R&D–Marketing Integration Mechanisms, Communication Flows, and Innovation Success

Rudy Moenaert, William Souder, Arnoud De Meyer, and Dirk Deschoolmeester report the results of their study of forty technologically innovative Belgian companies to examine the interaction between marketing and R&D. They studied one commercially successful and one commercially unsuccessful technological product innovation project in each participating company and collected data from one marketing and one R&D respondent per project. Communication flows between marketing and R&D are increased under conditions involving formalization of projects, decentralization, positive interfunctional climate, and role flexibility.     

Incubators: Tool for Entrepreneurship?

One of the biggest barriers for the development of incubators in Europe is the lack of entrepreneurship and the underdevelopment of seed financing and business angel networks. While incubation is increasingly being used as a tool for promoting entrepreneurship and start-ups, leading to new policy incentives, the content of the concept is becoming more and more polysemic. Completely different approaches tend to be associated with the incubator concept, which hence becomes more of an umbrella concept. This paper aims to combine a conceptual analysis with an analysis of economic reality, both in the U.S.A. and in Europe. It warns against non-accurate evaluations of the impact of incubators if one does not take into account the different types of incubators. The paper focuses on the dynamic process of incubatio and concludes by underlining the importance of close links between incubators and business angels networks.     

Architectural Redesign, Interpersonal Communication, and Learning in R&D

An effective R&D organization needs information from a complex web of sources, including customers, suppliers, sales and marketing, and company management. Within the R&D organization, information must flow into and among numerous teams. This network of interpersonal communications can go a long way toward determining the success of a company's innovation efforts. In an exploratory study of a Belgian company operating in the telecommunications industry, Rudy K. Moenaert and Filip Caeldries examine the effects of interpersonal communication on market and technological learning in R&D. Trying to improve the flow of information into and within its R&D organization, this company designed its new R&D facility with an eye toward improving both market and technological learning throughout the organization. By locating R&D personnel in closer proximity to one another, management hoped to provide them with improved access to market and technological information, and thus increase their innovativeness. Contrary to expectations, placing R&D professionals in closer proximity to one another did not increase technological learning in this organization. In fact, technological learning actually decreased slightly during the period studied, though the change is not statistically significant. On the other hand, market learning and product innovativeness improved significantly during the period studied. For an R&D professional in this company, members of other R&D teams seem to be more important as sources of market information than as sources of technological information. Surprisingly, the relocation of R&D personnel also did not increase the amount of communication that takes place, either within a project team, between members of different teams, or between R&D professionals and the management steering committee. However, the architectural redesign does appear to have improved the quality of communication. R&D team leaders report that since the relocation, the information flowing into R&D has been more customer focused. This is attributed to the company's ongoing efforts to provide the tools and structures necessary for supporting the objectives of the architectural redesign. For example, implementation of quality function deployment (QFD) has helped innovation team members to focus more clearly on relevant information. The success of the architectural design required approaching this effort as a complex, ongoing process, rather than a quick-fix solution.     

Does peer group size influence social preferences and risk taking?

This paper examines whether the ex post relative payoffs of peers as well as the size of the peer group impact an agent's willingness to take risks. For example, persons in a flood plain may be less likely to purchase flood insurance if their neighbors also refrain from purchasing. We generalize the Fehr‐Schmidt (1999) model to allow the intensity of the social preferences to vary with the size of the peer group. Our experiment tests whether subjects are more or less likely to choose a lottery over a fixed payment when others have been assigned either the same lottery or the fixed payment. Using both between and within subject designs, we find risk‐taking behaviour is not responsive to the risks faced by others regardless of the size of peer group.     

In Search of the Classics: A Study of the Impact of JPIM Papers from 1984 to 2003*

The Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) was launched in 1984 and over its first two decades of existence evolved into the leading journal in the field of innovation and the management of technology. During these 20 years JPIM contributed to the field by publishing 488 academic papers. This paper is a follow‐up study to an earlier study that looked at how JPIM evolved in terms of knowledge stock and knowledge flows during the first two decades (published in JPIM, March 2007). That paper looked at what was published during the first 20 years, which sources were cited, and which journals cited JPIM papers. This study takes a closer look at the impact of JPIM on the field of innovation and the management of technology by identifying the most classic papers published in JPIM during its first two decades of existence. This study used multiple research methods to identify 64 candidate potential classics from the 488 papers published in the first 20 years of JPIM's existence, to analyze how they differ from the other 424 papers published in the journal, and to investigate authors' motivations for writing these papers. Finally, using survey responses from the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) membership and other academics in innovation and new product development, the research then determines which 5 of the 64 candidate papers are considered to be the “most classic” papers published and the factors driving that determination. The findings show that classic papers are those presenting a “pioneering idea” in the field that creates buzz in both the academic and practitioner worlds. High numbers of citations are indeed the outcome of these endeavors, but being a classic requires more than having high numbers of citations. Authors of the true classics generally have worked hard to disseminate their research, usually to both academics and practitioners, perhaps also contributing to the network buzz created by their findings. While one of the five most classic papers represented the first investigation into a particular stream of research, the other four were culminations of a significant body of research, providing a distinct summary of known information on a topic at the time they were published and a clear road forward for future research on the topic. These bodies of knowledge have yet to be superseded by other culminating papers.     

Lachmann and the wilderness: On Lachmann's radical subjectivism

Abstract

This paper deals with the question why in the 1940s and 1950s Ludwig Lachmann (1906–1990) failed to revive Austrian economics. Lake Keynes and Hayek, Lachmann pointed out that expectations, and hence knowledge, are important determinants of (cyclical fluctuations in) investment and economic activity. He thereby emphasized that the process of knowledge acquisition is indeterminate and open‐ended. This indeterminateness is difficult to reconcile with neoclassical attempts to provide economics with internally consistent microfoundations. This fundamental difference between his and the neoclassical research agenda explains Lachmann's failure to revive Austrian economics.     

TEN YEARS OF GENERAL OLIGOPOLISTIC EQUILIBRIUM: A SURVEY

In this paper, I survey the recent and rapidly increasing theoretical literature using the brand‐new approach in embedding oligopolistic competition in general equilibrium, as designed by J. Peter Neary. First, I introduce the reader to Neary's approach, by describing the main ingredients. Then, I present a comprehensive set of studies that, over the last decade, apply this approach in different contexts, most of which are in open economy, and I examine the relevant outcomes. Although the theoretical literature has generously advanced, there is a lack of research on the empirical side, which would be an important area for future research besides theoretical extensions, some of which I highlight in the conclusions.