomitant increase in economic growth (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserve

Corporate Venture Capital in the Context of Corporate Innovation

Corporate venture capital (CVC) programs have followed a strongly cyclical pattern in response to the ebbs and flows of the private and public equity markets. However, the role of these programs inside the firm has received far less study. What role do corporate venture programs play inside large corporations, beyond any financial returns they generate? Do these programs substitute for more traditional corporate investments, such as R&D spending, perhaps outsourcing some portion of a company’s innovation activities? Or do they complement internal R&D spending, and effectively stimulate additional corporate innovation activities? To examine these questions, we develop a novel dataset of US and selected foreign corporations that have initiated corporate venture capital investment programs since 1980. We then examine the R&D spending activities of these firms, prior to and immediately after the onset of CVC programs. We find that the existence of a CVC program is strongly and positively associated with the level of corporate R&D spending, and that this finding is robust to several alternate methods of estimation. We conclude that CVC investing should not be studied merely as an asset class within the public and private equity markets. The strategic dimensions of CVC deserve more attention within the larger context of corporate innovation activities. CVC investments can complement the actions of other corporate innovation initiatives, effects that are not measured in analyses of the financial returns of CVC portfolio investments

Reducing Internet Auction Fraud

When it comes to online auctions, “caveat emptor” is an understatement

Modeling Business Models: A cross-disciplinary Analysis of Business Model Modeling Languages and Directions for Future Research

Modeling languages for business models are a powerful and flexible means of representing and communicating knowledge related to business models. More than fifteen years after Osterwalder et al. (2005) clarified the ontology for the business model concept in this journal, we offer a systematic and cross-disciplinary assessment of the literature on business model modeling languages (BMMLs) that facilitate the visualization of this concept. In so doing, we synthesize and organize the knowledge dispersed across different disciplines in which BMMLs have originated and highlight the potential weaknesses in this literature to offer solid insights for future research. Our analysis reveals the existence of 17 BMMLs that have originated in traditional domains such as strategy and information systems, but also emerging domains such as sustainability. We contrast and compare these BMMLs along three dimensions: semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. We also analyze research that has made use of these BMMLs, differentiating between research that is conducted with a given BMML and research that is conducted about a given BMML. We conclude by offering a research agenda in which we illustrate the main challenges associated with the lack of well-accepted semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic foundations of BMMLs and outline opportunities for future research

Exploring the performance effects of Internetworking

Extant theory presents two explanations as to how IT inputs might affect firm performance: direct or indirect associations between IT inputs and overall economic performance are proposed. A survey of 550 firms indicates that in the case of internetworking the relationship is indirect. Internetworking associates with overall economic performance, but only through proximate internetworking related performance. However, internetworking performance explains very little of the variance in overall economic performance. While enhancing operational efficiency, the Internet enabling of business operations offers little IT-derived competitive advantage

Incumbent entry into new market niches: The role of experience and managerial choice in the creation of dynamic capabilities."

I ncreasingly, technological innovation creates markets for new products and services. To survive, firms must respond to these new markets. How do firms develop the capabilities necessary to succeed in such changing conditions? Some suggest that experience with previous entry builds such capabilities. Others suggest that capabilities arise from experience producing and selling to existing markets. The role of managers is also debated. Some argue that experience with existing markets causes managers to miss entry opportunities. Others argue that managers enter new markets when their firm possesses the experience needed to compete effectively. In this paper, we explore these issues by investigating entry patterns in the disk-drive industry. We investigate the effect of experience in existing markets and experience with previous market entry. We find that experience in previous markets increased the probability that a firm would enter a new market. We show that this experience had greater value if the firm entered the new market. We infer that managers chose to enter these markets to obtain this increase in value