Strategies for Integrating Stakeholders into Sustainability Innovation: A Configurational Perspective

Sustainability is a key driver of innovation for products, services, and business models. Sustainability innovations are aimed at improving the environmental, social, and economic performance of the innovated solution. Given the complexity of many sustainability challenges, leading innovators may seek to boost their innovation capacity by tapping into the ideas, knowledge, and expertise of their stakeholders. In doing so they need to consider how many and which stakeholders to integrate into new product development (NPD) processes, and at what stage. This study investigates stakeholder integration strategies associated with high sustainability performance of innovation. Building on the literatures of sustainability innovation and stakeholder integration in the context of NPD, this study developed a configurational model to analyze stakeholder integration strategies. The empirical data consisted of 80 interviews and documents from 13 medium to large companies and their stakeholders in Europe. Using the fsQCA method, it was found that there is not just one effective strategy but three stakeholder integration strategies for high sustainability performance of innovation. The results imply that deep organizational engagement with stakeholders is necessary for the achievement of high performance. Otherwise, the three strategies range from progressive openness, which allows stakeholders to exert a fundamental influence on the sustainability innovation, to limited openness toward stakeholder integration. With the early secondary strategy pointing to progressive openness, companies integrate secondary stakeholders early on and so maximize the influence of different views on the innovation. As to limited openness, companies following the selective strategy limit the number of stakeholder groups in NPD but are indifferent to the timing of these groups’ inputs. Finally, the fine‐tuning strategy is least open to atypical views as it restricts the share of secondary stakeholders and only allows external inputs after the fuzzy front end phase when key decisions regarding the innovation have been made.     

Strategic orientation and new product development performance: The role of networking capability and networking ability

While strategic orientation can represent an important antecedent to new product development (NPD) performance, research suggests that adopting a strategic orientation alone is not sufficient and a better understanding of contingencies is necessary. Based on the dynamic capability view of the firm, this study examines the effect of a firm's ability to connect with external network partners (networking capability) and the ability of NPD project managers to network with stakeholders within the firm (networking ability). The empirical results indicate that market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation are positively associated with NPD performance when a firm has sufficient networking capability to manage network dynamics and when the managers of NPD projects possess networking ability to successfully mobilize the support and advocacy of stakeholders within the firm. The results also show that NPD performance is highest when market (entrepreneurial) orientation, networking capability, and networking ability are all high, thus supporting the proposed three-way interaction.     

Stakeholder Influence and Radical Change: A Coordination Game Perspective

Organizations often find it hard to change their corporate strategy radically, even if the need for change is widely recognized as in the Asian crisis of 1997. Such change requires large numbers of stakeholders to change their individual behavior, yet complex governance structures limit the applicability of agency-based models of governance. Rather, the coordination of stakeholder is at the core of governance during radical environmental change. Based on the game-theoretic concept of a ‘coordination game’, the paper analyses conditions that may inhibit the coordination of stakeholders to shift from an existing corporate strategy to a new one. I thus consider coordination failure that inhibit restructuring, and argue that radical change requires leaders to communicate and create common knowledge about the organization's future strategy.     

Determinants of integrated product development diffusion

Integrated product development (IPD) is an approach for developing new products focused on the early and active involvement of design, manufacturing, marketing and other key new product development (NPD) stakeholders in order to achieve cross-functional integration and concurrent execution of various NPD activities. The benefits of IPD are well known in both the academic literature and popular press, including significant reductions in NPD cycle time and costs. However, in spite of these benefits, for the majority of manufacturing organizations, IPD is not used on 100% of NPD projects. This research develops a model of the organizational contextual factors influencing the diffusion of IPD in organizations. Results of surveying 269 NPD managers indicate that the complexity of certain IPD practices and support for IPD directly influence IPD diffusion, while an innovative organizational climate and the complexity of the organization's NPD activities indirectly influence IPD diffusion through IPD support.     

Spurring Cross‐Functional Integration for Higher New Product Performance: A Group Effectiveness Perspective*

Spurring integration among functional specialists so they collectively create successful, or high‐performing, new products is a central interest of innovation practitioners and researchers. Firms are increasingly assembling cross‐functional new product development (NPD) teams for this purpose. However, integration of team members' divergent orientations and expertise is notoriously difficult to achieve. Individuals from distinct functions such as design, marketing, manufacturing, and research and development (R&D) are often assigned to NPD teams but have contrasting backgrounds, priorities, and thought worlds. If not well managed, this diversity can yield unproductive conflict and chaos rather than successful new products. Firms are thus looking for avenues of integrating the varied expertise and orientations within these cross‐functional teams. The aim of this study is to address two important and not fully resolved questions: (1) does cross‐functional integration in NPD teams actually improve new product performance; and if so, (2) what are ways to strengthen integration? The study began by developing a model of cross‐functional integration from the perspective of the group effectiveness theory. The theory has been used to explain the performance of a wide range of small, complex work groups; this study is the first application of the theory to NPD teams. The model developed from this theory was then tested by conducting a survey of dual informants in 206 NPD teams in an array of U.S. high‐technology companies. In answer to the first research question, the findings show that cross‐functional integration indeed contributes to new product performance as long conjectured. This finding is important in that it highlights that bringing together the skills, efforts, and knowledge of differing functions in an NPD team has a clear and coveted payoff: high‐performing new products. In answer to the second question, the findings indicate that both intra‐ (or internal) and extra‐ (or external) team factors contribute and codetermine cross‐functional integration. Specifically, social cohesion and superordinate identity as internal team factors and market‐oriented reward system, planning process formalization, and managerial encouragement to take risks as external team factors foster integration. These findings underscore that spurring integration requires addressing the conditions inside as well as outside NPD teams. These specialized work groups operate as organizations within organizations; recognition of this in situ arrangement is the first step toward better managing and ensuring rewards from team integration. Based on these findings, managerial and research implications were drawn for team integration and new product performance.     

The Impact of Organizational Integration and Product Development Proficiency on Market Success

This research investigates three major hypotheses important to new product market success: the greater organizational integration during the development of new products, the greater the market success; the greater organizational integration during the development of new products, the greater new product development proficiency; and the greater new product development proficiency, the greater the market success. “Organizational integration” is defined as the degree of cooperation and communication between internal and external NPD “support” groups and NPD teams. “NPD process proficiency” is defined as how well new product development stages and the new product development process as a whole is performed. “New product market success” is represented by four measures: the degree to which profits and sales exceeded or fell short of what was expected, and the degree to which the new product was perceived to exceed or fall short of expectations related to entering existing and new markets. Information was obtained concerning the most and least successful new products of U.S. firms in the medical instruments, the electrical equipment, and the heavy construction equipment industries. The field survey approach was utilized in which surveys were mailed to recipients such as new product development managers who already had been designated by executives of the sample firms. Several important findings were uncovered during this research. Overall organizational integration was found to be significantly associated with new product market success. Internal integration, the coordination between new product development teams and functional departments, was found to be significantly related to product market success. A significant relationship between new product development proficiency during the NPD “post-launch stage” and the degree of integration between an NPD team and external NPD organizations, such as customers and suppliers, was detected. During the post-launch stage, new product development proficiency also was found to be significantly related to new product market success. These findings suggest several important implications for new product development managers and scholars.     

Exploring the Nonlinear Impact of Organizational Integration on New Product Market Success

This article explores the nonlinear relationship between organizational integration and new product market success (NPMS). The concept of organizational integration was measured by assessing the degree of integration among various groups of people involved in the development of new products including new product development (NPD) teams that are typically the focal points of NPD efforts. New product market success was measured by examining four often‐used measures of NPD success. The mail survey research approach was used to gather empirical data from NPD managers in three major industries. The data gathered from this survey process were used as the basis from which to extract information to address this study's major research questions, which include: (1) How is the degree of new product market success related to the nonlinear degree to which groups of people (including NPD teams) integrate during NPD processes? and (2) How is the degree of new product market success related to the nonlinear degree to which separate groups of people (e.g., customers, suppliers, and functional departments) integrate during NPD processes? This study found that high levels of organizational integration (overall organizational integration and supplier organizational integration) during NPD processes are associated with high levels of new product market success. Additionally, this study found that the relationship between new product market success and organizational integration (customer organizational integration and functional organization integration) during NPD processes exhibit nonlinear, U‐shaped relationships. Therefore, the first important finding of this study confirms that various forms of organizational integration impact in a positive way the market success of new products. This suggests that management responsible for all NPD projects should consciously integrate important groups of people to support such developments. This study's findings also confirm and imply that new product developers in the studied industries should integrate marketing and research and development (R&D) over the duration of the NPD process. This suggests that new product managers must be proactive to assure that members of NPD teams are actively engaged with groups of supporting people within and outside new‐product–producing organizations. Unlike prior research, a major finding of this study suggests that the association between organizational integration and new product market success does not form inverted U‐shaped relationships. Data from this research imply that new product market success is linearly influenced by overall and supplier organizational integration. However, this study's data suggest that new product market success is nonlinearly influenced by customer and functional organizational integration. This study's data suggest that when customer organizational integration and/or functional organizational integration is increased, new product market success can be increased at a rate which is greater than a linear rate.     

Whether to Integrate R&D and Marketing: The Effect of Firm Competence

Integration of research and development (R&D) with marketing remains a frequent topic in the new product development (NPD) literature, largely because it represents a critical antecedent of new product performance (NPP). Two divergent opinions about this integration exist, such that those who contend that firms should pursue high levels of integration in every case provoke criticisms from those who propose that various NPD processes require different levels of integration. This paper proposes that the two perspectives can be reconciled by taking into account the fact that R&D and marketing are integrated mainly to combine critical knowledge (technological and market) that otherwise would be separate to achieve market success. Following Danneels's approach, we investigate how the effect of R&D–marketing integration on performance change across four types of NPD processes: pure exploitation, pure exploration, technological competence exploitation, and market competence exploitation. Data derived from a deep study of 11 NPD projects by five firms, analyzed through qualitative methods, highlight the necessity to vary the level of integration according to the type of competence to be developed during the NPD process. Our analysis suggests two main conclusions. First, the effect of integration depends strictly on the type of competence that the firm uses to develop and launch a new product. Second, integration does not have a unique effect on performance, but it is necessary to distinguish between market performance (e.g., sales and market share) and process performance (e.g., meeting the planned budget and time to market). In some projects, the effect of integration on the two types of performance is diametrically opposite. In particular, we propose that (1) higher performance will be associated with lower integration in pure exploitative projects; (2) in projects that exploit existing market knowledge, higher market performance will be associated with a higher integration, although these projects tend to offer poor process performance regardless of integration level; (3) in projects that exploit technical knowledge, higher performance will be associated with higher integration; and (4) higher integration will be associated with higher market performance but poorer process performance in pure explorative projects.     

Examining Proactive Strategic Decision‐Making Flexibility in New Product Development

While strategic flexibility is widely accepted as a prerequisite for a firm's success, its application in strategic decision making to a firm's new product development (NPD) activities is limited to only a few studies. Furthermore, many organizations still have difficulties creating proactive strategic flexibility in their decision‐making processes. Past research studies have largely ignored the relationship between strategic decision‐making flexibility and firms' resources and/or capabilities and success in the context of NPD. This study advances strategic flexibility by adopting the proactive approach of NPD decision‐making flexibility and by examining its role in translating organizational resources and capabilities into NPD success. This study draws upon the resources, capabilities (i.e., flexibility), and performance framework to show how proactive strategic decision‐making flexibility plays a crucial role in developing new products that can create new opportunities and comply with market needs. Therefore, this research aims to (1) develop an operational definition of strategic decision‐making flexibility and (2) propose a framework to understand the drivers and the subsequent new product performance outcomes of strategic decision‐making flexibility. This study adopts the proactive perspective of strategic decision‐making flexibility and defines it as a capability that enables firms to develop NPD strategies to respond to future changes in the environment. The analysis, based on data collected from 103 European firms, shows that that the effects of long‐term orientation, strategic planning, internal commitment, and innovative climate on proactive strategic decision‐making flexibility are significant. The findings indicate specifically the roles of both champions and gatekeepers, who infuse a firm's knowledge with a clear understanding of its resources, constraints, and market needs, thereby enhancing decision makers' motivation to behave proactively to precipitate transformation. The results also reveal a positive association between proactive strategic decision‐making flexibility and NPD performance outcomes. As such, strategic flexibility provides firms with an ability to adapt to changing environments and to create new market opportunities, product, and technological arenas, and to deliver successful new products. When firms open new market, technological, and product arenas, they can easily foresee their new demands and changes and successfully deliver new products, meeting customer needs/demands, and offering benefits such as quality, cost, and timeliness. This study therefore provides a valuable reference point for future research in strategic decision‐making flexibility in NPD.     

Managing Diffusion Barriers When Launching New Products

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the link between new product launch activities and market success. So far, most empirical research has focused on launch activities that target customer adoption barriers. However, with such a focus the influence of other stakeholders on innovation diffusion is not taken into account. A review of diffusion research and stakeholder theory serves as a basis for discussing the influence of different stakeholder groups such as customers, dealers, suppliers, and competitors on innovation diffusion. Essentially, it is expected that addressing multiple diffusion barriers during new product launch will have a positive impact on market success. The new concept for launch activities addressing multiple diffusion barriers is tested with data on new product launches in industrial markets using a multiple‐informant approach. The results lend support to the notion that a successful launch requires activities addressing diffusion barriers related to different stakeholder groups. Specifically, barriers related to customers, suppliers, and stakeholders of the further firm environment need to be lowered during market launch. For the group of competitors, a balanced launch approach including measures to both lowering and erecting entry and diffusion barriers will increase the market success of new products. The subsequent investigation of the influence of technological turbulence, market turbulence, and product complexity on the performance relationships shows that under high uncertainty managing multiple‐diffusion barriers is of higher relevance than in more unambiguous, clear‐cut contexts. Thus, the results demonstrate that a careful management of diffusion barriers related to multiple stakeholders is a relevant task when launching a new product. The paper concludes with implications for management practice and avenues for future academic research.     

Environmental Uncertainty, Organizational Integration, and New Product Development Effectiveness: A Test of Contingency Theory

R&D/marketing integration clearly improves new-product development (NPD) effectiveness. However, achieving this integration increases the costs of NPD efforts. If technical and market uncertainty moderate the effects of integration on NPD effectiveness, perhaps a firm can achieve NPD success in a more cost-effective manner by seeking the appropriate level of integration, based on the perceived level of uncertainty. In a study of 101 NPD projects at high-tech firms in the U.S. and the U.K., William E. Souder, J. Daniel Sherman, and Rachel Davies-Cooper explore the interplay between technical and market uncertainty, integration, and NPD effectiveness. Their study examines two types of integration: R&D/marketing integration and direct R&D/customer integration. The study measures NPD effectiveness in terms of such indicators as NPD cycle time, prototype development proficiency, design change frequency (a negative performance indicator), and product launch proficiency. The responses from both the U.S. and the U.K. firms provide balanced samples of high and low uncertainty projects, as well as successful and unsuccessful projects. The results of this study support previous research regarding the positive effects of both R&D/marketing integration and direct R&D/customer integration on NPD effectiveness. However, only one measure of NPD effectiveness—R&D comercialization effectiveness—was affected by both R&D/marketing integration and direct R&D/customer integration. This result suggests that the two types of integration are distinct from one another and that managers need to emphasize different types of integration, depending on which aspects of NPD effectiveness their firms need to improve. The results also suggest that technical and market uncertainty influence some aspects of NPD effectiveness. For example, the perceived level of technical uncertainty was found to influence prototype development proficiency and to moderate design change frequency. In other words, these results support the idea that a high level of technical uncertainty warrants paying extra attention to increasing prototype development proficiency in the interest of reducing design change frequency. However, the results also reinforce the idea that NPD activities generally involve high levels of technical and market uncertainty, which means that the high cost of integration may be a requirement for NPD success.     

Understanding ERP system implementation in a hospital by analysing stakeholders

Implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems requires significant organisational, as well as technical, changes. These will affect stakeholders with varying perspectives and interests in the system. This is particularly the case in health care, as a feature of this sector is that responsibility of services is shared between many autonomous units. In these and similar settings, it is essential to analyse stakeholders and to understand their expectations and attitudes towards the system. Such an understanding will help implementers to address stakeholder interests and to encourage acceptance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretically based model to analyse how stakeholder attitudes and behaviours in a hospital setting affect the outcome of ERP implementation. This model is applied in an empirical study of a project to introduce an ERP system in medium‐sized hospital in The Netherlands. The study shows how the ERP implementation impacts the interests of stakeholders such as physicians and administrators, which caused tensions. The paper examines the reasons of these tensions. In doing so, it contributes to our understanding of ERP implementation in health care and any other similar sectors from a stakeholder perspective, and it may help implementers to manage this more effectively.     

中国企业非市场策略与行为研究--对海尔、中国宝洁、新希望的案例研究

本文基于内容分析法以三家企业（海尔、中国宝洁和四川新希望）为案例，研究了提升企业经营合法性的非市场策略与行为。研究结果表明．尽管不同企业采取了差异化的非市场策略．但这些策略和行为均有助于提升企业的经营合法性；将企业与已经获得合法性的事项（例如，政治事项等）、组织（例如，行业协会、政府等）或人员（例如，专家学者等）联系起来，是提升企业经营合法性的重要策略和途径：高管人员作为企业的代言人频繁参与非市场活动，则是企业提升经营合法性的普遍做法。最后。本文提出了相应的理论推断并为现实中企业的经营管理提出了可操作性建议。     

Sales channel integration after mergers and acquisitions: A methodological approach for avoiding common pitfalls

This article addresses the integration of sales channels after mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by appraising the strengths, weaknesses, and biases associated with the four most common frameworks for evaluating sales channels (sales management, historical performance, strategic fit, and customer choice) for their appropriateness in a post-M&A context. The authors develop a methodological approach that uses a balanced-scorecard framework to guide managers through the sales channel integration process, and then apply this approach to the merger of two industrial firms' sales organizations across 21 territories. In so doing, they reveal various pitfalls and propose and test some analytical corrections. Longitudinal performance data support comparisons across the different evaluative frameworks; in particular, the sales management and customer choice frameworks provide the most insight into channel partners' post-integration performance. The results support the premise that channel integration can be improved by accounting for factors unique to the M&A context and using an approach that triangulates multiple perspectives.     

Technological Innovativeness as a Moderator of New Product Design Integration and Top Management Support

Many war stories, as well as a number of empirical research studies, point to the value of design integration and top management support in new product development (NPD) efforts, where design integration is conceptualized as the coordination of product and process design activities performed by various organizational groups. However, some emerging evidence suggests that these aspects of program management are not equally valuable in all NPD contexts. Furthermore, the benefits of these approaches may not extend to all dimensions of NPD performance. This article addresses these issues as they relate to technological innovativeness. The author reports the results of a research study designed to (1) assess the direct contributions of design integration and top management support to several dimensions of NPD performance, and (2) identify potential moderating influences of technological innovativeness on these direct effects. A survey of 136 NPD projects drawn from firms representing most of the major U.S. manufacturing industries provides data for the study. The overall goals of the study were to amplify our understanding of management's role in NPD and to further the development of contingency theory explaining new product success. The results indicate that design integration is positively associated with higher design quality in NPD, but it is not significantly linked with better financial performance. In addition, design integration appears to be an important influence on achieving NPD time goals, but only in cases of high technological innovativeness. This result suggests that increased design integration produces its greatest impacts when development processes are full of uncertainty. Top management support is positively associated with better time‐based performance, design quality, and financial performance on the whole. However, a significant interaction effect suggests that high levels of top management support are ineffective in securing good financial performance in high technologically innovative environments. Other forces appear to be at work in these circumstances, making top management support less important. The article discusses the implications of these findings for management practice, a contingency‐oriented view of NPD processes, and future research.     

Can You Hear Me Now? Communication in Virtual Product Development Teams*

Globalization and technological advances are driving organizations to extend the boundaries of new product development (NPD) teams from traditional colocated settings to dispersed or virtual settings. Virtual NPD teams have a wide array of information and communication technologies (ICTs) at their disposal. ICTs allow team members to communicate and collaborate as they cope with the opportunities and challenges of cross‐boundary work. The purpose of this paper is to explore ICT use by members of virtual NPD teams. This study presents an exploratory test and integration of two competing perspectives of media use in virtual teams: media capacity theories and social dynamic media theories. Specifically, this paper examines the role of task type, organizational context, and ICT type as critical contingency variables affecting ICT use. It also examines how different patterns of ICT use relate to individual perceptions of team performance. The findings from this study of 184 members of virtual NPD teams in three global firms suggest that communication via ICTs in virtual NPD teams is contingent on a range of factors.     

Enterprise logic: explaining corporate attention to stakeholders from the ‘inside‐out’

Why are some firms more effective than others at addressing stakeholder concerns? Conventional stakeholder theories focus on variables in the external environment and cannot adequately explain variance across firms operating in the same context. Our matched‐pair study of eight global corporations goes inside the firm and investigates the role of managerial cognition on corporate attention to stakeholders. We find that top management's conceptualization of the firm's relationship with society—which we name enterprise logic—prompts distinct foci of attention and potentially constrains how well a single firm can simultaneously attend to multiple stakeholders. These findings highlight the value of an ‘inside‐out’ perspective, centered on managerial cognition, in explaining why some firms address stakeholder concerns more effectively than their peers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Achieving new product success via the synchronization of exploration and exploitation across multiple levels and functional areas

While ambidexterity has been identified as a critical prerequisite for new product success, synchronizing exploration and exploitation in practice represents a multifaceted enigma. Ambidexterity is not in reality limited to a single organizational level, or a specific functional area. Firms become ambidextrous when corporate-level exploratory and exploitative strategies interact with operational-level exploratory and exploitative capabilities across multiple functional areas. Data from a sample of technology-intensive industrial firms using a multi-informant design shows that operational-level exploratory and exploitative product innovation and marketing capabilities allow firms to implement corporate-level exploratory and exploitative strategies in the context of new product development (NPD). Further, the findings reveal that the integration of exploratory product innovation–exploratory marketing and exploitative product innovation–exploitative marketing is significant for the implementation of exploratory and exploitative strategies over deploying each capability in isolation. Finally, we show that the implementation of exploratory and exploitative strategies drives new product success through creating distinct positional advantages to customers in the form of both differentiation and cost efficiency. These positional advantages help to better explain the effects of exploratory and exploitative capabilities on new product market performance.     

Entrepreneurial firms’ network competence,technological capability,and new product development performance

Successfully developing new products is critical to an entrepreneurial firm’s continued success. Based on the resource management model, this study aims to answer the key research question: how entrepreneurial firms leverage network competence and technological capability to enhance their new product development (NPD) performance in a turbulent environment. Using data collected from 134 entrepreneurial firms in China, we investigate the performance effects of network competence and technological capability, and the moderating effects of technological turbulence and market turbulence. Our findings show that network competence has a positive impact on NPD performance and technological capability plays a mediating role between network competence and NPD performance. Technological turbulence enhances the performance effects of network competence and technological capability; market turbulence advances the performance effect of network competence, but fails to exert significant negative impact on that of technological capability. We discuss managerial implications of our findings and offer directions for future research.