Increasing Learning and Time Efficiency in Interorganizational New Product Development Teams*

Despite the growing popularity of new product development across organizational boundaries, the processes, mechanisms, or dynamics that leverage performance in interorganizational (I‐O) product development teams are not well understood. Such teams are staffed with individuals drawn from the partnering firms and are relied on to develop successful new products while at the same time enhancing mutual learning and reducing development time. However, these collaborations can encounter difficulties when partners from different corporate cultures and thought worlds must coordinate and depend on one another and often lead to disappointing performance. To facilitate collaboration, the creation of a safe, supportive, challenging, and engaging environment is particularly important for enabling productive collaborative I‐O teamwork and is essential for learning and time efficient product development. This research develops and tests a model of proposed factors to increase both learning and time efficiency on I‐O new product teams. It is argued that specific behaviors (caring), beliefs (psychological safety), task‐related processes (shared problem solving), and governance mechanisms (clear management direction) create a positive climate that increases learning and time efficiency on I‐O teams. Results of an empirical study of 50 collaborative new product development projects indicate that (1) shared problem solving and caring behavior support both learning and time efficiency on I‐O teams, (2) team psychological safety is positively related to learning, (3) management direction is positively associated with time efficiency, and (4) shared problem solving is more strongly related to both performance dimensions than are the other factors. The factors supporting time efficiency are slightly different from those that foster learning. The relative importance of these factors also differs considerably for both performance aspects. Overall, this study contributes to a better understanding of the factors that facilitate a favorable environment for productive collaboration on I‐O teams, which go beyond contracts or top‐management supervision. Establishing such an environment can help to balance management concerns and promote the success of I‐O teams. The significance of the results is elevated by the fragility of collaborative ventures and their potential for failure, when firms with different organizational cultures, thought worlds, objectives, and intentions increasingly decide to work across organizational boundaries for the development of new products.     

Implementing key account management: Intraorganizational practices and associated dilemmas

Over the last few decades, key account management (KAM) has become a widespread approach to creating value in strategic customer relationships. Research in KAM has often focused on the role of the key account manager, taking a customer interface perspective and adopting cross sectional methods. We contribute to the KAM body of knowledge by presenting a novel longitudinal study of the intraorganizational decisions and dilemmas faced by leaders when implementing KAM programs. Our findings demonstrate that deploying KAM involves the continual balancing and harmonization of strategic and operational practices. In particular, we show that KAM programs become embedded when firms create structural as well as individual support systems and when long-term aims can be reconciled with the need for short term deliverables.     

Soaking It Up: Absorptive Capacity in Interorganizational New Product Development Teams

Prior research has acknowledged the importance of an organization's absorptive capacity—the ability to acquire new knowledge and information, assimilate, transform, and exploit it—for innovation purposes. Because innovations are usually developed by project teams, this suggests that absorptive capacity, as a construct, may also be usefully applied at the team level. Consequently, this study developed a measure for team‐level absorptive capacity, investigated the potential influencing factors, and examined its relationship to team effectiveness in terms of product innovativeness in an interorganizational context. Specifically, building on the theory of homophily and information and decision‐making theories, three factors (social‐category similarity, work‐style similarity, and knowledge complementarity between the recipient and the partner organization teams) were identified as likely antecedents of team absorptive capacity. The hypotheses were tested on data from 98 interorganizational new product development teams and included responses from team members, team leaders, and team‐external managers. With regard to the antecedents of team absorptive capacity in interorganizational settings, the results showed a significant positive association with partners' work‐style similarity and an inverted U‐shaped relationship with partners' knowledge complementarity. Social‐category similarity was not significantly associated with team absorptive capacity. We also examined whether team absorptive capacity was related to interorganizational team effectiveness and found a significant positive relationship between team absorptive capacity and product innovativeness. The study demonstrates that absorptive is indeed related to team effectiveness outcomes in an interorganizational context, which underlines the importance of team‐level absorptive capacity for product innovation management and suggests paying more attention to the lower levels of absorptive capacity.     

Leveraging Social Networks to Develop Radically New Products

In this article, the authors consider the nexus of social networks and radically new products. These new products are so innovative that they forge new product categories, and social networks might be particularly fruitful in their development, dissemination, and help to foster growth and acceptance. Several social networks concepts are brought to bear on these issues, from the class diffusion model, to current considerations of lead users and emerging ideas about crowdsourcing. In particular, the classic diffusion model provides parameters to reflect innovative consumer behavior, and it is suggested that, in complement to studies that seek customer traits to identify innovators, social network concepts and indices of degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality are very well suited in identifying customers embedded in social networks whose relational ties are indicative of their likely influence and stature. Next, lead users are considered in the specific context of health care, and it is suggested that online forums provide numerous benefits to customer patients as well as opportunities to health‐care providers. Next, the dynamics of social networks are considered as they apply to cutting‐edge ideas about crowdsourcing, movements that companies are exploring to be radically open to customer feedback and suggestions. This article closes with an example of a novel appeal that bridges social networks and radically new products—the challenge of solving societal difficulties, from food scarcity, to environmental pollutants, to weather patterns, to discovering treatments for cancer or other medical conditions.     

Intraorganizational information and communication technology diffusion: Implications for industrial sellers and buyers

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) like CRM, ERP and Intranet are considered important for creating competitive advantage. Despite their rapid deployment rates, only a few studies mainly from the information technology (IT) and engineering literature have been devoted in uncovering the factors that influence the diffusion of new information technologies within an organization. Similarly, empirical studies regarding the impact of ICT diffusion on organizations are strikingly limited. In an attempt to fill this research void, the present study examines the implementation of ICT tools within marketing-related and non-marketing-related functions. By testing a number of hypotheses using structural equation modeling, the authors conclude that the antecedents and consequences of ICT diffusion in these functions vary. Their findings provide the foundation for a more thorough examination of both intraorganizational diffusion of ICT tools as well as their impact on organizations.     

Identifying Key Customers for Novel Industrial Products

Managers responsible for novel industrial products seek to identify their most productive customers promptly, as a basis for deployment of marketing and development resources. Using a trial-and-adoption model, based upon invoice data from sales of novel industrial products over a five-year period, Richard Cardozo, David Smith and Madhubalan Viswanathan show that initial interpurchase interval (the time from initial purchase to first repeat purchase) identifies high-volume customers, no matter when they first purchased. In addition to demonstrating the usefulness of a trial-and-adoption model in analyzing purchases of novel industrial products, this study also describes for the first time four distinct purchase patterns for novel industrial products.     

组织间关系:价值界面与关系租金的获取

价值界面与关系租金概念的提出大大地拓展了获取企业内生性成长中各种资源的空间。本文通过价值界面、关系租金的模块化生产范式和关系型交易范式的分析,指出了价值界面与关系租金对于帕累托边界外推、埃奇沃思方盒改进的经济学意义,并进一步得出了价值界面构成与关系租金获取的四维模型,为网络创新提供了积极的研究视角。     

组织间关系:界面规则与治理机制

本文认为,界面规则是组织间关系的基础.本文讨论了界面规则的形成和演变的路径依赖特征,提出了一个分析组织间关系界面规则的理论框架,并对构成界面规则的要素进行了论述.本文还讨论了组织间关系治理机制的特点,强调组织间协调和组织间关系治理的重要性要大于内部科层协调和内部治理.     

Knowledge Sharing in Interorganizational Product Development Teams: The Effect of Formal and Informal Socialization Mechanisms*

Working collaboratively with suppliers is increasingly cited as a “best practice” in product development. The importance of sharing knowledge between buyer and supplier in this context has been well recognized, although comparatively little research exists on the interorganizational socialization mechanisms that facilitate it. The present research proposes and tests a theoretical model of the impact of formal and informal socialization mechanisms on the level of knowledge sharing within interorganizational product development projects and the subsequent effect on buyer firm performance. Results from this study of 111 manufacturing organizations in the United Kingdom largely support its hypotheses. It is revealed that informal socialization mechanisms (e.g., communication guidelines, social events) play an important role in facilitating interorganizational knowledge sharing, whereas formal socialization mechanisms (e.g., cross‐functional teams, matrix reporting structures) act indirectly through informal socialization to influence knowledge sharing. The results also show that interorganizational knowledge sharing is positively associated with supplier contribution to development outcomes, which, in turn, improves buyer product development performance and, ultimately, financial performance. Product development managers are encouraged to build social ties between interorganizational development teams to increase the flow of knowledge and to improve both product development outcomes and financial performance.     

生物基聚酯产品开发

随着环境友好型社会的建设和石油资源的减少,生物基聚酯产品得到了开发和应用.文章从技术、市场、竞争力等角度分析了生物基聚酯产品开发的可行性,认为生物基聚酯产品开发是聚酯产品结构调整的重要方向和出路,技术可行,市场前景广阔,开发价值和意义深远.     

Interorganizational Imitation and Acquisitions of High‐tech Ventures

Research summary: This article shows that there is a positive association between the changes in the number of prior acquisitions or the changes in the prominence of prior acquirers within the focal venture's subfield and the venture's likelihood to be acquired. Results are in line with the existence of frequency‐ and trait‐based imitation in acquisitions targeting tech ventures. More importantly, these positive associations are more pronounced when (a) exogenous technological uncertainty within the venture's subfield increases and (b) there are significant differences between the focal venture's and acquirer's technological resources. Our findings are in accord with the suggestion that uncertainty in the technology domain is an important boundary condition in moderating the extent of imitation in technology acquisitions. We also discuss alternative explanations and implications. Managerial summary: The findings of this article suggest that when deciding whether or not to acquire a technology venture (i.e., startup company in a high‐tech industry), managers infer information by observing other acquisitions in the venture's subfield to make assessments about the underlying value of the potential targets. We also find that receiving some informational cues from previous acquisitions would be more useful when there is high technological uncertainty in the potential target's subfield about which technologies will be dominant, and when the potential acquirer and the tech venture operate in dissimilar technological areas. This article shows that imitation can be one way to deal with decision‐making under uncertainty when making acquisition decisions in high‐tech environments. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

区域产业集群发展关联网络的建模与实证分析——以汽车行业和石化行业为例

本文首先根据投入产出直接消耗系数表,结合复杂网络理论的建模思想构建了一类有向加权网络——区域产业结构网络,然后运用2007年全国投入产出数据研究了该网络的一系列特征值。在研究网络的路径问题时,考虑到网络边权是一种相似权,进而转向研究网络的最长路径及其蕴含的产业经济意义。以此为基础,论文又构建了产业间最强关联网络和产业集群发展关联网络,一方面梳理出区域产业规划过程中的关键产业部门,另一方面通过与发达国家和地区进行比较,识别出产业集群化过程中存在的问题。最后选取了汽车行业和石化行业进行了产业集群发展可行性方面的实证分析。     

Interorganizational Collaboration and Innovation: Toward a Portfolio Approach*

In the literature on innovation, interorganizational collaboration has been advanced as beneficial for the innovative performance of firms. At the same time, large‐scale empirical evidence for such a relationship is scarce. This article examines whether evidence can be found for the idea that interorganizational collaboration supports the effectiveness of innovation strategies. This article empirically addresses this research question by analyzing data on Belgian manufacturing firms (n=221) collected in the Community Innovation Survey, a biannual survey organized by Eurostat and the European Commission aimed at obtaining insights into the innovation practices and performance of companies within the various European Union (EU) member states. Tobit analyses reveal a positive relationship between interorganizational collaboration and innovative performance. At the same time, the impact on innovative performance differs depending on the nature of the partner(s) involved. These findings strongly suggest the relevance of adopting a portfolio approach to interorganizational collaboration within the context of innovation strategies.     

组织间关系的拓展与演进：基于组织间知识互动的研究

知识经济时代,产品竞争力更多来自于知识层面,知识整合成为组织最为重要的能力。本文从产品知识基础的复杂性出发．根据其与组织知识领域的关系以及组织间知识的互补性划分出组织间知识互动方式。在此基础上．本文不仅对知识利用中的单向交流与双向交流的组织间关系进行阐释．还提出了基于组织间共同进行知识开发的组织间关系进行了探索性的研究,从而将组织间关系的市场与科层的二维平面拓展到由科层、市场以及共同体构成的三维空间,并由此构成了组织间关系的组合。最后．本文结合日本相机制造业的发展对组织间关系组合的演进进行了分析．进一步论证了本文的观点。     

Social Networks for Innovation and New Product Development

In this article we first provide a brief introduction into social network analysis, focusing on the measures and approaches that are used in the empirical contributions in this special issue. Second, we discuss the role of social networks in new product development. Social networks are inherently multilevel; we consider four “levels”: networks inside a firm, networks that cross firm boundaries, networks between firms, and networks that reside outside of the firm. Third, we discuss these four levels and highlight some of the extant research. We summarize and position the eight papers in this special issue along these four levels. Together, we argue, these papers provide an interesting coverage of this burgeoning field.     

组织间关系:界面规则的演进与内在机理研究

组织间关系的界面规则是动态演进的,组织间学习是界面规则演进的背后机理。本文考虑外界环境的变动对组织间关系界面规则的影响,指出组织间关系网络成员长期重复性的互动是界面规则形成的基础,并重点探讨了组织间关系界面规则的自组织演进过程,揭示出界面规则的演进是组织间关系成员之间的互动与组织间关系界面之间相互转换的螺旋上升的动态过程,并对界面规则演进的内在机理——双元模式和组织间学习做出了解释。     

关于成品油物流配送体系建设的若干思考

以成品油物流配送的全部流程为线索,按照物流与商流相对分离运行的原则,对国内大公司成品油物流配送管理体制和运行机制的改革和调整做了全面的分析和思考.总的思路是,从"软件"再造和"硬件"建设两个方面入手,统筹一、二次物流配送的整体优化运行.在"软件"再造方面,提出按照物流配送一体化的思路,以及业务专业化、机构扁平化、管理集约化、运行网络化的要求,重组和优化各业务单元,实现总部-大区公司-省区公司一物流配送中心四级组织和管理.在"硬件"建设方面,建议按照整体分布合理、系统协调配套、满足可持续发展的要求,分区域、分层次制定成品油物流配送中心建设规划,加快炼厂地付(公路付油)设施、配送油库的改造和运能运力建设,并按照"统一、成熟、实用、兼容、高效"的原则,建设成品油物流配送信息系统.     

非纤聚酯生产技术和产品开发

综述了国内外非纤聚酯发展现状、非纤聚酯主要生产技术和特点。介绍了国内外非纤聚酯产品的应用现状,对中国石化上海石油化工股份有限公司非纤聚酯技术和产品开发提出了建议。     

我国腈纶新产品的开发与市场

介绍了我国腈纶差别化产品和功能化产品的开发现状以及市场应用情况。着重介绍了中国石化上海石油化工股份有限公司腈纶新产品的开发情况,并对我国腈纶新产品的开发提出了建议。     

ISO9000与CMMI在航天型号研制中的应用

<正>ISO9000和能力成熟度模型集成(Capability Maturity Model Integration,CMMI)是当前最流行的质量保证体系,它们都是适用于软件和集成产品质量保证能力评价的