Decision makers find creating an innovation portfolio challenging, because more innovative projects are associated with a higher degree of uncertainty. In this study, we investigate the potential benefits of applying real options reasoning (ROR) in innovation portfolio management from an attention‐based view. Using a sample of 137 innovation portfolios with multiple informants, we investigate ROR's

Businesses increasingly incorporate the sustainability aspects into their products, services, and processes that drive innovation. While extant research on the linkage between sustainability and innovation has gained momentum over the past years, prior research has predominantly focused on sustainability's performance impacts (e.g., financially and environmentally) and product innovation outputs, neglecting

The Pandemic taught us that accelerated new‐product development is more important than ever, and provided examples of firms developing breakthrough products in record time. This article outlines five approaches to accelerated development. The first two deal with adequately resourcing new‐product projects, namely the use of focused teams; and effective portfolio management to prioritize projects and

Management and organizational scholars have paid increasing attention to the interconnections between digital transformation and innovation management in the last decade. However, a highly fragmented understanding of this topic is what we are left with so far. In this editorial, we suggest an approach to open up the black box of the interplay between digital transformation and innovation management

With the changing way people live, communicate, and work, enterprises are striving to shift their existing business model into a “self‐tuning” one. Enterprises are becoming more agile, adaptive, and ambidextrous in order to boost innovation in the current digital transformation era. Nowadays, “digital innovation” is closely associated with Industry 4.0 enablers and smart enterprises. Prior research

Organizations use idea screening to select which ideas will be developed into innovation projects. Extant research has revealed that, during idea screening, expert evaluators use intuition to make rapid holistic decisions about idea quality, analyze ideas in detail to determine their value and employ sensemaking to understand and elaborate on ideas. However, much of this takes place in the minds of

The importance of platform‐based businesses in the modern economy is growing continuously and becoming increasingly relevant. Specifically, the deployment of digital technologies has enhanced the applicability of two‐sided business models, enabling companies to act not just as builders and owners of assets, but also as orchestrators of external resources. Management research has, therefore, focused

Reward structures can have a significant impact on the performance of new product development (NPD) teams. However, there are several gaps in our understanding of how different types of extrinsic rewards influence the creative performance of NPD teams. Drawing on key theoretical objectives for advancing rewards‐creativity research in general, and NPD research in particular, this study incorporates

Digital innovations often follow a more fluid innovation process and, therefore, require different ways of managing the front end of innovation. Agile as alternative to established front end management practices is often suggested, potentially combined with Stage‐Gate, in what is called a hybrid Agile‐Stage‐Gate model, to reap the benefits from both. Implementing the hybrid model in the front end is

Innovation in a digital world increasingly revolves around open platforms that consist of a core technology and a large variety of complementary products developed by an ecosystem of independent complementors. The platform ecosystem literature has mainly focused on indirect network effects arising from the quantity of complements, with little attention to the quality of complements, despite the importance

Failure is an inevitable feature of innovation, and management research promulgates the importance of learning from it. Key to excelling at an innovation‐based strategy is understanding the processes that can turn failures into successes. However, post‐failure success remains elusive. Although failure signals that the innovation journey is off course, shifting trajectory is difficult, because it may

The field of external knowledge search for innovation has a long tradition and has inspired several schools of thought resulting in a rich and burgeoning body of research. However, the field suffers from two key limitations. First, the pluralism of research across multiple disciplines impedes our attention to the field as a whole, including its intellectual structure and core ideas. Second, recent

Societal pressures for greater sustainability can encourage firms to target part of their innovation activities at ecological initiatives (i.e., eco‐innovation). Yet, depending on their value function, firms can respond differently to such pressures and exhibit variance in their eco‐innovation activities. In this paper, we investigate the idea that a firm’s ownership structure may play a significant

Smart products have received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners alike. One limitation of the existing literature, however, is that the term is often used as a blanket term and that there is no consensus on what a smart product actually is. Because different studies rely on differing conceptualizations, the current body of knowledge is scattered and lacks a uniform language and

This study examines the impact of family management on digital transformation with specific regard to the firm’s development of Internet of Things (IoT) innovations. Drawing on the distinctive characteristics of firms with family managers, such as the focus on family‐centered noneconomic goals, long tenure, emotional ties to existing assets, and rigid mental models, it hypothesizes that increasing

Despite increasing scholarly attention on digital transformation, there are only limited micro‐level insights into how incumbent firms organize and manage their digital transformation efforts on a daily basis. Through a longitudinal, exploratory qualitative case study of a large firm, this article investigates how organizational members respond to an ambidextrous organizing model designed to accelerate

Introduction In this article, we focus on design innovation, that is, innovation in the external appearance of a product. Design has become an important competitive tool for managers and a fruitful area of research for scholars. The term design is rather elusive, having been attributed very different meanings. For example, when design is defined as an outcome, it has been conceptualized as enhancing

Over the past several decades, digitization has invaded all areas of human activity, including innovation. The result of digitization of existing tools for design and collaboration, and the introduction of entirely new digital tools, is a far more substantive change of innovation than previous generations of tools enabled. It affects not only the quality of the output and speed of its generation, but

Search and recombination are important mechanisms in the creativity phase of innovation. Digital transformation and the resulting pervasive digitalization of the innovation function have often been associated with increasing possibilities for search and recombination. In this paper, by systematically integrating the search and recombination literature with the literature on digitalization, we demonstrate

Social innovation is critical for supporting the economic and social fabric of communities globally. Yet little is known about the processes through which social innovation occurs and how context shapes them. To date, scholarship has focused primarily on social entrepreneurs and social enterprise creation, while the role of established not‐for‐profits (NFPs) as agents of social innovation has received

Team design thinking in new product development (NPD) refers to a set of design‐oriented principles that can be embedded in the everyday routines of NPD teams. We theorize that team design thinking enables NPD teams to develop more innovative products––products that are useful and novel––by reducing the routine and cognition‐based inertia that constrains the team’s innovativeness. Through a study of

Recently, the diffusion of digital machines has further enhanced firms’ manufacturing flexibility, but also opened questions on potential challenges and implications in the production process. To respond to these timely issues, this study adopts a behavioral perspective and comparatively explores how four different types of digital machines—characterized by increasing degrees of manufacturing flexibility—affect

The digital revolution is fundamentally reshaping the business landscape by generating abundant new opportunities and novel business models. As a new source of value creation, a start‐up’s business model is critical for its survival and growth. How, then, should a digital start‐up design its business model? The present study departs from existing viewpoints on the topic and proposes a strategic orientation

To foster their innovation teams’ adaptability, organizations are increasingly relying on agile teams. While research on the adoption of agile methods and practices has grown tremendously in the past decade, little is currently known about the human side of agile teams and how it contributes toward the emergence of adaptability. While the Agile Manifesto states that individuals and interactions are

At the heart of any innovation process lies a fundamental practice: the way people create ideas and solve problems. This “decision making” side of innovation is what scholars and practitioners refer to as “design.” Decisions in innovation processes have so far been taken by humans. What happens when they can be substituted by machines? Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings data and algorithms to the

Product development teams often face the challenge of designing radically new products that cater at the same time to the revealed tastes and expectations of existing customers. In new product development projects, this tension guides critical choices about continuity or change concerning product attributes and team composition. Research suggests these choices interact, but it is not clear whether

Innovation is an essential and yet puzzling part of family firms’ strategic focus. While family firms are generally characterized as conservative regarding their research and development (R&D) activities, researchers have recently argued that family firms can still achieve innovation‐based competitive advantages. Seeking to understand the link between family influence and the outcomes of innovation

Industrial manufacturers are innovating their business models by shifting from selling products to selling outcome‐based services, where the provider (manufacturer) guarantees to deliver the performance outcomes of the products and services. This form of business model innovation requires a profound yet little understood shift in how value is created, delivered, and captured. To address this research

Understanding product innovation in family firms is an important research endeavor given the economic predominance of those firms, their idiosyncrasies, and the importance of constant renewal for those firms to achieve transgenerational survival. Recently, family firm research has highlighted the role of next‐generation chief executive officers (CEOs; i.e., successors) who are often seen as drivers

Much of the contemporary modularity literature subscribes to the idea that increased product modularity is associated with advantageous increase in organizational modularity. Known as the “mirroring hypothesis,” this proposed relationship states that the structure of a product development organization and the architecture of the product being developed would “mirror” each other. This correspondence