Innovation Management Literature Research Articles

THE EFFECTS OF WORK-LIFE BALANCE, ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING CAPABILITY, AND TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP ON PRODUCT INNOVATION PERFORMANCE

This study significantly advances innovation management literature by analysing the impact of work-life balance (WLB), organisational learning capability (OLC), and transformational leadership (TL) on product innovation performance (PIP). By employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) combined with Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), it clarifies the roles of these variables in Brazil’s manufacturing sector. Data from 332 organisations revealed that OLC and TL are vital for enhancing PIP, while WLB, though not directly influential, is crucial for innovation. This finding offers a new understanding of WLB’s role in innovation management and highlights the complexity of factors driving product innovation. Integrating NCA with PLS-SEM, this research enriches theoretical debates and provides practical insights for optimising innovation strategies. It fills a gap in the literature by analysing how these key factors interact to impact PIP, contributing to both academic research and practical innovation management.

Navigating the Digital Frontier: Emerging Trends in Digital Innovation Management for 2023 and Beyond

Purpose: After the pandemic digital technologies have increasingly become the focus of companies’ innovation management processes. This trend has led to a rapid expansion of the field, with a growing number of research papers on various facets of this topic being published in academic journals. However, the proliferation of literature in the field has complicated the ease with which practitioners and academics can stay up to date with the latest developments and build on recent findings in their respective work. In order to succeed within the field of digital innovation management a strong grasp of the newest trends is required to not fall behind competitors, and to be able to develop cutting edge research. To address this challenge, this paper aims to answer the research question: What are the most common themes in post-pandemic digital innovation management literature? Design/methodology/approach: To answer this question, this study conducted a systematic literature review of 148 academic papers published between 2020 and 2023. The identified trends were subsequently organized into a framework that provides a comprehensive understanding of the field. Findings: The identified trends can be classified as either catalysts or new opportunities. Catalysts are trends that companies can implement to make their digital innovation management more efficient. The four identified catalysts are: the use of artificial intelligence as a vital part of innovating, educating leaders and employees, incorporating digital knowledge management practices, and collaborating with innovation networks. The articles also point to three trends classified as new opportunities that digital innovation management can enable, such as more sustainable initiatives, better foreign aid, and a transition to platformization. Originality: This study summarizes the research direction of digital innovation management and synthesizes important key developments leading up to the year 2023, which researchers and practitioners should be aware of.

Unraveling data from an idea management system of 11 radical innovation portfolios: key lessons and avenues for artificial intelligence integration

In strategic and radical innovation, the degree of uncertainty and the amount of complexity is much higher compared to ‘business as usual’. Therefore, idea management systems are often used to support such innovation processes. An interesting question is what we can learn from studying data in such idea management systems and what potential implications we can derive from the innovation management literature. In this study, we were allowed to access and analyze data from the same idea management system used in 11 radical innovation projects from the years 2012–2018. Our analysis unravels 8 findings that in different ways nuance or challenge current research on innovation management. Finally, we discuss how the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in idea management systems can support innovation team members in increasing the innovation potential of the ideas that are elaborated.

Innovation in Living Labs: A Quantum Approach

Living lab research is a well-accepted stream of innovation management literature. Although previous research has documented living labs from a variety of perspectives, the core of living labs and their principles remain largely underexplored. The present study analyses innovation in living labs inspired by the lens of quantum theory and its key concepts, including superposition, entanglement and wave function collapse. More specifically, the study applies insights from quantum theory to improve our understanding of innovation endeavours in living labs. The framework developed in the study illustrates how and why living labs advance innovations: they enhance collisions of individuals with different backgrounds and knowledge, thereby increasing potential realities (superpositions) and their collapses. The study contributes to living lab literature by suggesting that living labs can be seen as a realisation of quantum computing in real-life environments, speeding up innovation activities. While the study explores conceptual aspects, its findings can offer valuable insights for policy makers and practitioners engaged in living labs.

The AI‐augmented crowd: How human crowdvoters adopt AI (or not)

AbstractTo date, innovation management research on idea evaluation has focused on human experts and crowd evaluators. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), idea evaluation and selection processes need to keep up. As a result, the potential role of AI‐enabled systems in idea evaluation has become an important topic in innovation management research and practice. While AI can help overcome human capacity constraints and biases, prior research has identified also aversive behaviors of humans toward AI. However, research has also shown lay people's appreciation of AI. This study focuses on human crowdvoters’ AI adoption behavior. More precisely, we focus on gig workers, who despite often lacking expert knowledge are frequently engaged in crowdvoting. To investigate crowdvoters' AI adoption behavior, we conducted a behavioral experimental study (n = 629) with incentive‐compatible rewards in a human‐AI augmentation scenario. The participants had to predict the success or failure of crowd‐generated ideas. In multiple rounds, participants could opt to delegate their decisions to an AI‐enabled system or to make their own evaluations. Our findings contribute to the innovation management literature on open innovation, more specifically crowdvoting, by observing how human crowdvoters engage with AI. In addition to showing that the lay status of gig workers does not lead to an appreciation of AI, we identify factors that foster AI adoption in this specific innovation context. We hereby find mixed support for influencing factors previously identified in other contexts, including financial incentives, social incentives, and the provision of information about AI‐enabled system's functionality. A second novel contribution of our empirical study is, however, the fading of crowdvoters’ aversive behavior over time.

Risk-Reward in Economics: Academic Career Genealogy

In academia, fostering innovation through interdisciplinary knowledge recombination is essential for growth. However, the balance between novelty and skepticism poses challenges, particularly for early-stage researchers lacking established social capital. While prior studies suggest diverse academic training enhances career prospects, this quantitative genealogical analysis challenges this notion. Drawing on the Family Tree of Trade Economists database, this study finds that having multiple supervisors and diverse academic ancestry doesn’t guarantee academic success. Surprisingly, the presence of academic siblings (shared supervisors) significantly increases the likelihood of securing a tenured position, whereas academic cousins (shared grand-supervisors) show no significant impact. This study, at the nexus of innovation and organizational management literature, informs doctoral students aiming for academic success by emphasizing the strategic choice of affiliations.

Business model innovation: Integrative review, framework, and agenda for future innovation management research

AbstractThe business model innovation (BMI) concept has become a well‐established phenomenon of current academic research. While Foss and Saebi's (Journal of Management, 2017, 43, 200–227) seminal literature review on BMI revealed 349 articles on BMI published between 1972 and 2015, an additional number of 1727 articles on the topic have been published since 2016. In contrast to this overall interest in the BMI phenomenon, innovation‐focused journals include only a limited number of publications on BMI. Further, besides the valuable insights and fruitful research directions of extant literature reviews, they tend also to overlook the linkages between traditional innovation management and the majority of BMI research. Given this underrepresentation of BMI research in the innovation management literature, we conduct an integrative literature review to bring the disconnected literature closer together and offer directions for future research. Our literature review applies the review strategy of blending and merging the literature across domains. First, we blend the knowledge base of the BMI domain by applying the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Body of Knowledge categories. Second, we merge the literature across domains by developing an integrative framework. As recent BMI literature increasingly converged to two lines of research, our framework differentiates between the relatedness of the BMI and BMI openness. Thereby, we offer new avenues for future research that can enrich the dialogue on BMI research in the innovation management community. These results demonstrate how the BMI domain covers aspects that fit, contribute to, and extend classical innovation‐focused research, how both research domains can be merged to enrich each other, and how future research can foster the dialogue across disconnected domains.

Innovation Management Model for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs): Georgia

Abstract The present article explores the internal and external factors that enable the implementation of innovative practices within Georgian SMEs and the successful management of innovation and growth. We posit that a well-functioning and effective innovation management model is a prerequisite for growth and sustainability. The research aims to propose a conceptual model of innovation management and assess whether the application of innovation practices impacts the company’s growth in the targeted sample. The interpretation of results is based on examining the phenomenon and synthesis of theoretical information and data obtained from the online questionnaire and focus group. The data reported here appear to support the assumption that innovation management and a good combination of human and financial resources shall be the basis upon which the growth is implemented. As there is still a scarcity of research on innovation management practices in SMEs in developing countries, notably in Georgia, the present study shall contribute to the business and innovation management literature and shall develop recommendations and suggestions for start-up managers, entrepreneurs, policymakers or other interested parties. Consequently, the present research shall attempt to combine theoretical and empirical substantiations and create practical implications.

SME innovation, supply chain strategy fit and business performance: the moderating role of environmental uncertainty

ABSTRACT Innovation continues to be a strategic priority of corporate competitiveness. Despite there is a sizable body of research that addresses how innovations influence various business outcomes, little is known as to whether and how process and product innovation may fuel/hinder the supply chain strategic fit (SCSF) and the business performance of focal small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Employing structural equation modelling on data collected from 258 Korean SMEs, we find that both process and product innovations positively impact SCSF, and that improved SCSF positively influences on SME performance. Our study also suggests a non-monotonic contingency effect of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between SME innovation and SCSF. Specifically, we find that environmental uncertainty strengthens the positive effect of process innovation on SCSF but weakens the positive impact of product innovation on SCSF. Our study contributes to the innovation and supply chain management literature with novel theoretical and managerial knowledge on how to manage innovation and SCSF under different environmental conditions.

The ‘bright’ side of innovation management for international new ventures

All businesses are finding it difficult to figure out how to enhance the environment and society. Following the co-generation of social, ethical, and corporate aims, new sustainable inventions have evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic event, similar to new solutions into a workable, viable, and ethical business. The positive and negative aspects of inventions are a topic of discussion among innovation management academics. In particular, how innovation may be more sustainable even when job inequities caused by automation have sparked a feeling of the importance of upholding human rights. Despite that, the innovation management literature is still far from being pedantic in studying automation and human rights towards sustainable innovations in the context of international new ventures (INVs). The article challenges a pessimistic view of innovations by examining automation and human rights for 3000 INVs through the perspective of the micro-foundations. Multiple linear regression analysis is used to evaluate hypotheses, demonstrating how social entrepreneurship can play a constructive mediating role in upholding human rights and promoting automation. This demonstrates the necessity for additional research on a business’s individual level to create social breakthroughs. The study encourages policymakers and the government to support sustainable innovations by utilizing technology to boost job quality, uphold human rights, and foster global entrepreneurship.

The influence of the cross-border innovation environment on innovation processes in agri-food enterprises – a case study from the Dutch-German Rhine-Waal region

Enterprises of the agri-food and other sectors develop innovations that can serve the EU’s Green Deal objective to become climate-neutral by 2050. Innovation processes face specific innovation environment conditions, which are beyond the enterprise’s control. Our research aims to investigate how the innovation environment affects product innovation processes of agri-food enterprises located in a cross-border region. We developed our conceptual framework of the “cross-border innovation environment” based on innovation system and innovation management literature. We conducted semi-structured interviews in selected agri-food enterprises in the Dutch-German region Rhine-Waal. Results indicate that agri-food enterprises’ innovation environments concentrated on national-level factors, and that cross-border factors and relationships were rare. Moreover, different factors influenced different stages of innovation processes that were primarily driven by markets compared to research. We conclude that integrating customers and business partners during research and technological development is important to address current challenges of the Green Deal. Understanding how the innovation environment influences innovation processes in agri-food enterprises can help to develop appropriate policies.

Industrial Convergence and Industrial Crisis: A Situational Analysis About Precision Medicine During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Convergence, and its various configurations, is an established topic in technology and innovation management literature. This article contributes to the extant literature about industrial convergence by conducting an explorative analysis of the industrial crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article, we aim to explore how industrial convergence affects the business dynamics of the healthcare markets. To fulfill our research purpose, we perform a qualitative study by exploring retrospectively the case study of precision medicine. Thus, we use a case study approach based on the triangulation of the multiple sources of evidence gathered. We propose a conceptual framework attesting to the continued recourse to digitalization for the need for data integration and the creation of hybrid figures within healthcare markets during the industrial crisis. This article proposes various implications for researchers and practitioners dealing with the management and development of innovation in convergent sectors.

Co-creating values for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements: research on the structural hole filling behavior of stakeholders

PurposeThis study aims to explore how stakeholders leverage their guanxi and structural holes to promote knowledge mobilization to increase the performance of sci-tech achievement transformation.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted questionnaires, a social network analysis and semistructured interviews to examine its hypotheses by gathering data from a university and an enterprise in China.FindingsStructural holes impede knowledge mobilization among stakeholders in their network, but guanxi moderates this impeding effect. In addition, knowledge mobilization promotes transformation performance.Originality/valueBy developing a mechanism to illustrate how stakeholders strategically leverage their guanxi and structural holes to affect the efficacy of knowledge mobilization to increase transformation performance, we reveal how stakeholders interact to co-create values for innovation, thereby contributing to the innovation and knowledge management literature.

How the smart product attributes influence consumer adoption intention.

Compared with traditional products, the connection attributes and intelligence attributes of the smart product are their differentiated competitive advantages. In order to understand how smart product attributes affect consumer attitudes and the influencing mechanism, we carry out this study. In the framework of psychological empowerment, this paper explores the relationship between smart product attributes and consumers' adoption intention. We consider that companies can launch a range of smart products, where the probability of success is related to the degree to which intelligent and connection attributes stimulate consumer motivation. Smart products with intelligence attributes and connection attributes can improve consumers' cognition of the four motivations consist of meaning, ability, autonomy and influence, which activate consumers' psychological sense of empowerment, and thus improve consumers' willingness to adopt. In addition, we also find that consumer heterogeneity influences this process. This paper mainly reports the moderating effect of Consumer domain-specific innovation. We find that the connection and intelligence attributes of smart products stimulate consumers' adoption intention effectively. The findings of this paper complement innovation management literature related to smart product attributes and provide suggestions for enterprises to introduce smart products.

Short communication: To speed or not to speed? The impact of market type and the COVID pandemic

Rapidly developing and bring an innovation to market (innovation speed) should have positive effects on performance. Yet innovation and technology management literature also suggests that faster innovation speed may lead to higher innovation failures in some scenarios. We investigate the value of innovation speed in four market scenarios: established markets before and during the COVID pandemic and emergent markets before and during the COVID pandemic. The study findings indicate that the pandemic has major implications for the value of innovation speed. In established markets where customer needs are well defined, rapid innovation increases performance before the pandemic; yet fast innovation speed leads to worst performance during the pandemic. In emergent markets where customer needs are still being formed, before the pandemic, the effect of innovation speed on performance is U-shaped (that is, slow or rapid innovation speed is better than moderate innovation speeds). In contrast, increasing innovation speed always leads to higher performance during the pandemic and innovation is most successful at very fast innovation speed. We present top ten success factors for managing innovation speed before and during the pandemic. The research findings are applicable for the post-pandemic new normal. The study also advances the engineering and technology management literature.

Impact of multiple commitments on the performance of open innovation projects: the mediating role of trusted and vigilant knowledge interaction

PurposeBased on commitment system theory and commitment-trust theory, this study aims to reveal the effects of participating teams’ multiple commitments (i.e. synergistic commitments and conflicting commitments) on the performance of open innovation projects through the mediating role of trusted knowledge interaction and vigilant knowledge interaction.Design/methodology/approachPrimary survey data collected from 242 respondents of 47 open innovation projects in the manufacturing industry was used to test eight hypotheses. Correlations between multiple commitments, knowledge interaction and the performance of open innovation projects were investigated.FindingsThe findings reveal that synergistic commitments improve the performance of open innovation projects through enhancing trusted knowledge interaction. Synergistic commitments reduce the level of vigilant knowledge interaction, and the performance of open innovation projects follows an inverted U-shaped relationship with vigilant knowledge interaction. Conflicting commitments negatively moderate the effect of synergistic commitments on trusted knowledge interaction and vigilant knowledge interaction.Originality/valueThe authors extend commitment system theory and commitment-trust theory to open innovation project field. The findings bridge the gaps in isolated and static focus in previous commitment literatures and innovation management literatures, and provide practical guidance for how to better manage the dynamic combination of multiple commitments and knowledge interaction among participating teams in open innovation projects.

SMEs’ sustainable innovation performance during pandemic: impact of knowledge coupling and parallel-mediation of ambidexterity and market capitalising agility

ABSTRACT Covid-19 pandemic has caused crisis and uncertainty which adversely influenced innovation performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Innovation is a primary source of survival and growth in SMEs; therefore, this study aims to develop and empirically analyse conceptual model that sustains innovation performance of SMEs during the pandemic. This study integrates knowledge-based view (KBV) with a self-tuning model to examine Chinese manufacturing SMEs. Survey data of 306 responses were collected from the top and mid management and analysed through Smart-PLS 3. Results indicate a positive effect of knowledge coupling on innovation performance; besides, ambidexterity and market capitalising agility (MCA) positively mediate between knowledge coupling and SME innovation performance. This study contributes to KBV, self-tuning, strategy, innovation and crisis management literature. To practitioners, this study advises developing dynamic capabilities to sustain innovations during pandemic crisis. This is the earliest empirical examination to mediate the effect of knowledge coupling on innovation performance through ambidexterity and MCA during a crisis.

Firms’ innovation and university cooperation. New evidence from a survey of Italian firms

Abstract In this article, we investigate whether the cooperation with universities may stimulate the innovative performance of Italian firms. We use a dataset merging information from two different surveys carried out by the Bank of Italy between 2007 and 2010. We derive our results using a two-stage procedure with the aim of ruling out spurious correlations due to the existence of omitted variables. Results show that the cooperation with universities does not affect the likelihood of firms introducing technological innovations. However, when we distinguish between pure technological innovation outcomes (only new products and/or productive processes) and joint innovation outcomes, which involve both organizational and technological changes, we find that only the latter is positively stimulated by the cooperation with universities. These findings are promising since, according to the innovation management literature, joint innovation activities are more successful in transferring new ideas and new business opportunities into market success.

Agile R&D Units’ Organization Beyond Software—Developing and Validating a Multidimensional Scale in an Engineering Context

Previous literature addressed organizations’ adaptiveness to ever-changing business environments and investigated the concept of agility. However, extant agility research primarily covers the corporate and project levels and is typically located in the information systems and operations management fields. Relatively little quantitative research in innovation management literature exists, and those studies approached the concept solely from an outcome perspective (i.e., increased adaptiveness) instead of elucidating how organizations should organize themselves to be agile (i.e., a capability perspective). This article addresses these shortcomings and adopts a capability perspective since no empirical studies have examined agile R&D units’ organization (ARDO). Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, we develop a measure of ARDO, conceptualizing it as a second-order construct, consisting of six dimensions: a culture of agile values, customer integration, autonomy, an iterative work method, cross-functional capabilities, and flat hierarchies. We validated the measurement by conducting three studies to ensure content, structural, and nomological validity. We applied structural equation modeling on a sample of 175 R&D managers and cross validated our findings on different hierarchical levels via a sample of 454 R&D employees. The results confirm the second-order nature of the ARDO measure and provide evidence of its positive relationship with front-end success. We advance scarce quantitative research on agility's neglected capability perspective and contribute to the innovation management field by facilitating further empirical research on agile R&D units’ antecedents and outcomes in the context of physical product development.

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY? RELIGIOUS DIRECTORS AND DIGITAL INNOVATION

Digital innovation has become an important focus for corporations wishing to provide novel products and services to their customers. To achieve this, firms must maintain a disruptive organisational posture and promote risk-taking behaviours. In contrast, religious executives are generally seen in the literature as risk-averse and endorse conservative values, such as traditionalism, security, and conformity. In an analysis of large U.S. firms between 2010 and 2015 and using a novel measure for the religiosity of board directors, we find that companies with higher proportions of religious board directors file fewer digital patents and receive fewer citations on their digital patents. Moreover, this study establishes firms’ technological and religious environments as relevant boundary conditions. We contribute to the innovation management literature by introducing board religiosity as an antecedent to digital patenting activities in large firms and by establishing leisure activities as an indicator of the religiosity of executives. In addition, this study offers relevant organisational policy implications with respect to diversity initiatives and board decision-making.