ABSTRACT In the realm of entrepreneurship, incubators have emerged as indispensable facilitators, serving as crucial avenues for entrepreneurs to establish external network connections and secure access to vital resources. This study draws upon the principles of social network theory and employs hierarchical regression analysis. The primary focus of our investigation is to elucidate how incubators' network-building endeavors exert a substantial influence on the entrepreneurial performance of start-ups, from the perspective of resource bricolage. Our research examined a sample of 465 start-ups in China. The empirical findings that have emerged from our study reveal the positive impact of incubator network building on the entrepreneurial performance of start-ups. Importantly, this impact is not isolated but instead is partially mediated through the lens of resource bricolage, highlighting the innovative use of available resources. Furthermore, we shed light on the moderating role of network proactiveness, revealing its positive influence on the relationship between incubator network building and the resource bricolage employed by start-ups. This study significantly enriches the existing body of knowledge by advancing our comprehension of the intricate mechanisms governing the incubator start-ups dynamic. It contributes to a deeper understanding of how diverse incubator network mechanisms shape the accumulation of resources and capabilities within start-ups, shedding new light on the path to entrepreneurial success.

ABSTRACT We discuss the effect of cluster and firm heterogeneity on knowledge sourcing in an overseas research and development (R&D) lab. Building on agglomeration economies, absorptive capacity view, and social capital theory, this paper proposes theories that explain certain conditions under which the enjoyment of benefits from the knowledge source can be maximised. This paper suggests that 1) the level of knowledge absorption from a region by an overseas R&D lab is likely to increase as the region contains more diverse technological profiles with a similar science base; 2) the level of knowledge absorption from a region by an overseas R&D lab is likely to increase as the lab enhances its technological capabilities; and 3) the level of knowledge absorption from a region by an overseas R&D lab is likely to increase as the lab becomes older in the cluster. We simultaneously suggest that cluster traits and firm heterogeneity influence the learning of overseas R&D labs. The consideration of both factors will provide a better understanding of knowledge spillover and its contribution to firms in the cluster.

ABSTRACT While prior studies have indicated a positive correlation between followers’ psychological capital (PsyCap) and their innovative behaviour, there has been limited exploration of the congruence effect of leader and follower PsyCap in predicting innovative behaviour. Overlooking the congruence effect of leader-follower PsyCap may lead to an overstatement of the benefits of followers’ PsyCap in shaping innovative behaviour, resulting in an inaccurate understanding of its antecedents. To address this gap, this study draws on the person-environment fit theory, specifically the person-supervisor fit theory, to examine how congruence and incongruence of PsyCap between leaders and followers influence innovative behaviour. Polynomial regression analyses were conducted with data from 55 leaders and 264 followers in China. The results demonstrate that the higher alignment of PsyCap levels between leaders and followers, the better the leader-member exchange (LMX). Moreover, a high level of leader-follower PsyCap congruence is associated with higher LMX than a low level of congruence. In cases of incongruence, the high-low combination of leaders’ PsyCap and followers’ PsyCap is associated with lower LMX than a low-high combination. Finally, LMX mediates the relationship between leader-follower PsyCap congruence/incongruence and follower innovative behaviour. These findings emphasise the importance of congruence in leader and follower PsyCap for promoting innovative behaviour. Implications for theory and implementation are discussed.

ABSTRACT To remain competitive, firms must innovate their business models (BMs) to meet the demands of the external environment. Given the severity of external threats or opportunities, managers need to determine the scope of BM innovation (BMI) – how many elements of a BM need to be changed – and the degree of novelty required. However, internal firm knowledge may not be sufficient to conceive of and implement new BMIs. Seeking external knowledge can offer managers diverse perspectives and expertise that should foster BMI, a topic that has been insufficiently addressed in the literature. To address this gap, we investigate whether firms that engage in external knowledge search are more likely to engage in BMI and whether different external knowledge sourcing strategies are associated with different BMI types. Analysing Norwegian firm-level data, we find a close association between a firm’s choice of external knowledge search activity in terms of breadth and depth and the scope and novelty of a BMI. The wider a firm’s search, the wider its BMI scope, and the deeper that search, the more novel its BMI. Our findings contribute new, empirically supported insights on external knowledge search as an important antecedent to BMI. For practitioners, our findings illustrate how different search strategies help firms initiate and implement different types of BMI.

ABSTRACT This study looks at how decisions are made during early-stage innovation, specifically how managers, teams, or team leaders formulate problems on which to focus. Problem formulation processes put organisations on paths that incur sunk costs and influence subsequent problem solving and innovation outcomes. Varying human biases may impair these processes. Therefore, factors that have the potential to mitigate biases play a key role in determining problem formulation performance. This exploratory study looks at one of these factors by examining the role of awareness of bias. It offers theoretical insight into and examines empirically the relationships between bias awareness and bias intensity, as well as between bias intensity and problem formulation performance. Using the problem as the unit of analysis, and examining original survey datasets gathered from the US, China, and Finland, we find that two bias types are particularly prone to influence strategic problem formulation: Solution jumping as a cognitive bias and dominance as a motivational bias show negative relationships with problem formulation performance. We also find that unlike other biases, dominance bias appears unaffected by the degree of bias awareness. The insights from our study shed light on how formulating novel problems is subject to the influence of cognitive, motivational, and informational biases.

ABSTRACT Healthcare is a challenging field for innovation: it is characterised by complex regulation and needs for enhanced collaboration between public and private actors who differ in terms of their motivations, innovation needs, and institutional logics. These complexities relate to multiple ways of approaching value capture in terms of securing financial or non-financial benefits from value creation in innovation collaboration. At the same time, existing scholarly knowledge offers limited help to understand or manage value capture practices in public-private collaborations. Exploring the specific practices of value capture is needed not only to understand how the returns from shared value creation activities are secured but also to understand why public and private organisations should invest their limited resources in collaboration in the first place. Applying insights from the innovation management and industrial marketing literatures, the present case study explores value capture practices in public-private collaborations for healthcare technological innovation. Empirically, it draws from twelve collaborations between a public hospital and private firms providing insight into both private firms and a public hospital organization. As a result, the study suggests a categorisation of value capture practices emerging in innovation collaboration in healthcare, thereby explicating how such practices incorporate approaches of both public and private sector participants.

ABSTRACT Processing large and heterogeneous numbers of ideas submitted to crowdsourcing contests is a regular challenge for idea evaluators. The aim of this study is to investigate a potential use case for AI-based innovation management and to extend the knowledge of using automated novelty detection in idea evaluation processes. AI-based language models can automatically allocate short texts according to their semantic similarity in an embedded space. We represent the semantic content of crowdsourced ideas with the three contemporary text embeddings – Doc2Vec, SBERT, and GPT-3-based Ada Similarity – and compute their semantic distance to different reference sets using different novelty detection algorithms. We then compare the algorithm-generated scores with human novelty assessments to validate them. While selected novelty scores based on text embeddings correlate with humans, our results show that scores based on SBERT embeddings best match human novelty assessments. We also find that AI-based novelty detection approaches perform better for ideas below the median word count and when compared to a set of existing solutions, suggesting that the chosen language model is not the only factor influencing the applicability of the proposed approach. Furthermore, the study highlights important features and limitations of automatically generated novelty scores that need to be considered when complementing evaluators searching for new ideas in crowdsourcing contests and beyond.

ABSTRACT Previous studies on innovation governance have focused on the governance of science, technology, and innovation from a long-term perspective. In this article we focus on the short term by exploring the generation and use of new scientific and technical knowledge to address an urgent societal crisis. We empirically analyse the emergency response during the first wave of COVID-19 infections in Iceland using a conceptual framework based on three theoretical components, namely, emergency management, innovation governance, and the innovation process as a problem-solving process. The empirical analysis is built on a systematic analysis of secondary data. Based on the results, we conclude that improvisation processes using existing knowledge and capabilities and triggered by unanticipated problems during a crisis are in some cases sources of successful innovation. In these cases initial problem-solving processes characterized by improvisation can be interpreted as blind variations that are retained and diffused through a series of complementary problem-solving processes that generate and use new scientific and technical knowledge. Furthermore, we extend the concept of innovation governance readiness to include both the readiness to exploit technological opportunities and the readiness to address unanticipated problems during a crisis and propose that our extension is useful for integrating long-term and short-term aspects of innovation governance.

ABSTRACT Although convergence is a major trend in the development of medical innovations, the implications of the institutionalisation of convergent innovation are understudied. This paper explores how the institutionalisation of convergent innovation affects the organisation of health care, by using operational domains and categories of the Non-adoption, Abandonment, Scale-up, Spread and Sustainability (NASSS) and the Institutional Readiness (IR) approach respectively. We use an illustrative comparative case study on the institutionalisation of MRI-guided linear accelerator (MR-Linac) technology in the Netherlands and the United States. Empirically, we conducted 66 interviews with different professionals in the health care system around MR-Linac. The findings show that institutionalisation of convergent innovation affects the organisation of health care by: changing the traditional organisation of solving a medical problem, thereby transforming and reorganising work in the health care environment, providing opportunities for individual user development, collective action and cross-sectoral developments, and requiring the additional work of evaluating convergent innovation, including administrative tasks, innovation and research activities within and across institutions. The insights offered are also relevant for understanding convergence in the medical field, and for rethinking medical innovation in general.