A study of coordination in three research settings

The present paper reports findings from a study on coordination in three research settings—academic, cooperative-government, and industrial—and discusses their implications for research management. The study ascertains the relationship between coordination and research effectiveness, and examines how coordination operates and is attained in research settings. Two hypotheses regarding the relationship between coordination, research effectiveness, and integration of research staff are advanced and tested on research groups in the three research settings mentioned above. The results support the hypotheses and indicate that the relationships occur very generally regardless of the setting in which the research is conducted. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for research management and in particular the attainment of coordination in research settings.     

Knowledge sharing mechanisms in industrial research

Previous research has firmly established the importance of knowledge sharing in Research and Development (R&D) settings. However, current theories provide only fragmented insights into the origination of knowledge sharing, and thus offer limited guidance for knowledge management practices in R&D. To integrate and extend these fragmented insights, we undertook two exploratory field studies of knowledge sharing in industrial research organizations. The contributions of this study are the following. First, we introduce three dimensions that differentiate origination mechanisms for knowledge sharing. Second, we show that some of these mechanisms correspond to mechanisms assumed in particular streams of literature, whereas others have been neglected till now. Third, based on our field studies, we show that each of these knowledge-sharing mechanisms have a different value for industrial research practices. Therefore, knowledge management in R&D should facilitate and stimulate a broad portfolio of knowledge-sharing mechanisms.     

Comparison of patterns of research effectiveness and output and their stability across six countries*

The focus of the study is an exploration of the stability of relationships between characteristics of research groups and various dimensions of the effectiveness of research activities across different national settings. The analysis is based on data collected by a Unesco coordinated international research team in six European countries. Data were collected by means of a survey of research groups engaged in research and experimental development activities in a variety of scientific disciplines, primarily in the natural and technological sciences. The total sample consists of 1,222 research groups. From a wide variety of data a set of indices describing the age, patterns of communication, management, diversity, morale and inter-personal relations in the unit, etc., were selected on the basis of observed correlations to measures of effectiveness in the samples of each of the six countries. By means of a residualization procedure the indices were adjusted for the effect of the type of institution end scientific field of research groups to eliminate differences with respect to these two structural dimensions in the samples of the different countries. Stepwise regression analyses were performed separately for each country to explore the relationships of the ‘adjusted’ indices to seven different measures of effectiveness. The common pattern of relationships of certain indices to give effectiveness measures is described and discussed. The recurrent relevance of certain variables in the individual countries across a variety of effectiveness measures is analysed. On the basis of these analyses a few ‘universal’ indices are isolated such as quality of research planning, communication with users of the research results, and the research morale as perceived by unit heads and scientists. These seem to have consistent, systematic and additive relationships across countries to most of the specific dimensions of research group effectiveness. In conclusion the theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon

There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside-in process of open innovation, while the inside-out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge-intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.     

The Social Network Position of Lead Users

The field of lead user research has seen a great deal of attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, we still lack a full understanding of the nature of users with high potential for innovation. In this paper, we employ a social network perspective on lead users. Increasing the realism of our research in three empirical studies with different empirical settings and methods, we provide robust evidence that lead users have a distinctive social network position: They exhibit an unusually high level of “betweenness centrality,” meaning that they are positioned as bridges between different social groups. This finding has two major implications for lead user theory. First, it consolidates seminal conceptual work on lead users and their embeddedness in social networks. And second, the findings extend and validate prior work on the social network perspective of lead users by combining theoretical insights from cognitive psychology, research on creativity, and network theory. As the social network positions of individuals can be mapped quickly and at low cost with modern Web mining tools, our findings may point to a new and readily applicable approach for the efficient and effective identification of lead users in real‐life projects, an aspect that is usually emphasized as the most crucial activity in lead user projects.     

How advanced is the strategy paradigm? The role of particularism and universalism in shaping research outcomes

As the field of strategy reaches its 25th anniversary, we examine how far the field has progressed during that time. Both management and strategy research have been characterized as being in an early stage of development. We draw on Kuhn's ( 1996 ) paradigm development model, which posits a connection between a field's stage of maturity and research processes and outcomes, to assess the maturity of the strategy field. We conduct two studies. The first is a cross‐discipline comparison of productivity norms for university faculty. The second study examines longitudinal research outcomes for a sample of 945 strategy faculty. Our results indicate that strategy has the attributes of both an early stage and mature field: while overall research norms are low relative to other fields, they are driven far more by merit‐based than non‐merit factors. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Grounding of a Discipline: Cognition and Instruction in Technology Education

Technology education has long struggled to establish itself as an equal partner in general education and often struggled to gain recognition for the value of its instruction. Frequently technology educators tout the effectiveness of their programs based on anecdotal evidence gathered from their classroom experiences on how their instructional methods empower students to learn. Although technology education originated without any meaningful input from cognitive science research, it appears that technology education instruction methods are remarkably consonant with findings from cognitive science that define good instruction. Specifically, there is considerable accord between how instruction in technology education and cognitively based instructional models such as collaborative learning, socially distributed expertise, design/engineering, and project-based instruction can be connected. The role of the cognitive research findings on instruction could inform a long over-due theoretical grounding of instruction in technology education. The absence of research on learning and instruction in technology education could be attributed to a lack of theoretical grounding in this relatively new field. This paper examines four cognitively based models of instruction and reviews the relationships between research in the cognitive sciences on learning and instruction in technology education. The consonance between the research recommendations from the cognitive sciences and practice in technology education instruction could serve to stimulate debate on the theoretical grounding of an emerging field of study.     

Factors Impacting the Adoption and Effectiveness of the World Wide Web in Marketing

With the increased popularity of the World Wide Web, companies are rushing to have a presence on the Web. However, many companies do not know whether the Web will be effective for them, or what they can do to increase its effectiveness. Few empirical studies have been done on what companies can do to increase the adoption and effectiveness of the Web in marketing. By studying the practices of 110 marketers, we found that adoption and effectiveness of the Web can be positively influenced if a company 1) provides formal training to its marketing organization, 2) encourages an effective relationship between the marketing and IS/MIS organization, 3) demonstrates the usefulness of the Web to the marketing organization, and 4) uses younger marketing personnel.     

Toward a social fitness perspective on contract design: Contract legitimacy and influence strategy

The effectiveness of contracts in terms of cooperative efficiency and relational outcomes in interorganizational relationships has become critical in today's volatile markets. However, extant research on the effect of contracts on trust has found inconsistent results, possibility because of its overwhelming focus on an economic fitness perspective at the expense of a social fitness perspective. Drawing insights from institutional theory, we focus on legitimacy building in interfirm contract design, investigate how contract legitimacies (i.e., regulative, normative, and cognitive) influence the effectiveness of interfirm contract design, and further explore the moderating effects of influence strategies that are applied in the process of contract implementation. Using longitudinal field survey data and archival data, this study finds that the three types of contract legitimacy play different roles in influencing compliance and trust and that noncoercive influence strategies can improve the effectiveness of regulative and normative legitimacy better than coercive influence strategies on trust. The findings offer new theoretical and managerial insights into the role of institutional environments in the effectiveness of contract design in manufacturer–distributor relationships.     

Outward-looking and future-oriented customer value potential management: The sales force value appropriation role

The management of customer relationships based on customers’ value to the selling firm has been a central topic in marketing research for decades. Yet, extant research has devoted only scant attention to the management of customer future value potential, focusing mostly on advanced statistical modeling based on firm-internal and historical data, which often lacks relevance in B-to-B settings. We employ a longitudinal intervention study, rooted in a constructive research approach, to assess the relevance of a novel customer value potential management model in business markets. The results, based on realized sales and customer portfolio dynamics, demonstrate that a firm can effectively manage customer value potential by adopting a non-statistical, sales force-driven analysis perspective. Further, the study presents evidence for the effectiveness of combinative outward-looking and future-oriented value potential criteria in value potential analysis. Finally, the findings demonstrate how a supplier can proactively manage customer portfolio dynamics in the long run by systematically enhancing its competitive position and capitalizing on customers’ organic growth at individual customer account level, through the interplay of organizational value management and sales force value appropriation efforts.     

缓控释滴丸的研究进展

采用固体分散体技术制备的缓控释滴丸剖,由于具有生物利用度高、起效平稳、生产操作简单、成本较低等独特优势而成为近年来引人注目的药用剂型之一。综述缓控释滴丸剂的释药机理、制备、体内外评价方法等方面的最新研究进展。     

Market Orientation and R&D Effectiveness in High‐Technology Firms: An Empirical Investigation in the Biotechnology Industry*

There seems to be lack of consensus among informed scholars about the importance a of market orientation for high‐technology firms. This paper gives a comprehensive review of existing empirical studies on the relationship between market orientation and innovation performance and pinpoints two limitations in this research stream that might be at the origin of such controversy. First, extant research often overlooked key innovation outcomes for high‐technology firms, such as those related to research and development (R&D) performance. Second, organizational conditions that can ensure an optimal integration of market knowledge in the innovation process have been less analyzed in the case of these firms. Against this background, the present study contributes to the literature by providing a test of the effect of market orientation on R&D effectiveness and the moderating role of knowledge integration in this relationship, using a sample of Italian biotechnology firms. The study's objectives are addressed in two steps. The first one consists of an in‐depth qualitative study based on semistructured interviews in five biotechnology firms. The second step consists of a follow‐up survey of 50 biotechnology firms. Results from hierarchical multiple regression analysis show that the different dimensions of a market orientation have diverse effects on R&D effectiveness of high‐technology firms: whereas interfunctional coordination has a positive main effect, the effect of customer orientation is moderated by knowledge integration, and competitor orientation has no effect on R&D effectiveness. Post hoc analyses also show two additional results involving a broader set of dependent variables. First, R&D effectiveness mediates the effects of customer orientation and interfunctional coordination on organizational performance. Second, market orientation does not appear to significantly affect R&D efficiency. The present study contributes to current literature in two main respects. First, it adds to previous work on market orientation and innovation by proposing a new dependent variable—R&D effectiveness—which offers a better perspective to understand the impact of market orientation on innovation performance in high‐technology contexts. Second, while part of the current debate on the role of market orientation in high‐tech markets seems to be polarized by positions that sustain its potential drawbacks or, on the contrary, its advantages, this study's findings on the moderating role of knowledge integration shed light on important contingency factors, such as organizational capabilities. The authors discuss the study's limitations and provide directions for future research.     

Signaling Quality: An Examination of the Effects of Marketing‐ and Nonmarketing‐Controlled Signals on Perceptions of Automotive Brand Quality

When introducing new products to market, firms often leverage marketing signals in an effort to increase perceptions of product quality. While prior research mostly focuses on marketing‐controlled signals that firms can directly influence to affect consumer perceptions of product quality, the proliferation of nonmarketing‐controlled signals in the form of third‐party product reviews introduces a new layer of complexity to a consumer's inference process. Given the fact that propagation of marketing signals and third‐party reviews has made the marketplace more interactive, it is no longer diagnostic to analyze the impact of various quality signals on consumer perceptions, separately. The purpose of this study is twofold. There has been extant research on the individual effects of marketing‐controlled signals on quality perception, but research providing a simultaneous examination of multiple signals is scarce. The first purpose is to examine interaction effects between various marketing signals on consumer perceptions of quality. Firms may be able to control the communication strategy of internal signals (e.g., price, advertising), but third‐party signals are external to the firm, and hence are often perceived as being more credible and less biased than marketing signals. Despite the popularity of third‐party product reviews, there is scarce empirical research about how they impact perceptions in the presence of marketing‐controlled quality signals. Thus, the second purpose is to examine the interaction effects between marketing signals and independent third‐party reviews on perceived product quality. This study advances existing models of market signaling to account for the potential interactions between various types of quality signals. Hypotheses are tested using a longitudinal data set comprising all car brands that have existed in the U.S. automotive industry between 1990 and 2007. The automotive industry provides an ideal context for the analyses as quality is an indispensable yet not easily discernible attribute of cars. Furthermore, consumer perceptions of the quality of new vehicle introductions can have a profound effect on product performance. Data are compiled from various secondary sources, including Harris Interactive's Equitrend, Consumer Reports, and TNS Media Intelligence, among others. Econometric techniques are used to estimate the empirical model. Findings show that effects of quality signals are codependent such that third‐party quality ratings reduce the effectiveness of pricing and advertising, whereas they enhance the credibility of warranty signal. Furthermore, warranty positively interacts with price and advertising. It is also demonstrated that car sales in the previous period and the country of origin of the car brand significantly impact perceived quality. Overall, the research findings can help car manufacturers better understand how their initial product configurations and marketing strategies impact the perception of new vehicle introductions.     

Triangulation in industrial qualitative case study research: Widening the scope

The particular qualities of case study research have enabled the advancement of theory in industrial marketing research through revealing rich insight into context-specific phenomena. Triangulation is recommended as good practice in conducting case study research and is traditionally envisaged as offering validity through convergence of findings, sources or methods. Is this, however, the only interpretation of triangulation and in what way is it consistent with case study research that is often concerned with naturalistic settings and nuanced interpretations? The purpose of this study is to delve into the role of triangulation in qualitative case study research in order to re-appraise its role. The study offers firstly, an inventory of triangulation categories for case study research in industrial marketing and secondly, a theoretical reframing of triangulation consisting of three modes - convergence, complementarity and divergence. Both the inventory and the reframing are discussed with reference to illustrations of published case studies, thus extending current understanding of research practice in industrial marketing.     

Technology Commercialization in Road Infrastructure: How Government Affects the Variation and Appropriability of Technology

Successful technology commercialization is important for business profitability, and government policies can help or hinder firms' success. As a regulator, government affects standard setting and the nature and scope of property rights. As a sponsor, government can empower technology commercialization by its financial support of new technology. As a first user, government can significantly enhance the chances of successful technology commercialization. And as a buyer, government accounts for a substantial part of the world economy. Previous research on government's roles in technology commercialization mainly addressed the effects of specific roles. However, there is little understanding about the combined impact of these roles on technology commercialization. This article develops a conceptual model to analyze the combined effect of these roles on technology development projects. This model is based on a review of the literature on large technical systems, technological regimes, and technology policy that enabled this study on government's diverse roles in technology commercialization. To refine the conceptual model, an in‐depth analysis of three technology development projects was conducted. The empirical findings are drawn from road infrastructure. In that sector, government is the dominant customer and first user of most new technologies. Therefore, government has to create a market for those technologies and strongly affects their viability. This research has produced several major results. First, the developed model is the first to conceptualize the relevant relationships between the various roles of government in technology commercialization. Second, this study has shown that government's behavior as a regulator and sponsor conflicts with its preferences as a buyer and user. Consequently, the support of and demand for new technology is inconsistent and uncoordinated, leaving firms with significant uncertainties in assessing market opportunities. Third, the dominant position of government as a buyer in road infrastructure weakens the effectiveness of intellectual property rights. Fourth, existing studies on technology for partially public goods are mainly historical accounts, and only a few are empirical studies on innovation processes. This study provides an in‐depth analysis of the development and commercialization of technology for partially public goods. This article concludes with policy implications and suggestions for future research. An important policy implication is that government could improve technology commercialization by either stimulating the commercialization of various competing technologies or developing various competing products based on the same technology. A central issue for future research is how firms can involve government in its diverse roles in technology commercialization. Most of the existing research on customer involvement deals with consumer and business‐to‐business markets. A better understanding of government involvement could help firms to overcome the impediments they face in dealing with government.     

Identifying a distinctive competence: forecasting ability in the money fund industry

Testing the causal link between a firm‐specific competence and its antecedents or consequences has become a key objective for strategy research over the past decade. On one hand, case studies can identify a competence, but with their small sample size, their retrospective research design, and their tendency toward sampling on the dependent variable, they can not reliably test the causal connection between a competence and its antecedents or its consequences. On the other hand, variance decomposition studies demonstrate the existence of firm‐specific performance differentials but have not identified which particular competencies are responsible for them. The present paper avoids both of these problems by measuring a particular competence across a large sample of organizations over a long period of time, so that a test of statistical causality can be applied to the relationship of this competence to both its antecedents and its consequences. The particular competence studied is the ability of money market mutual funds to forecast changes in short‐term interest rates—a competence known from prior research to be both valuable and rare. In particular, we test the effect of forecasting ability on the economic surplus generated by the fund and its growth. Conversely, we also test the effect of growth on the subsequent development of forecasting ability. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sales trainer roles, competencies, skills, and behaviors: A case study

Numerous studies have examined different issues related to evaluating the effectiveness of sales training programs. Limited needs assessment, lack of training objectives, no alignment between training objectives and corporate goals, and sales training content, are all potential factors that can influence the effectiveness of training programs. Yet, little attention has been paid to the role of a central actor in the training process — the sales trainer. The evaluation of sales training programs is incomplete without taking into consideration the qualifications of the trainer. Through a case study, this paper suggests there are 8 roles that are associated with the sales trainer position. To effectively execute these roles, this exploratory investigation identified 18 related skills that are grouped into 5 competencies. Recommendations are offered regarding the relevance of this research for practitioners and suggestions are provided for future research in this area.     

From Physics to Function: An Empirical Study of Research and Development Performance in the Semiconductor Industry

We present the results of an empirical study of research and development in the semiconductor industry. The study aimed to understand the drivers of innovation performance in an environment characterized by close links to science and a combination of technical novelty and manufacturing complexity. The data reveal substantial differences in research and development (R&D) performance, and R&D performance improvement, between firms. Analysis of our field observations suggests that these differences are associated with the use of experimentation and experience in guiding technology choices, matching options provided by scientific developments with the complex requirements of evolving production environments. We describe the technology choice process in some detail, and examine its nature in both U.S. and Japanese industrial settings.     

How to leverage the impact of R&D on product innovation? The moderating effect of management innovation

Although research and development (R&D) is a key indicator of (technological) innovation, scholars have found mixed results regarding its effect on product innovation and firm performance. In this paper, we claim that variations in R&D effectiveness can be explained by changes in a firm’s social system, in particular in its management innovation. It is still unclear how management innovation influences R&D effectiveness in terms of product innovation. In this study, we address this theoretical and empirical gap in the innovation literature. Our theoretical arguments and findings from a large-scale survey among Dutch firms show that R&D has a decreasingly positive relationship with product innovation, particularly for firms with low levels of management innovation. However, in firms with high levels of management innovation, this relationship becomes more J-shaped, especially in small and medium-sized firms. Our findings also appear to indicate that management innovation may be more important for competitive advantage than just R&D. Overall, our insights reveal that management innovation is a key moderator in explaining firms’ effectiveness in transforming R&D into successful product innovation.