How Ideation Portfolio Management Influences Front‐End Success

The front end of innovation is recognized as an important driver for successful new products and business prosperity. On the one hand, companies must generate a sufficient number and variety of high‐quality ideas to obtain a well‐balanced portfolio of potentially successful innovation projects. On the other hand, companies must strictly select and prioritize promising ideas and concepts because resource constraints do not allow for the pursuit of every idea. Therefore, companies must practice ideation portfolio management to simultaneously support the variety and selection of ideas and concepts before they enter the innovation project portfolio. To date, there is no research on how ideation portfolio management affects the performance of the front end and of the eventual project portfolio. The current study addresses this research gap in an empirical cross‐industry investigation of 175 medium‐sized and large firms in Germany using a double‐informant design. Ideation portfolio management is conceptualized with three elements: ideation strategy, process formalization, and creative encouragement. We find that all three elements independently and significantly contribute to front‐end success. The results also show that front‐end success mediates the relationship between the elements of ideation portfolio management and project portfolio success. More importantly, we find significant interaction effects between creative encouragement and process formalization and between creative encouragement and ideation strategy. The findings suggest that these elements of ideation portfolio management are complementary and should be balanced to maximize the performance of the front end and the eventual innovation project portfolio.     

On the role of alliance management capability,organizational compatibility,and interaction quality in interorganizational technology transfer

Interorganizational technology transfer (ITT) is a key component of firms' innovation processes. ITT involves purposeful, goal-oriented interactions between two or more organizations to exchange technological knowledge and/or artifacts and rights. Using the relational view, this study develops and empirically tests a research framework that incorporates key factors of technology transfer success to answer three questions: (1) How do various managerial routines and procedures that as a whole reflect a firm's alliance management capability influence interaction quality in ITT? (2) How does interaction quality in turn influence technology transfer success? (3) Which configurations of organizational and interactional factors contribute to technology transfer success? By examining the causal chain from alliance management capability through interorganizational interaction quality to technology transfer success, this study explains linkages between important antecedents and consequences of interaction quality and thus contributes to a better understanding of the interorganizational exchange processes that determine technology transfer success.     

Bayesian analysis of periodic unit roots in the presence of a break

A Bayesian testing approach for a periodic unit root in quarterly and monthly data is presented. Further a Bayesian test is introduced to test for unit roots at (non)seasonal spectral frequencies. All procedures admit one structural break in the periodic trend function, where the occurrence of a break and the associated timing are treated as additional model parameters. A Bayesian model averaging (BMA) approach is proposed and power functions of the tests are computed. Overall the results indicate that the BMA periodic unit root test exhibits favourable test properties even in small samples. In an empirical application the presented testing procedures are used to test for (non)seasonal forms of unemployment persistence among OECD countries.     

Operating Expenses and the Rent Premium of Energy Star and LEED Certified Buildings in the Central and Eastern U.S.

This paper investigates the relationship between operating expenses and rents of Energy Star and LEED certified buildings in the Central and Eastern United States. Several studies have shown that sustainable buildings command a rent premium compared to comparable conventional buildings. Lower operating expenses are expected to be a major source of the rent premium that sustainable buildings command. This is especially the case for buildings with triple-net leases, where tenants directly benefit from savings in operating costs. For a large dataset of U.S. office buildings this study finds significantly lower operating expenses in LEED certified buildings. However, savings in operating expenses only explain part of the rent premium. Additional factors must be at work. Surprisingly, we find significantly higher operating expenses in Energy Star rated buildings. Hence, intangible benefits appear to be the major source of rental premiums of Energy Star rated buildings.