The role of supply management innovativeness and supplier orientation in firms’ sustainability performance

Questions about the influencing factors and measurement of firms' sustainability performance have attracted growing research interest, as the requirements for sustainability have steadily increased. This study examines whether supply management innovativeness and supplier orientation make positive impacts on firms' overall sustainability performance. An empirical study based on a survey targeting large- and medium-sized manufacturing companies in Finland shows that innovativeness in supply management considerably influences a firm's overall sustainability performance and that supplier orientation positively relates to sustainability performance. The benefits of innovativeness in supply management and strategic supplier orientation are directly realised in sustainability performance. Therefore, supply management is not only a gatekeeper against sustainability risks arising from the supply base but is also a function by which new ideas aiming to influence supply markets and firms' sustainability are presented.     

How to stimulate supplier innovation? Insights from a multiple case study

Drawing on the literature on supplier innovation, supplier development, and the relational view, we bring forward the concept of stimulation of supplier innovation, which refers to the buyer company's actions which aim to enhance its suppliers' innovativeness, guide its suppliers' innovation processes, and/or encourage its suppliers to share their innovations. Through four case studies about purchasing categories in three companies, we study how the stimulation focus is determined and what methods can be used for stimulating supplier innovation. We propose that stimulation comprises indirect and direct forms of knowledge-sharing and governance with an emphasis on indirect methods and suggest that the concept sheds light on the research gap on the push model of supplier innovation. We also elaborate the literature on supplier development and relational view in the context of supplier innovation.     

Learning from R&D outsourcing vs. learning by R&D outsourcing

We analyze how research and development (R&D) outsourcing influences product innovation. We propose a separation between learning from R&D outsourcing, whereby the firm improves its ability to innovate by using outsourced R&D directly in new products, from learning by R&D outsourcing, whereby the firm indirectly uses outsourced R&D by integrating it with internal R&D to create new products. Building on the knowledge-based view, we argue that learning from R&D outsourcing is likely to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with product innovation, because the initial benefits of using outsourced component R&D knowledge to innovate products is eventually outweighed by the hollowing out of the firm's ability to innovate. In contrast, we propose that learning by R&D outsourcing is likely to have a U-shaped relationship with product innovation, because the initial challenges of integrating internal and external R&D are eventually overcome, resulting in more innovations. Finally, we distinguish between domestic and foreign R&D outsourcing and propose a liability of foreignness in R&D outsourcing as it has a lower impact on new products than domestic R&D outsourcing. The empirical analysis shows that outsourced R&D has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the number of new products, while the interaction between outsourced R&D and internal R&D has a U-shaped relationship with the number of new products. It also shows that domestic outsourced R&D has a higher positive impact on the number of new products than foreign outsourced R&D.     

Shaping buyer–supplier relationships in manufacturing contexts: Design and test of a contingency model

Although the idea that buyer–supplier partnerships can yield considerable benefits to firms is largely diffused among researchers and practitioners, the approach adopted in this paper is that no “one best way” exists in buyer–supplier relationships, but rather a “best way” for each specific exchange context. Hence, this paper proposes a contingency model for shaping and managing buyer–supplier relationships in manufacturing contexts. In order to test the model, an empirical study was performed on a sample of 45 buyer–supplier relationships within the Italian white goods industry. A three-dimensional performance indicator was computed to compare supplier performance achieved within relations matching the model's suggestions with those set differently. The results strongly suggest that suppliers involved in relationships set accordingly to the contingency model are likely to enjoy superior performance.     

Assessing the impact of organizational learning and innovation on performance in cultural organizations

• Product innovation, technological innovation and organizational innovations are the key to helping cultural organizations achieve their social mission and achieve efficiency. This innovation strategy and the outcomes depend on introducing learning orientation into the organization. The current work analyses the relationship between learning orientation, innovativeness and performance for the case of 386 British, French and Spanish museums. Findings indicate that learning orientation significantly influences both innovativeness and performance. Further, whereas technological and organizational innovations are related to economic performance, product innovations have a greater impact on social performance.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organizational interfaces and innovation: The challenge of integrating supplier knowledge in LEGO systems

Suppliers have become increasingly important as partners in firms' innovation efforts. Reaping potential collaboration benefits is complex due to challenges in combining internal and external knowledge. The paper explores how various types of organizational interfaces between buyer and supplier create both opportunities and problems for their joint actions. The paper is based on a longitudinal case study of attempts to develop an innovative packaging solution for the toy manufacturer LEGO systems. The study shows that buying firms need to carefully analyse what form of organizational interface access to prioritize since each type offers its specific possibilities and drawbacks. Furthermore, the feasibility of organizational interfaces may change over time due to mutual organizational learning.     

From quality to innovation: Evidence from two French Employer Surveys

In this article we investigate the impact of quality systems on innovation performance using the method of propensity matching. We use two French microeconomic surveys, the “Organizational Changes and Computerization” (COI 1997) and the “Community Innovation Survey” (CIS3 1998–2000). The first hypothesis indicating that quality (ISO 9000 certification) impacts positively on innovation is supported for certain areas of innovation performance. Furthermore, the second hypothesis states that different levels of quality differentially improve innovation performance. Results indicate that the innovation performance of firms with Top Quality Level is higher than that of firms with Medium Quality Level which is also higher than that of firms with Low Quality Level for certain areas of innovation. However, we found that the difference in innovation performance between firms with Medium and Low Quality Levels is not of a great magnitude. This study implies that in order to achieve a significant innovation performance improvement via quality systems, a very well-established quality system is needed within a firm.     

Rational and intuitive decision-making in sourcing teams: Effects on decision outcomes

According to dual process theory, individual decision-making can be based on rational procedures and experience-based intuition, and the decision-making approach can influence decision outcomes. We investigate how the application of rational procedures and experience-based intuition affects the outcomes of supplier selection decisions taken by cross-functional sourcing teams. Specifically, we examine whether the selected supplier׳s cost and quality/delivery/innovativeness performance is higher when more team members use a highly rational and/or a highly experience-based decision-making approach. From data on 54 teams, we find that the use of rational procedures enhances cost performance. Conversely, when sourcing team members use their experience-based intuition, the decision is more likely to result in satisfactory supplier performance along all tested performance dimensions.     

供需链节点企业技术创新合作模式选择的博弈分析

供应商与制造商之间的技术流动与商业化合作日驱频繁,因此有必要研究供需链节点企业技术创新合作模式选择问题。文中在供需链环境下,建立供应商与制造商技术创新的完全信息动态博弈模型,引入准投资弹性变量,探讨供需链中供应商与制造商进行技术创新的条件与时机问题,通过对制造商与供应商之间的技术创新合作方式博弈分析,得出准投资弹性变量影响下技术创新方式选择的临界条件,并将模型拓展到n维领域的创新方式选择问题,文中结论对供需链节点处企业技术创新活动的选择具有一定的现实指导意义。     

A fuzzy-QFD approach to supplier selection

This article suggests a new method that transfers the house of quality (HOQ) approach typical of quality function deployment (QFD) problems to the supplier selection process. To test its efficacy, the method is applied to a supplier selection process for a medium-to-large industry that manufactures complete clutch couplings.The study starts by identifying the features that the purchased product should have (internal variables “WHAT”) in order to satisfy the company's needs, then it seeks to establish the relevant supplier assessment criteria (external variables “HOW”) in order to come up with a final ranking based on the fuzzy suitability index (FSI). The whole procedure was implemented using fuzzy numbers; the application of a fuzzy algorithm allowed the company to define by means of linguistic variables the relative importance of the “WHAT”, the “HOW”–“WHAT” correlation scores, the resulting weights of the “HOW” and the impact of each potential supplier.Special attention is paid to the various subjective assessments in the HOQ process, and symmetrical triangular fuzzy numbers are suggested to capture the vagueness in people's verbal assessments.     

Time-sensitive supply chain disruption recovery and resource sharing incentive strategy

Market demand is becoming increasingly time-sensitive in competitive environments. Hence, supply disruptions will have a more serious impact on the profits of supply chains. This study applies a Stackelberg competition between a single supplier and a single manufacturer in a time-sensitive supply chain in a cloud manufacturing environment. We aim to address the supplier’s production capacity recovery issues and the manufacturer’s incentive decision issues after supply disruption. We find that the supplier is in a weak position when the information is symmetrical. The manufacturer can encourage the supplier to shorten the recovery time by raising the unit wholesale price. When the supplier’s unit production cost remains unchanged but the unit wholesale price increases, the profit of the supplier first increases and then decreases. In addition, under the centralized decision-making setting, the optimal recovery time of the supplier is shorter and the optimal unit market price of the product is lower than that under decentralized decision-making. We further find that resource sharing can shorten the optimal recovery time, but it does not necessarily play an incentivizing role.     

Informal thinkering — how is it important?: Case studies of technical change processes: an industrialized–industrializing country comparison

This paper examines innovation processes or technical change-generation processes at the firm level. It emphasizes the notion that the element of technical and technological change that is a determinant of productivity growth is strongly induced by internal factors related to the firm's behavior, via investment in R&D but also, and importantly, on the basis of “informal thinkering” within plants.This research is unique in that it seeks first, to examine the pattern of technical change and its ensuing productivity growth, and second, to make a comparison between an industrialized and an industrializing country. This comparison is conducted by empirically comparing mills in the pulp and paper manufacturing sector in two countries: Canada and India. The overall analysis is based on direct observations at the mill level, face-to-face interviews and on analysis of mill documentary records.This paper highlights the importance of managing change as a continuous process. The introduction of intermittent, “step-jump” technical changes contributed little to explain the differences in performance between the mills. Much more important are (i) the continuing sequences of smaller investments in technical change, often linked to the larger step-jumps, and (ii) the existence of steady streams of changes and improvements that are unrecorded as capital expenditure.     

Levels of strategic purchasing: Impact on supply integration and performance

The growing importance of supply chain management has led to an increasing recognition of the strategic role of purchasing, which has recently evolved and expanded from “buying” to “procurement” and “supply management”. In this study, we chart our sample firms’ advance in strategic purchasing, characterized by the strategic focus, strategic involvement of the purchasing function and the status and visibility of the purchasing professionals, into three stages.This study provides strong empirical support for the importance of strategic purchasing by showing that, by moving towards the more advanced stages, firms at the nascent stage of strategic purchasing can achieve better supply integration, a second-order construct composed of four facets of relational, process, information, and cross-organizational team integration. Our analyses further reveal that strategic purchasing can have a profound impact on supply chain performance for both buyer and supplier firms.     

Linear learning in changing environments

The decision maker receives signals imperfectly correlated with an unobservable state variable and must take actions whose payoffs depend on the state. The state randomly changes over time. In this environment, we examine the performance of simple linear updating rules relative to Bayesian learning. We show that a range of parameters exists for which linear learning results in exactly the same decisions as Bayesian learning, although not in the same beliefs. Outside this parameter range, we use simulations to demonstrate that the consumption level attainable under the optimal linear rule is virtually indistinguishable from the one attainable under Bayes’ rule, although the respective decisions will not always be identical. These results suggest that simple rules of thumb can have an advantage over Bayesian updating when more complex calculations are more costly to perform than less complex ones. We demonstrate the implications of such an advantage in an evolutionary model where agents “learn to learn.”     

Learning for sharing: an empirical analysis of organizational learning and knowledge sharing

Knowledge is one of the most strategically important resources to sustain competitive advantage in an organization. So its creation and management has attracted the attention of managers and researchers alike. Organizational learning has been positively associated with innovation and performance and knowledge sharing has been associated with innovation performance. Although, some authors argued that organizational learning and knowledge sharing are complementary, there are few studies that have empirically tested the relationship between them. The purpose of this study was to analyze its relation and to empirically test it in the hospitality industry. Based on the results of the structural equation modeling approach on 244 Spanish hotels we confirmed a positive relationship between the variables. The findings are discussed; implications and future lines of research are presented.     

Managing the performance of outsourced customer contact centers

This research focuses specifically on customer contact services that have been outsourced to external suppliers. The performance of the contact services supplier directly affects end customer satisfaction which underlines the need for appropriate management of customer contacts and consideration of the end customer's perspective in designing appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs). This research draws on various streams of literature including services purchasing, performance management and service quality to derive propositions on how to manage customer contact services suppliers. These propositions are subsequently investigated in an in-depth case study. The results of the case study show that managing customer contact services suppliers on effectiveness rather than efficiency benefits the overall performance of the supplier. This research shows that quality improvements in both process and service delivery ultimately lead to decreased costs. These improvements will furthermore enhance customer satisfaction and improve buying company performance. The current trend in selecting and managing suppliers for outsourced business processes is on efficiency improvements and cost savings. However, this research shows that this type of focus can actually decrease customer satisfaction and increase costs.     

Does relationship learning lead to relationship value? A cross-national supply chain investigation

In global business-to-business markets, shared resources between buyers and suppliers often result in competitive advantages and enhanced relationships between firms. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of research regarding learning capabilities between business partners in a cross-border setting. This study takes the approach to integrate customer value literature into interorganizational learning theory and adopts the often-neglected theoretical perspective of transaction value by contextualizing inter-firm collaboration in terms of relationship learning and value co-creation viewed by both the buyers and sellers in one single study. Through the development of a conceptual framework that examines how global environmental and inter-organizational conditions influence learning capabilities, the study investigates how relationship learning influences relationship value for both supplying and buying firms. Using a survey of 126 cross-border dyads in the industrial chemical, packaging, consumer durable, and apparel industries, the authors show how relationship learning is valued by both buyers and suppliers, and how it is critical when viewing the “supplier as a customer.” The results indicate the strategic nature of relationship learning in maintaining cross-border business-to-business relationships. Simultaneously, the findings provide evidence that cultural distance is not a significant influence on the firm's propensity to share knowledge with its global partners. It helps advance our understanding of the significance of cultural-pollination in the era of globalization.     

Outsourcing the procurement function: Do actions and results align with theory?

Are common theories of outsourcing useful in predicting the extent of and performance gains from the outsourcing of procurement activities? Or does procurement׳s broad scope and boundary-spanning role confound successful analysis? This study applies a theoretical framework combining concepts from transaction-cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV) to study the procurement outsourcing decisions of two hundred and eighty US-based electronics manufacturing firms. Findings suggest that TCE and RBV act in complementary ways on the procurement outsourcing decision. TCE, through fear of supplier opportunism, appears to be the primary driver of the extent to which procurement activities are outsourced. The RBV, through which the OEM׳s resource position in procurement vis-à-vis its outsourcing partner is determined, appears to be the primary determinant of the performance results of the outsourcing decision. Procurement activities are outsourced to a greater extent when fear of supplier opportunism is low, but such outsourcing is only “justified” (expected to yield performance benefits) when the OEM has a weak resource position vis-à-vis the outsourcing partner. An “enriched” TCE–RBV framework is presented and discussed as part of study results.     

Innovation shock,outsourcing strategy,and environmental performance: The roles of prior green innovation experience and knowledge inheritance

To investigate under what conditions an outsourcing strategy can show superior environmental performance, one stream of scholars has underscored the importance of prior green innovation experience, and another stream of scholars has underscored the importance of the in‐house possession of outsourced component knowledge. However, the empirical findings regarding the positive role of both scholarly streams when studied separately are mixed and sometimes contradictory. This study bridges these two distinct but related streams and suggests that prior green innovation experience and in‐house knowledge regarding outsourced components play a complementary role in enhancing environmental performance. The U.S. hybrid electric vehicle market lends support to the argument of this study. In so doing, this study increases our understanding of the role of prior green innovation experience and outsourced component knowledge on environmental performance while pursuing an outsourcing strategy. This study also provides guidance for managers and policymakers on how to achieve superior environmental performance in outsourcing.