Team control mode,workers' creativity,and new product innovativeness

Scholars of creativity and innovation argue that successful innovations originate from the creative ideas of workers. However, few studies have empirically examined how management mechanisms, such as the control mode adopted by the new product development team, may work together with workers' creativity to deliver a successful new product. Drawing on the theory of opposing action strategies of team innovation, we propose that different team control modes may work together with team members' creativity to jointly influence the innovativeness of teamwork outcomes. With survey data collected from different sources in new product development teams, we find that restrictive control can effectively help teams composed of very creative members to successfully develop innovative new products. Conversely, promotive control can effectively help teams composed of less creative members to deliver innovative new products.     

Examining the new product innovation – performance relationship: Optimizing the role of individual-level creativity and attention-to-detail

New product innovation has been identified as the key to firms' marketplace success, profit and survival. Yet, the failure rate for new products is high. Because of the high costs associated with new product development, there is considerable theoretical and managerial interest in how to minimize the high failure rates of new products and what separates new product winners from losers. This study focuses on individual level ambidexterity – namely head of the R&D departments' capacity to engage in creativity and attention-to-detail simultaneously, a skill involving different centers of attention, and relying on somewhat incompatible behaviors and processes. The ability to engage in these behaviors simultaneously is seen as being ambidextrous. Drawing from the data of 150 advanced manufacturing firms in India (gathered from one CEO and one head of the R&D department for each firm), the results show that when an individual head of R&D engages heavily only in creativity, too many new, risky ideas may come and when he/she engages heavily only in attention-to-detail, he/she may suffer through a lack of novel ideas. Both approaches limit individual's contribution to enhancing product innovation – financial performance relationship. The results also show that an individual head of R&D needs to engage in high levels creativity and attention-to-detail in the pursuit of enhancing product innovation to achieve superior financial performance.     

Salespersons as Internal Knowledge Brokers and New Products Selling: Discovering the Link to Genetic Makeup

Managers increasingly realize the importance of involving the sales force in new product development. However, despite recent progress, research on the specific role of the sales force in product innovation‐related activities remains scarce. In particular, the importance of a salespersons' internal knowledge brokering has been neglected. This study develops and empirically validates the concept of internal knowledge brokering behavior and its effect on selling new products and developing new business, and explores whether a salesperson's internal brokering qualities are determined by biological traits. The findings reveal that salespeople with the DRD2 A1 gene variant engage at significant lower levels of internal knowledge‐brokering behavior than salespeople without this gene variant, and as a result are less likely to engage effectively in new product selling. The DRD4 gene variant had no effect on internal knowledge brokering. Management and future research implications are discussed.     

Exploring How Peer Communities Enable Lead User Innovations to Become Standard Equipment in the Industry: Community Pull Effects

Literature on new product development indicates that on average around 40% of new products fail across different industries (e.g., Crawford, 1977 ; Crawford and Di Benedetto, 2008 ). Out of those that survive only few become widely accepted standard equipment in the industry (Utterback, 1996 ). Literature on entrepreneurship (e.g., Baron and Shane, 2008 ) and on innovation (e.g., Christensen, 1997 ) shows that such innovations often originate outside the boundaries of established firms. However, it is difficult to understand and analyze the exact source of such innovations and the entrepreneurial processes by which they are developed. It is therefore the aim of this study to shed light on how innovations become widely accepted by large segments of the market and specifically which demand‐side forces are at work. An approach suitable for pursuing this objective is to focus on those individuals who are on the leading edge with respect to an important market trend (lead users) and their respective peer communities. As little knowledge is available, an explorative case study design is applied, working with cases from two different industries, specifically the medical equipment and sporting equipment industry. A longitudinal research design is used, extracting data from multiple respondents and various other sources such as reports, publications, databases, or community web pages. The research framework takes a process perspective by following the entrepreneurial processes from invention to commercialization and diffusion. In this process, micro‐level variables at the individual and group level are analyzed as well as the barriers to be overcome by the individual innovator and the community. The findings show that communities play a central and active role in the entrepreneurial process. Community members provide valuable feedback on the overall potential of the lead users' ideas, participate by making concrete development contributions, acting as testers of the new products, and finally helping to diffuse the innovations inside and outside the community. We identify two pull effects on the part of the community: first, community members demand and facilitate the development of prototypes; and second, community members help to cross the chasm between first adopters and the early majority. This paper has various implications for entrepreneurship and innovation research. For entrepreneurship, this article points out peer communities as a specific kind of social network that plays a crucial role in entrepreneurial processes. For innovation research, this article emphasizes the interaction between lead users and their peer communities in the process of developing the next dominant product design.     

Adoption of New Products by the Sales Force: The Construct, Research Propositions, and Managerial Implications

Some firms take salesforce commitment to any new product as a given, seemingly adopting the attitude, “If we build it, they will sell.” However, management has no guarantee of salesforce commitment to a new product. For various reasons, salespeople may fail to sell a new product, or they may engage in dysfunctional behavior during the selling process—for example, misrepresenting the product's benefits to gain short-term sales. Ensuring salesforce adoption of a new product requires careful consideration of the characteristics of the product, the competitive environment, the firm, and the members of the salesforce. In other words, managers who hope to engender support for a new product would do well to view the salespeople as a first line of customers. Successfully launching a new product to the company's salesforce requires the same high levels of creativity, energy, and managerial insight as does the product's launch into the marketplace. Consequently, managers and researchers need to examine more closely the factors underlying the successful launch of a new product to a firm's salesforce. As a first stop toward gaining greater insight into those factors, Kwaku Atuahene-Gima develops a model for exploring the characteristics that affect new-product adoption by the salesforce. His model suggests that a salesperson's commitment to a new product depends, to a large extent, on the salesperson's learning style, performance orientation, and problem-solving style. For example, he proposes that, compared to their colleagues with systematic problem-solving styles, salespeople with intuitive problem-solving styles are more likely to adopt a new product and are less likely to engage in dysfunctional behavior in the selling process. The model also suggests that the salesforce's perceptions of the firm's commitment to new products, tolerance for failure, and attitude toward intradepartmental conflict during the product development process play key roles in determining whether the salesforce will take an active, positive approach to selling the new product. For example, a firm that views occasional failures as opportunities for learning and growth offers an environment in which salespeople can accept the risks that selling a new product entails. The proposed model also takes into account the moderating effects of the product's innovativeness, the intensity of market competition, and the type of sales control systems that the firm uses.     

The Relationship of Individual Capabilities and Environmental Support with Different Facets of Designers' Innovative Behavior

Theoretical perspectives on employee creativity have tended to focus on an individual's capability to generate original and potentially useful ideas, whereas definitions of innovation also include the process of putting those new ideas into practice. This field study therefore set out to test how theoretically distinct types of individual knowledge and skills are related to different aspects of employees' innovative behavior in terms of both their new idea generation and idea implementation. Using a sample of design engineers (n = 169) in a multinational engineering company, measures were taken of different aspects of innovative work behavior (patent submission, real‐time idea submission, idea implementation) and a range of individual capabilities (creativity‐relevant skills, job expertise, operational skills, contextual knowledge, and motivation) and environmental features (job control, departmental support for innovation). Analyses showed that creativity‐relevant skills were positively related to indices of idea generation but not to idea implementation. Instead, employees' job expertise, operational skills, and motivation to innovate demonstrated a stronger role in idea implementation. In terms of environmental factors, job control showed no positive relationship with innovative work behavior while departmental support for innovation was related to employees' idea generation but not idea implementation. The theoretical perspective that correlates of idea generation differ in certain aspects to those for idea implementation are confirmed by the study. Practical implications for organizations wishing to improve their innovativeness are discussed in terms of tailored training, development, motivational, and environmental interventions designed to improve the capabilities of individuals to engage in all parts of the innovation process.     

The Vital Role of Problem‐Solving Competence in New Product Success*

Problem solving, a process of seeking, defining, evaluating, and implementing the solutions, is considered a converter that can translate organizational inputs into valuable product and service outputs. A key challenge for the product innovation community is to answer questions about how knowledge competence and problem‐solving competence develop and sustain competitive advantage. The objective of this study is to theoretically examine and empirically test an existing assumption that problem‐solving competence is an important variable connecting market knowledge competence with new product performance. New product projects from 396 firms in the high‐technology zones in China were used to test the study's theoretical model. The results first indicate that problem‐solving speed and creativity matter in new product innovation performance by playing mediator roles between market knowledge competence and positional advantage, which in turn sustains superior performance. This new insight suggest that mere generation of market knowledge and having a marketing–research and development (R&D) interface will not affect new product performance unless project members have the ability to use the information and to interact to identify and solve complex problems speedily and creatively. Second, these results suggest that different market knowledge competences (customers, competitors, and interactions between marketing and R&D) have distinct impacts on problem‐solving speed and creativity (positive, negative, or none), which underscore the need to embrace a more fine‐grained notion of market knowledge competence. The results also reveal that the relative importance of some of these relationships depends on the perceived level of turbulence in the environment. First, competitor knowledge competence decreases problem‐solving speed when perceived environmental turbulence is low but enhances problem‐solving speed when perceived turbulence is high. Second, competitor knowledge competence has a positive relationship with new product performance when the environmental turbulence is high but no relationship when the environmental turbulence is low. Third, the positive relationship between problem‐solving speed and product advantage is stronger when the perceived environmental turbulence is high than when it is low, which implies that problem solving is more important for creating product advantage when environmental turbulence is high and change is fast and unpredictable. Fourth, the negative relationship between problem‐solving speed and new product performance is stronger when the perceived environmental turbulence is high than when it is low, which means that problem‐solving speed is more harmful for new product performance when change is fast and unpredictable. And fifth, the positive relationship between product quality and new product performance is stronger when perceived environmental turbulence is low than when it is high, which implies that product quality may more likely lead to new product performance when the environment is stable and changes are easy to predict, analyze, and comprehend.     

Impact of Knowledge Type and Strategic Orientation on New Product Creativity and Advantage in High‐Technology Firms

As different types of knowledge may have different effects on new product positional advantage, knowledge portfolio management in concert with the firm's strategic orientation is indispensable for new product success. However, previous research has not dealt with the knowledge resources and strategic implementations that affect new product development (NPD). To fill in this gap, the current study focuses on two dimensions of knowledge type (knowledge complexity and knowledge tacitness) and two forms of strategic orientation (technological orientation and market orientation), which influence the positional advantages as determinants of NPD outcomes. Drawing on the resource‐based view, this study explains how these knowledge and strategic orientation variables influence new product creativity, which comprised the novel and meaningful characteristics of new products. Finally, it demonstrates how these two dimensions of new product creativity differentially provide product advantages in terms of customer satisfaction and product differentiation, which lead to superior new product performance. A conceptual framework is developed and the related hypotheses provided to incorporate the study variables and to test their relationships in a sample based on data collected from both marketing and project managers from 100 U.S. high‐technology firms. The model estimation results from path analysis demonstrate that reliance on knowledge of high tacitness harms meaningfulness, while reliance on knowledge of high complexity increases both novelty and meaningfulness of new product. As expected, market orientation and technological orientation improve the meaningfulness and novelty dimensions of the new product, respectively. New product novelty and meaningfulness are shown to enhance new product advantage in terms of product differentiation and customer satisfaction, both of which contribute to new product performance. It is also found that the combinative use of market orientation and knowledge complexity, and technological orientation and knowledge tacitness positively influence both the novelty and meaningfulness of new products. This study, using the product‐level analysis, contributes to the literature by clarifying how the firm's different knowledge properties and strategic orientations both play a role as a source of new product creativity, and how new product creativity, as a valuable and rare resource, enhances new product advantage. The study results suggest that project/product managers should increase the transferability and codifiability of unstructured knowledge by stimulating intraorganizational knowledge sharing among NPD team members, and that they should promote both technology and market‐orientated practices to fully develop creativity of new products.     

The Impact of a Creativity‐supporting Work Environment on a Firm's Product Innovation Performance

Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that a creativity‐supporting work environment contributes to a firm's product innovation performance. Although there is evidence that such an environment enhances innovative behavior at individual level, very few studies address the effect of a creativity‐supporting work environment on product innovation performance at firm level, and the results are inconsistent. This paper examines the relationship between a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment and a firm's product innovation performance in a sample of 103 firms. For measuring a firm's creativity‐supporting work environment, a comprehensive and creativity‐focused framework is used. The framework consists of 9 social‐organizational and 12 physical work environment characteristics that are likely to enhance employee creativity. These characteristics contribute to the firm's overall work environment that supports creativity. The firm's product innovation performance is defined by two distinct concepts: new product productivity (NP productivity), which is the extent to which the firm introduces new products to the market, and new product success (NP success), which is the percentage of the firm's sales from new products. In most firms, different knowledgeable informants provided the data for the variables. The results show that firms with creativity‐supporting work environments introduce more new products to the market (NP productivity), and have more NP success in terms of new product sales (NP success). NP productivity partly mediates the relationship between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success. The mediation model shows that the two paths from a creativity‐supporting work environment to NP success are about equally important: the direct path between creativity‐supporting work environment and NP success has a coefficient of .22, and the coefficient of the indirect path via NP productivity is .23. The creativity‐supporting work environment framework can be used in managerial practice to enhance employee creativity for product innovation. It allows applying a flexible and broad approach by influencing both social‐organizational and physical characteristics of the work environment.     

From Experience: Harnessing Tacit Knowledge to Achieve Breakthrough Innovation

The ability to create a stream of revolutionary new products can represent a sustainable competitive advantage for firms in almost any industry. Whereas evolutionary product improvements often follow predictable trajectories, breakthrough innovations involve unexpected leaps of creativity and insight. Despite its strategic importance, however, little is known about the process by which innovators achieve these valuable breakthroughs. This article proposes that breakthrough innovations result from the harnessing of tacit knowledge possessed by individuals and project teams. Tacit knowledge lies below the surface of conscious thought and is accumulated through a lifetime of experience, experimentation, perception, and learning by doing. Managers who can tap into this vast pool of creative energy can elevate the innovative capabilities of their teams well beyond the incremental and mundane. The article begins by establishing the vital importance of breakthrough innovations to the competitiveness of firms. This strategic mandate is followed by a brief discussion of the nature and implications of tacit knowledge in the context of innovation. The remainder of the article describes three mutually reinforcing methods for encouraging the explication and sharing of tacit knowledge among design team members. The ultimate goal is to establish a generative atmosphere for breakthrough innovation, in which divergent thinking, improvisation, and artistic creativity merge with the practical demands of the product development process. The first step toward harnessing the creative power of tacit knowledge is to foster the emotional commitment and deep personal involvement of design team members. Managers can accomplish this goal through the development of inspiring “innovation stories,” encouragement of reasonable risk‐taking and experimentation, building of unique team identities, and displaying unbridled confidence in a team's creative abilities. Once the emotional commitment of team members has been assured, two techniques are proposed as catalysts for breakthroughs derived from tacit knowledge. These methods are based on evidence that intimate physical interaction during the creative process, both person to object and person to person, may be a catalyst for tacit insights. The first technique highlights the use of early and frequent prototyping as a powerful focal point for the explication of tacit knowledge from both the design team and potential customers. The second technique involves the encouragement of face‐to‐face interaction between innovators during product development, thereby enabling creative improvisation and real‐time knowledge sharing. Several implications for managers are highlighted, including the need for a greater emphasis on employee retention, the importance of developing a nurturing environment for innovation, and the value of intimate physical interaction, including early prototyping, indwelling with customers, and co‐location of teams wherever possible.     

Triggers for virtual customer integration in the development of medical equipment — From a manufacturer and a user's perspective

Virtual customer integration (VCI) involves customers throughout all stages of the new product development process. Firms across industries have started to experiment with virtual user integration and expect to utilize their knowledge, creativity, and judgment. However, little research exists that looks at the motivations of customers and managers to engage in virtual product development projects. In this paper we try to identify the triggers for virtual customer integration (VCI) from the manager's as well as from the customer's perspective. Using Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior we aim at explaining managers' motivation for the adoption of VCI based on a sample of 104 managers engaged in the product development process of manufacturing firms of medical technology. Drawing on motive research, we test six categories of customer motivations to engage in VCI projects on a sample of 105 users of medical technology. The results show that for mangers subjective norms and attitude predict the intention to use VCI. For customers, interest in innovation and product improvement are the most important drivers, whereas monetary compensation and prestige are not significant, and surprisingly the desire to help people even has a negative impact on the participation of VCI.     

Measuring New Product Success: The Difference that Time Perspective Makes

Management is often criticized for overemphasizing short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth. On the other hand, although numerous studies have explored the factors underlying new product success and failure, such studies rarely distinguish between short- and long-term success. In fact, little research has been conducted to explore the relationship between a company's time perspective and its choice of criteria for measuring new product success. For that matter, little consensus exists as to just what we mean by the term success. Expanding on work done by a PDMA task force on measurement of new product success and failure, Erik Jan Hultink and Henry S.J. Robben identify 16 core measures of new product success. In a survey of large Dutch companies, they explore managers' perceptions of new product success, hypothesizing that the importance attached to each of the 16 core measures depends on the company's time perspective. For example, they propose that criteria such as development cost and speed-to-market are more important in the short term, and return-on-investiment (ROI) is more important in the long term. The study also examines the type of market served, the innovation strategy, and the perceived innovativeness of the company's products. It is hypothesized that these factors will influence the importance the company attaches to the core measures of new product success. For example, it is expected that speed-to-market is probably more important for technological innovators than for fast imitators or cost minimizers. The findings support the hypothesis that the firm's time perspective influences the perceived importance of the core measures of success. For the short term, the respondents emphasize product-level measures such as speed-to-market and whether the product was launched on time. In the long term, the focus is on customer acceptance and financial performance, including attaining goals for profitability, margins, and ROI. Four factors are perceived as being equally important for short-term and long-term success: customer satisfaction, customer acceptance, meeting quality guidelines, and product performance level. Customer satisfaction was found to be the most important measure, regardless of a company's time perspective. Contrary to expectations, the perceived importance of the 16 core measures does not differ on the basis of the type of market, the innovation strategy, or the product's perceived innovativeness. In addition, the firm's functional orientation—technology push or market pull—does not affect the importance attached to the core measures of new product success.     

Can All Brands Innovate in the Same Way? A Typology of Brand Position and Innovation Effort*

Product innovation is vital to ongoing brand equity and has been responsible for revitalizing many brands, including Apple, Dunlop Volley, Mini, and Gucci. While several scholars have noted the relationship between a brand's position and the form of innovation available to a firm, surprisingly no study has sought to bridge this gap. This study aims to address this issue by, first, building a typology of the innovation practices underpinning differently positioned brands and, second, exploring the strategic and tactical implications of different brand‐related innovation efforts. In so doing, this study addresses a critical question: How do differently positioned brands organize their innovation efforts? A multiple case‐study approach was used in this paper. Cases were sampled from a number of industries and across a range of different countries with a focus on business‐to‐consumer brands. Thirty‐five interviews were conducted across 12 cases. The brands studied differed in their approach to innovation (incremental vs. radical) and in their relationship to the marketplace (market‐driven and driving markets). These two dimensions result in four alternative ways of organizing the innovation effort to effectively reinforce the brand: (1) incremental and market driven (follower brands); (2) radical and market driven (category leader brands); (3) incremental and driving market (craft‐design‐driven brands); and (4) radical and driving markets (product leader brands). For follower brands, new product success is contingent upon the quality of the firm's marketing information systems and speed to market. Category leaders seek to dominate and appeal to the mass market with bold product initiatives. Craft‐designer‐driven brands aim to maintain an aura of authenticity, downplaying the commercial realities of their innovation efforts, while product leader brands seek to reaffirm their status as industry pioneers. This research contributes to the branding and new product development literature in several ways. It illustrates that differently positioned brands require the deployment of different firm capabilities and resources and a unique organizational philosophy to achieve new product success. The findings also enrich the brand extension literature through an examination of alternate bases, beyond that of product category, by which brand fit can be established. Finally, this research demonstrates how brand positioning can pose limitations on an industry leader's ability to respond to disruptive technologies. This study identifies that failed new products or brand extensions are driven by a mismatch between desired strategy and the capabilities necessary for achieving success (suggesting brand extensions are not as low risk as previously thought). As such, managers should carefully attend to brand perceptions when developing innovation strategies, particularly in relation to brand extensions.     

Extending Lead‐User Theory: Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Lead Userness*

Lead users are found to come up with commercially attractive user innovations and have been shown to be a highly promising source of innovation for new product development tasks. According to lead‐user theory, these users are defined as being ahead of an important market trend and experiencing high benefits from innovating. The present article extends lead‐user theory by exploring the antecedents and consequences of consumers' lead userness in the course of three studies on extreme sports communities. Regarding antecedents, it uncovers that field‐related variables (consumer knowledge and use experience) as well as field‐independent personality variables (locus of control and innovativeness) help explain an individual's lead userness. These variables might therefore be used as a proxy to identify the rare species of lead users. With regard to consequences, it uncovers that lead users demonstrate innovative behavior not only by creating new product ideas but also by adopting new commercial products more heavily and faster than ordinary users. This highlights the idea that lead users might not only be valuable to idea‐generation processes for radically new concepts; instead, they might also be relevant to more general issues in the marketing of new products.     

The (Unknown) Providers to Other Firms' New Product Development: What's in It for Them?

For every inbound activity by a firm in open innovation, a reciprocal outbound activity by another firm must be generated. The reciprocal outbound activities range from transferring of knowledge and ideas to solutions delivered to other firms' new product development projects. This paper names the firms that produce the reciprocal outbound activity for “providers,” and is the first to empirically investigate such providers of ideas, solutions, and technologies for other firms' open innovation activities. The literature review shows a surprising shortage of research on who the providers are, how they engage with other firms, and not least what potential benefits can be achieved from supporting other firms' innovation activities. The paper uses a quantitative survey on Danish small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) carried out in 2010 to identify the providers, the role they take on, and the main benefits the providers gain. This paper finds that firms that are providers are indeed an under‐researched and important phenomenon for firms' innovation activities. Compared to receivers of knowledge, the providers are younger, have a higher R&D intensity, adopt more open innovation practices, have higher absorptive capacity, and fewer barriers toward knowledge sharing as demonstrated by the NIH and NSH syndromes. Finally, although only tentatively, the paper finds that the provider firms are more product innovative compared to nonproviders. The paper further finds that more projects, more embedded relationships, and mutual rather than one‐way exchange relationships significantly raise the probability that a firm experiences a substantial benefit from providing to other firms' new product development projects. The overall ambition of the paper at this point is to inspire other researchers to pursue the agenda on the provider perspective for future research. To support such research, the paper suggests a broadening of the research perspectives from the receiver of knowledge, in the literature on interorganizational relationships and open innovation, to include the provider, and even suggests some preliminary ideas for such research. Hence, the contribution of this paper lies not only in opening a new research topic but also in identifying some first characteristics of the phenomenon adding a substantial perspective to the literature on open innovation and interorganizational relationships. The paper formulates three indicative recommendations for managers that consider becoming a provider to other firms' NPD.     

创新团队公平感知与知识共享行为关系研究——以成员信任为中介变量

创新团队组织形式的蓬勃发展使得团队成员的绩效激励方式成为众多管理者的研究课题。团队中掌握独特隐性知识的成员往往不愿意共享自身的有利于团队的创新知识,从而给团队的发展带来困难。如何针对这类员工做出有利于团队整体绩效提升的激励活动,是创新团队管理者和所有创新团队工作模式研究者的共同目标。通过数据模型的回归,得出如下结论:创新团队的成员公平感知与成员知识共享行为正向相关,成员对互动公平的感知对知识共享行为的影响最为显著。验证了创新团队成员信任在成员公平感知与知识共享行为之间的中介效用。     

Antecedents and consequences of the quality of e-customer-to-customer interactions in B2B brand communities

The opportunities that interactions in business-to-business (B2B) brand communities offer companies as well as brand community members have already been recognized by B2B firms, but are still an underexplored field of B2B academic marketing research. To provide a first step in analyzing B2B brand communities, we develop a conceptual framework of the quality of customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions in B2B brand communities by drawing on several theories and concepts (e.g., social exchange theory, uses and gratifications approach and value-in-the-experience). Based on an online survey (n = 330) spanning three virtual B2B brand communities in the IT-sector, we test our framework using structural equation modeling. Our results reveal that brand trust has a positive impact on brand community trust. Brand community trust leads to an increase in the quality of C2C interactions in B2B brand communities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the quality of C2C interactions in B2B brand communities has a positive impact on functional, experiential, and symbolic brand community benefits, which, in turn, foster brand loyalty.     

The Ability and Willingness Paradox in Family Firm Innovation

We present a framework of how family involvement influences innovation management based on ability (discretion to act) and willingness (disposition to act), two drivers that distinguish family firms from nonfamily firms and lead to heterogeneity among family firms. Paradoxically, family firms have superior ability yet lower willingness to engage in technological innovation. Resolving this paradox should yield new insights about innovation management in general. We summarize and position the papers in this special issue according to these drivers and set out an agenda for further research that will contribute to a better understanding of family firms' heterogeneous and paradoxical behaviors.     

The paradox of tie strength in customer relationships for innovation: a longitudinal case study in the sports industry

Current literature argues that firms should have strong ties to customers to benefit from increased customer retention and loyalty. Strong ties, however, have also shown to prevent innovation, suggesting that firms should also develop weak ties to other customer groups. This paper focuses on the potential for strong ties to facilitate, rather than prohibit, innovation. It is based in a 7‐year longitudinal research project with Adidas, a global sporting goods company. From the case, we find that the paradox of tie strength results from an overly simplified view of the nature of company–customer relationships. Contrary to the established literature, we find that strong ties in the Adidas case supported significant innovation. In fact, the involvement resulted in the development of a new product with a radically different product architecture and led to one of the most successful product launches in the company's history. To explain these findings, we introduce the nature of customer participation in a firm's value creation processes as a new dimension of the constitution of firm–customer ties and discuss how such a kind of relationship can develop.     

Exploring the Contributions of Involving Ordinary Users in Ideation of Technology‐Based Services*

Lead users have long been acknowledged as important contributors to the market success of innovative products and services. The ability of lead users to be such effective innovators has been ascribed to a combination of adequate technological expertise and superior knowledge of the user domain so‐called use experience. Drawing on the apparent success of lead users in innovation, many companies are now attempting to involve other types of users, namely, ordinary users, for ideation at the fuzzy front end (FFE) of new product and service development. However, ordinary users do not usually possess the technological knowledge of lead users, and the existing literature provides little guidance on how to manage such user involvement or its expected contributions. The purpose of the present study is, therefore, to contribute to scholarly knowledge regarding the benefits and management of user involvement during the ideation phase of innovation in technology‐based services. More specifically, the study investigates the contribution made in this respect by “ordinary” users, as opposed to professional developers. The research questions that are addressed are as follows: (1) What contributions do ordinary users make when involved in the FFE for ideation of new technology‐based services; and (2) how is the contribution of the users affected by their knowledge of the underlying technology? The study addresses these questions through a literature review and conceptual analysis of the involvement of users in innovation in mobile telephony, followed by an empirical study using a quasi‐experimental design in which the independent variable is the users' technological knowledge of the underlying mobile telephone system and the dependent variable is the quality of the created idea‐proposals from an innovation perspective. Various scenarios involving guided users, pioneering users, and professionals are investigated. The study finds that the users' knowledge of the underlying technology has an effect on their propensity to contribute with incremental or radical new ideas. The ideas from guided users tend to be more incremental whereas the pioneering users' ideas are more radical. Contrary to the users in the guided user scenarios, the users in the pioneering user scenarios have a propensity to produce ideas that challenge the prevailing dominant logic of the company; these ideas can be used to assist the company to think in new trajectories. The paper proposes that ordinary users should not be expected to contribute ideas that can be directly put into the new product development process; rather, ordinary user involvement should be regarded as a process whereby a company learns about users' needs and is inspired to innovate. The paper concludes that user involvement can actually be a stimulus for review of a company's business strategy.