Opening the network: Bridging the IMP tradition and other research perspectives

This paper introduces the theme of this Special Issue, that brings together some of the most significant papers presented at the 2006 Industrial Marketing & Purchasing (IMP) Group Conference. By proposing “opening the network” as the conference theme, our ambition was to provide a forum for new perspectives, alternative research methods and new empirical contexts, and so help IMP scholarship to continue evolving. After some preliminary remarks, we briefly introduce the papers and their contribution to the theme of this Special Issue. A first group of studies stimulates reflection in the field by contrasting IMP scholarship with ideas and points of view developed in related fields of inquiry. The second group, on the other hand, may be seen as an endogenous development of IMP scholarship, while the third group represents a response to a critique often addressed at the markets-as-networks approach: its dearth of managerial relevance.     

Impact assessment of agricultural research,institutional innovation,and technology adoption: Introduction to the special section

This article introduces a special section on impact assessment of agricultural research, institutional innovation and technology adoption. It is based on papers presented at a pre-conference workshop held at the International Conference of Agricultural Economists at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil in August 2012. It briefly reviews the history of impact assessment of agricultural research and discusses the contributions made by each of the papers included in this section towards advancing the theory and practice of assessing the outcomes and impacts of agricultural research for development.     

Servitization: A contemporary thematic review of four major research streams

Servitization describes the addition of services to manufacturers' core product offerings to create additional customer value. This study aims to identify the key themes and research priorities in this body of literature over thirteen years from 2005 and 2017, based on four major research streams (general management, marketing, operations, and service management). Prior multi-theme literature reviews have focused on operations journals, overlooking important work in other streams, particularly marketing. Informed by a systematic literature review of 219 papers, the study identifies five main themes: service offerings; strategy and structure; motivations and performance; resources and capabilities; service development, sales, and delivery. Within each theme, gaps in the literature are identified and eleven research priorities presented. The review shows that the literature has evolved significantly in recent years, becoming increasingly diverse. A recent noteworthy topic is the use of digital technologies, which indicates the increasing relevance of technological developments to manufacturers' service activities. Our review highlights that there are still some fundamental aspects of servitization that warrant further research, primarily the need to replace the focal-manufacturer perspective with a multi-actor perspective that highlights the important role of relationships with existing and potentially new actors as a result of technological developments.     

The search for the latent information star

Abstract: R & D groups are knowledge-intensive organizations. As such, their principal assets are the men and women with scientific and technical training who constitute these groups. The raw materials that they work on and the products that they produce are ideas or information. The patents, papers, and hardware which emanate from these groups represent the physical manifestations of these ideas. One important concern for increasing productivity in R & D laboratories, therefore, is the facilitation of information flow into, within, and out of research group (Fischer, 1980). This paper considers an approach for improving the performance of an R & D group by increasing its information acquisition and processing capabilities and reports findings from a field study undertaken to examine this approach.     

Why co‐creation experience matters? Creative experience and its impact on the quantity and quality of creative contributions

This article introduces ‘virtual design competitions’ as a new means of opening up the innovation process and enriching the companies, ‘design‐ideas’ by utilizing the creativity of a multiplicity of external designers and enthused consumers all over the world. The ‘Swarovski Enlightened^? jewellery design competition’, explored in this study, demonstrates the enormous potential of virtual co‐creation platforms. It further highlights the importance of the co‐creation experience and its impact on the quantity and quality of designs submitted. First, we introduce the idea of virtual co‐creation platforms and the requirements on the design of such a platform. Second, we explore the impact of the co‐creation experience on the content contributed by participants. Our study shows that co‐creation experience significantly impacts the number of contributions by consumers as well as the quality of submitted designs. Our paper contributes to a better theoretic understanding of the impact of a participant's perceived autonomous, enjoyable, and competent experience, as well as participants' perceived sense of community on their experience. From a managerial perspective, it provides guidance in designing successful idea and design competitions. While innovation managers may be interested in creative contributions, for participants, it is the experience which matters. Fully featured community platforms rather than single idea submission websites are required to attract creative users to submit their ideas and designs.     

IMP and service-dominant logic: Divergence, convergence and development

This article arose directly from discussions at the 2nd Otago Forum on Service-Dominant (S-D) logic held at the University of Otago in December 2008. It builds on the papers presented and discussions at the forum, on previous papers within the S-D logic field and relates these to the research of the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group. The article focuses on two important conceptual issues that appear to need further development by both S-D logic and IMP researchers: Firstly, the identity and characteristics of the business actor in an interacted business landscape and second, the nature of value and its creation and delivery. The article also seeks to use some IMP ideas on business interaction in an attempt to refine and clarify the central S-D logic concept of ‘service’ between companies. Finally, the article attempts throughout to draw tentative conclusions about the implications of this conceptual analysis for practitioners.     

The Nature of Technology for Design

This paper reviews ideas from design and technology and science education and discusses knowledge, values and skills as aspects of technology in order to demonstrate that technology for design cannot be simply associated with a knowledge component of technology. The paper highlights the linguistic challenges in expressing issues in this area and the philosophical difficulty that the nature of cognitive modelling means that some aspects may be impossible to express using language. Values and a designerly way of knowing and the nature of technological skills are discussed in order to establish their relationship to technology for design. Prior studies concerning technology and designing have focused on engineering and science-based design areas. A research agenda in relation to the proposed broader interpretation of technology for design is discussed, which demonstrates that such research must ultimately be interdisciplinary. Nevertheless, initial steps which could be taken by design researchers are suggested.     

Semi-quantitative risk assessment method for product management

The workshop presented a semi-quantitative risk assessment technique that can be used to judge the total risk on all undesired consequences/events for a product manufacturing operation. The technique requires an experienced team to judge risk utilizing a numerical rating system that, although arbitrarily chosen, is self consistent and provides a relative assessment of product manufacturing risk. Once calculated, the risk is compared to the product's net income for making risk management and product planning decisions. The workshop included an exercise where all participants could try the technique.     

Submission quality in open innovation contests - an analysis of individual-level determinants of idea innovativeness

The digital age allows for integration of dispersed groups into the innovation process. These heterogeneous groups of individuals varying in size and knowledge distribution, also referred to as crowds, build the basis for open innovation contests (OIC), one of the most common forms of crowdsourcing innovation. Different from more focused forms of open innovation, at OIC innovation managers often do not identify or evaluate participants ex-ante. Instead, innovation managers often make use of open calls for participation and assume efficient self-selection of participants i.e., that only motivated and qualified participants will volunteer and engage in the innovation contest. This behavior reflects one of the key assumption of crowdsourcing in participatory innovation settings. However, not every self-selected member is in the position to solve the contest task appropriately. Hence, innovation contests often result in large numbers of submissions, covering a wide range of quality levels, causing decision biases and significant workloads for innovation managers to select ideas. This problem is referred to as “crowding”. In order to reduce “crowding”, open innovation researchers are interested in understanding which types of individuals make the “best” contributions and therefore should be preferably encouraged to participate in in OIC. In this paper, we are assessing what characterizes those participants who submit innovative ideas to OIC, in particular those who submit incremental ideas vs. those who have more radical ideas. Drawing on the componential model of creativity and data generated in innovation contest held by chocolate producer Ritter Sport, we analyze the effect of participants‘ creativity, domain knowledge, and several motivational factors on the innovativeness of their contributions. We find all of these factors to affect the innovativeness of an idea. However, regarding generating incremental or radical innovations, some factors have opposing roles. Our findings imply for practice that innovation managers must decide which type of innovations they intend to generate and then design contests to attract participants with the required characteristics, if they want to increase the number of appropriate ideas and reduce the problems of “crowding”.     

Sourcing,Filtering, and Evaluating New Product Ideas: An Empirical Exploration of the Performance of Idea Markets

The proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity through Internet‐based technologies enables new forms of support for new product development. This paper analyzes idea markets, which use widely distributed knowledge, the power of markets, and the Internet to support the crucial initial tasks of the new product development process, including the sourcing, filtering, and evaluation of new product ideas. Idea markets employ virtual stocks to represent new product ideas and allow participants to suggest and trade new product ideas in a virtual marketplace. This paper empirically explores the performance of idea markets in a real‐world field study at a large, high‐tech business‐to‐business company that includes more than 500 participants from 17 countries and features various idea sourcing tasks. The results indicate that idea markets are a feasible and promising method to support the fuzzy front end of the new product development process. Idea markets offer a platform and formal process to capture, select, and distribute ideas in an organization, which motivates employees to communicate their ideas to management. By effectively sourcing and contemporaneously filtering, idea markets help reduce the number of ideas brought to management's attention to those that seem worthy of further consideration. Because idea markets also have the ability to source many ideas, they can increase efficiency at the fuzzy front end of the new product development process.     

Relationships and networks as examined in Industrial Marketing Management

The importance of the study of relationships and networks within business-to-business marketing is clear from the numerous articles written over the years that aim to give us greater insight into these two concepts. This paper reviews six of these articles. What sets these six apart from others is that they are the most highly cited articles on relationships and networks published in Industrial Marketing Management between 1995 and 2004. We examine each of these articles in terms of their scholarly impact and identify what researchers have learnt from these highly cited papers. Our conclusions show some interesting similarities that we feel has led to these articles being so highly cited. We conclude that the key to citation success is the identification of new research avenues. In addition, the chances of writing excellent papers seems to be improved when collaborating with others, rather than writing alone. By introducing new ideas these authors have not only been successful in their own work, but have given others the platforms to build on, thereby generating much more research in this area.     

Collective entrepreneurship at Qualcomm: combining collective and entrepreneurial practices to turn employee ideas into action

Successful new products are essential to every company for survival in the marketplace. Especially discontinuous innovations are attractive because they can contribute to revenue growth by creating new businesses or addressing new market segments. Employees and their entrepreneurial spirit are often not fully utilized in a company's innovation activity. This paper presents a coherent methodology to promote corporate entrepreneurship and transform the creative thinking of many employees into valuable products. The application of this methodology at Qualcomm has resulted in more than 1,100 participants submitting almost 730 new business ideas, resulting in over $60 million in funding for several incubation and joint‐venture projects over the past four years, some of which have already produced innovations that the company values at over $300 million. Further, the paper discusses the limitations of this approach, its transferability to other companies as well as implications for future research.     

The Role of Ideas in Understanding Industrial Relations Policy Change in Liberal Market Economies

This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.     

Inter-organizational collaborations for social innovation and social value creation: Towards the development of new research agenda and theoretical perspectives

The intensifying poverty and poorer living conditions, the need for greater social welfare along with ongoing damages to the natural environment in several contexts of the world have proved the increasing importance of social innovation for creating positive social and environmental change. This special issue addresses to the limitations in social innovation literature by providing insights into the role of inter-organizational collaborations in the process, practice and outcome of social innovation. Thus, the papers published in this special issue advance current knowledge and scholarship on different aspects of the social innovation phenomena occurring in inter-organizational contexts. The current paper reviews existing perspectives and studies on social innovation undertaken inter-organizational contexts, develops the future agenda for improving scholarship on social innovation occurring through inter-organizational collaborations, and provides the development of new theoretical ideas by focusing on some key studies in the literature and papers published in this special issue. With a focus on subsistence contexts that are characterized by limiting institutional environments, this paper identifies the types of partnerships that are being formed by social enterprises and individual social entrepreneurs, and how they may facilitate and foster social innovation practice and performance through social value creation.     

Policy analysis and advocacy for livestock-based development: The gap between household-level analysis and higher-level models

The dichotomy in approaches to policy analysis for developing countries’ livestock sectors is presented. Substantial experience and information generated from a large number of household-level studies is not being utilised by macro- and aggregate models which fail to recognise heterogeneity, dynamics and fundamental drivers of change in livestock systems. Household-level studies are not standardised and rarely identify and characterise key drivers and mechanisms for exploiting heterogeneity in policy analysis. The paper provides an overview of a set of six papers contained in a special edition which define and address this gap in analytical approaches and identify aspects of the way forward. Evidence is presented of inconsistencies and practicalities which emphasise the gap, but all papers present evidence of integrative progress and list opportunities for accelerating it. Constraints on the subject matter are outlined and a challenge to livestock policy analysts is made.     

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.     

谈如何保证纠正预防措施的有效性

通过某车间的产品不合格实例,运用质量工具分析方法,指出产品出现不合格问题的具体原因,并提出了如何进行纠正和预防措施的制定、实施和验证等几个方面的工作,从而保持企业质量管理体系运行的有效性及质量管理体系的持续性改进．确保纠正和预防措施的有效性。     

A survey of the current state of business policy research

This paper is an analysis and evaluation of a cross-section of current research in the policy area. The data used as representative of current policy research are the 51 papers submitted for possible presentation at the 1979 Business Policy and Planning Division Meeting in Atlanta, and the evaluations of these papers by blind reviewers. The areas covered by the papers are compared to the recommendations found in Schendel and Hofer (1979). The research methodologies used are also enumerated. The quality of the papers, as perceived by the blind reviewers, is presented by category—conceptual, empirical, and teaching.     

关于公共交通网络优化研究概要

本文旨在介绍我们关于公共交通网络优化研究的梗概。重点论述了数学模型建立和交通调查方法,并提出了一些设想,力图阐明自己的特色。