Digitalization offers new opportunities for equipment suppliers to support the competitiveness of process industry firms through participating in digitally enabled process-innovation initiatives. However, doing so is not without challenges as it requires equipment suppliers to align with multiple actors within an extended ecosystem to deliver complex product-service software systems as embodied sources

This study investigates how the social and technical subsystems of a platform ecosystem change and interact in the advanced services context. An integrated research approach results in the development of an analytical framework accounting for the four perspectives of - technical core, key actors, structural boundaries and tasks of a servitization-based platform ecosystem. This study draws from collective

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has been used to examine the role of resources and capabilities in product innovation and how product innovation is related to overall firm performance. Moreover, the natural RBV (NRBV) has addressed how resources affect the natural environment, whereas the relational RBV has highlighted the importance of relational resources, that is, resources shared with

IoT as a disruptive technology is contributing toward ground-breaking experiences in contemporary enterprises and in our daily life. Rapidly changing business environment and phenomenally evolving technology enhancement necessitate a robust understanding of IoT implications from business and management perspective. The current study benefits from an explanatory sequential mixed-method approach to represent

In this study, we investigated ambidextrous governance in alliances—the alliance partners’ efforts to simultaneously pursue alliance efficiency and flexibility through the use of formal and relational governance. Grounded on the ambidextrous organization and alliance governance literature, we argued that ambidextrous governance can enhance the performance of technology alliances, and technological

In recent years, developing low-carbon technology has been a critical strategy for enterprises to respond to global warming challenges. Although consumer perception is influential in determining technology adoption, there is a lack of studies looking into the impact of consumer perceptions on enterprises' low-carbon technology adoption behaviors. This paper thus aims to investigate enterprises' decisions

Given the managerial/financial commitments needed for supplier development programs, buying firms need to be selective of the suppliers they engage for development. This paper examines the moderating role of five supply-side factors (i.e. supplier size, supply share, product complexity, buyer-supplier integration, and the supplier's management systems) in the relationship between supplier development

Research on incubation models indicates that incubators and accelerators are crucial catalysts for the development of start-ups. To facilitate start-ups in financial markets, several regulatory authorities have adopted a new incubation model called a ‘regulatory sandbox’. Regulatory sandboxes enable eligible applicants to test their technology-enabled financial solutions for a certain period of time

Open innovation (OI) is an important phenomenon in a global marketplace where knowledge is distributed and individual firms no longer have a monopoly on the best talent. As firms increasingly search for innovative external ideas and solutions, an obvious problem is how to source high-quality contributions externally. A more specific problem is how firms motivate in-bound, non-pecuniary contributions

This study focuses on the potential of expired patents, that is, patents freely available in the public domain, to become new technology opportunities. These technologies can create a new value, if they are well utilized and combined with other technologies, or go through further commercialization processes. Furthermore, such value can be obtained effectively, given their initial usability, proven

This study aims to deepen our knowledge of the SME ‘human’ role within open innovation adoption. To achieve this, we explore how the SME leader, namely the founder/CEO managerial characteristics influence the SMEs open innovation adoption dynamics (i.e. mechanisms, partners, motives and sequence of adoption). The empirical analysis is based on seven Irish medical device SME case studies achieving high

The present study examines whether a balancing strategy for ambidextrous learning (BSAL) can influence business model design (BMD) via dynamic capabilities. Furthermore, this study investigates whether environmental dynamism, in an opposite manner, moderates the relationships between dynamic capabilities and novelty-centered and efficiency-centered BMD. It draws on a cross-industrial sample of 493

In today's competitive world, globalization touches all industries. The open innovation (OI) paradigm has garnered increasing importance in academic research and industrial applications. Considering this interest, this paper aims to synthetize up-to-date findings, outline the intellectual structure of OI within the manufacturing research domain, and suggest a future research agenda. Building upon the

Pro-market reforms are a form of institutional change from a socialist economy to a market economy. As the institutional environment in a transition economy changes, pro-market reforms exert a significant influence on university technology transfer (UTT). By leveraging dynamic capabilities in the context of universities, this study develops a theoretical framework for analyzing how the scope (degree)

Digitization is receiving a lot of interest in recent servitization research, but the use of platform-based Industry 4.0 technologies to boost product-service innovation (PSI) is less covered. This study aims to explore how companies successfully leverage platforms for servitization in an Industry 4.0 context. Building on theories of PSI, platform leverage and business model adaptation (BMA), we use

There is a general consensus among scholars that knowledge is probably the most important source of competitive advantage. The influential, novel knowledge incorporated in patented inventions can be considered as a valuable resource for firms. The research questions that are at the heart of this work are how long the effect of influential knowledge on financial performance can last and how this effect

People have the power to make an innovation a success or a failure. Corporate decision makers act as both facilitators and barriers to the introduction of technologies into their organisations. Psychological factors clearly have an impact on their decisions and acceptance behaviours, but these have not been fully explored. Consequently, an understanding of these factors is essential for organisations

Industrial manufacturers increasingly develop digital platforms in the business-to-business (B2B) context. This emergent form of digital platforms requires a profound yet little understood holistic perspective that encompasses the co-evolution of platform architecture, platform services, and platform governance. To address this research gap, our study examines multiple platform sponsors from an industrial

Scholars, managers, and policy makers are increasingly interested in the potential of servitization to enhance the innovation capabilities for manufacturing companies, among others. Collaboration within the supply chain appears to play a relevant role in the transition to service provision because of its relational character. Combining these elements in the same model, this study sheds light on the

When companies in process industries take radical leaps in product innovation, these new products often fall outside the “process window” of existing production processes and hence require extensive production line modifications and radical process change. Consequently, firms need to deal with high degrees of uncertainty, complexity, equivocality and ambiguity in the front-end. These four knowledge

Digital Transformation (DT) has become an imperative for most organizations in our world of emergent and continuous changes. The term DT has been so broadly used (and misused) that it becomes very confusing. Consequently, the need to provide some conceptual rigor to DT is urgently needed. The purpose of this article is to develop a unified definition of “digital transformation” based on a vastly rigorous/scientific

The digital wave of change had an unprecedented effect on the competitiveness of the global value chain, whereby the process industries are not an exception. Although they are often regarded as laggards in the general progress towards adopting digital technologies, the pressure to cut costs and to review existing business models have prompted the industry forerunners within the process industries to

Innovation is one of the main determinants of economic development in modern societies. The extant evidence points to increasing territorial disparities in Europe concerning innovation. Relying on production theory, we examine the nature of these disparities. In particular, we are interested in finding out whether catching up processes are stronger than the shifts of the technology frontier, which

Network platforms are increasingly important in current economic ecosystems. With industries, platforms and organizations integrating in many directions, the difficulties of defining the boundaries of organizational populations increase. Although population ecologists have frequently applied legitimation and competition mechanisms to analyze inside the organizational population, there is little understanding

A major goal of government and non-profit scientific funding agencies is to support research and development (R&D) that has broad impacts. This study proposes a new framework, called the Inclusion-Immediacy Criterion (IIC), to determine whether research benefits marginalized communities, reduces inequality, and encourages inclusive innovation. To test the framework, the study analyzes NSF sponsored

Drawing from the dynamic learning perspective of entrepreneurship, this paper investigates how entrepreneurs' learning activities and new venture performance (early sales and employee growth) are impacted by reliance on different network tie partners (strong and weak ties) for learning. Utilizing a sample of early-stage high technology ventures in incubators, we find weak ties help improve performance

By comparing the cross-country citation performance of patents registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), this paper investigates how the economic crisis that Japan faced in the early 1990s altered the innovation capacity of the nation once regarded as a technological powerhouse. The following main findings are reported based on a difference-in-differences framework. First

This study investigates the effect of organizational support, perceived usefulness, and perceived availability of support schemes on public purchaser attitudes towards public procurement of innovations (PPI). Through a self-administered questionnaire, data were collected from a sample of public purchasers working in the Norwegian municipalities. The dataset was analysed through partial least squares

Despite the attention technology transfer offices (TTOs) have received in previous studies, the question of how they should recruit and train an appropriate mix of employees remains unanswered. In fact, surprisingly little is known about the ways in which TTOs’ employees affect technology transfer (TT) activities. This study helps to fill this gap by exploring how TT officers with specific capabilities

This paper proposes a new method to quantitatively evaluate the relative importance of a functionality in a technological domain at a specific time, called function score. Based on the function score and actual demand for each functionality, we developed a framework to analyze dynamic functional trends in a technological domain. To test the proposed method, this paper conducted an empirical study using

Public procurement has been increasingly adopted as a demand-side policy instrument to stimulate innovation, but empirical evidence on the effectiveness of public procurement remains scarce especially evidence using firm-level data. This paper theoretically analyzes the demand-pull and certification mechanisms through which public procurement can lead to innovation and empirically examines and disentangles

Developing new products that can address the triple bottom line of sustainability poses one of the grand challenges in our time. This study is among the first to examine how the adoption of 3D printing (3DP) technologies mediates the impact of firms’ sustainability orientation (SO) on new product performance. We use a mixed-methods design. First, we conduct qualitative interviews in the U.S. and India

Discovering and seizing technology opportunities is key to innovation at all levels. However, there are several open issues in the existing research into the discovery of technology opportunities, such as the insufficient specification of technology opportunities, defining the features of opportunities in a way that may lead to the exclusion of some valuable opportunities, and a lack of empirical support

This article reviews the literature on business models in process industries. The review reveals that the business model concept has gained an increasing amount of attention in process-industrial research, but it also shows that the literature exhibits a lack of construct clarity and that it is developing in different domains, depending on the perspectives scholars have taken to study business models

As the relationships among technologies become more complex, technological convergence is occurring in many fields, resulting in technological spin-offs in which technologies born in an industry are used in unexpected fields. Predictions of these events, such as patent citation analysis and International Patent Classification's (IPC) association analysis, are used to propose a method. Previous studies

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a policy mix between general innovation policies and environmental policies in fostering the adoption of global warming-related eco-innovations both in the short term and long term. Focusing on process eco-innovations, we investigate whether the combined impact of general innovation and environmental policy instruments, which we term a cross-instrumental policy

As a response to the call for cumulative knowledge in ecosystem research, this paper focuses on ecosystem literature from the perspective of a focal firm. Through an in-depth analysis of modern and classic ecosystem conceptual works, this paper clarifies the theoretical underpinnings of the structure view and the coevolution view of ecosystems. Whereas according to the structure view an ecosystem features

This study explores how start-up firms raise funds at founding. Using a data set of firms founded in the manufacturing, and information and communications technology sectors of Japan during the 2003–2010 period, we examine whether founders’ human capital, including technological human capital, impacts the initial funding of start-up firms. The results reveal that start-up firms managed by entrepreneurial

This paper investigates how business and innovation strategies explain companies' responses to transformational pressures in a mature industry. The analytical framework combines two perspectives on business and innovation strategies: competitive position and resource position. Based on an embedded case study of eight companies in the Swedish pulp and paper industry, the paper contributes to previous

Past lead user research has provided strong empirical support for the claim that lead users tend to innovate independently. While the innovation activity itself is well documented, little is known about whether users' ideas and solutions also reach manufacturers' organizations. Recent research indicates that the majority of user discoveries remain limited only to local use and are rarely presented

Many nations have been investing significant funds in cyberinfrastructure for sciences (commonly known as “CI” or “e-science”) in the last few decades. The purpose of these investments has been to advance scientific progress in the supported scientific disciplines such as biodiversity and ecological research. However, there is scare research on how these CI investments impact scientific progress. We

Big Science aims to answer fundamental questions regarding our Universe and represents a great example of how science can lead to innovations that generate a positive impact. Big Science has a great deal of scientific, economic, and social relevance. The objective of this study is to better understand how Big Science impacts innovation through transfer mechanisms and spillovers. To accomplish this

Due to the industrial features of high resource dependence and high state-owned shares, the impact of the environmental information disclosure (EID) and technological innovation information disclosure (TIID) on the financial performance of Chinese coal listed companies remains unknown. This paper selects 26 listed coal companies in China from 2014 to 2018 as empirical research objects, combined with

The degree to which inter-firm research and development (R&D) networks benefit a firm's exploitative and exploratory innovation depends on two factors: (1) the kind of knowledge that the firm can access from networks and (2) how the firm acquire these knowledge resources through its connections. Utilizing a knowledge-based view of the firm, we argue that related and unrelated network knowledge diversity

This paper explains the performance outcomes of markets for technology. It examines whether, and in what context, licensing agreements function as signals of innovativeness that influence investors' evaluation of public companies and if they are consistent ex post the announcement. Joining the literature on markets for technology and signalling theory, it distinguishes the outcomes related to the expectation

As product development has recently emphasized user innovation, it should necessarily reflect customer-perceived value, as well as technological value itself. However, while previous studies for technology planning have focused on analyzing the potential of technology, they have not considered the customer-perceived value that technology can create in a new product. Therefore, this research suggests

With the tides of new entrants constantly driving the extension of an industrial technology trajectory, how does the new entrants' divergent technological backgrounds impact their cross-industry innovation performances? To answer this question, we investigated the new entrants' pre-entry technological background, including their accumulated technology (T1) different from that of their targeted industry

In recent decades, there has been growing interest in intrapreneurial capabilities. The intrapreneurship and strategic management literatures have insights for entrepreneurs about how to apply entrepreneurial and strategic techniques and concepts in creating competitive advantage. More specifically, the dynamic capabilities framework has emerged as a useful tool for managers to better develop and manage

Digitization blurs the lines between technology and management, facilitating new business models built upon the concepts, methods and tools of the digital environment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data in terms of how businesses manage their digital transformation. The paper argues that the outbreak of IoT and Big Data has resulted in

Accelerators are a fast-growing form of entrepreneurship support. Literature about them remains descriptive and disjointed. While some consider them new, others believe them to be a next-generation incubator model. Based on a qualitative inductive study in India, with inputs from both accelerator executives and founders of accelerated ventures, we shift the analysis from the form (accelerator) to its

While science parks represent one of the most important policy initiatives to stimulate firm development and growth, their contributions are still highly debated. This paper takes a novel customer-oriented approach to disentangle the contributions science parks provide to their tenants. Particularly, we qualitatively explore when and how science park tenants reach customer satisfaction and how tenants

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the innovation processes of technology development across the Valley of Death. Hitherto, studies of the innovation process for this difficult early phase in technology development have implied a linear progression or have privileged the contribution of intermediaries channelling government-funded support. By making use of process theories, and pursing a novel action

The study aims to clarify the behavioral patterns of technology transfer professionals (TTPs) required in university technology commercialization. In the past, TTPs simply transferred technology using functional skills and experience gained in specific science/business fields; however, now they are often required to be entrepreneurial in the process, as mentioned in the literature and manuals on the

The management literature defines modular innovation as a way to make technological changes in product modules that does not necessarily change the product architecture. However, engineering science shows that new product modules not only change the product architecture, but they can also be used for technologically radical next generation products. Therefore, there seems to be a misalignment in how

This paper addresses how a technology holding company (THC) affects university inventions crossing the Valley of Death (VoD). A THC, which is a new incubation model, is a specialised organisation for establishing spin-offs as subsidiaries and commercialising university inventions. This study verifies the effects of THCs on the incubation productivity of universities by conducting a propensity-score

Firms invest much of their capital into basic research in order to generate new ideas and technologies. However, converting new technology concepts into marketable products is difficult, and firms struggle with transitioning projects from a knowledge discovery to product development, a gap referred to as the Valley of Death (VoD). While the concept of VoD has been well documented, the literature provides

The essential cause of the ‘Valley of Death’ (VoD) is the reluctance of the private sector to invest in technologies which are perceived as immature. However, uncertainty about whether a new product or technology complies with regulatory frameworks may also have an important effect on private sector investments. We use the cases of the Critical Path Initiative, in the pharmaceutical industry, and the

This paper explores and explains how, why and with what consequences business angels' trust in the entrepreneur affects their decisions to invest, reinvest or withdraw funding in the Valley of Death (VoD). Drawing on the VoD literature and on business angel research, we retrospectively study two contrastive cases of success and failure of French start-ups operating in the IT sector over a period of

We address the lack of studies focusing on internal organizational sponsorship mechanisms, while considering environmental influencers and focus on a specific type of organizational sponsorship to do so: Business incubators. We argue that to be able to offer a customized incubatee-strengthening service pack, incubator-incubatee interaction is key, requiring clear-cut and directive service co-development

Fintech innovations are enabling access to financial services through mobile devices for many unbanked in the world. Though fintech innovations are touted as game changers in deepening financial inclusion, their wide acceptance and use still remain limited. In the extant literature, technological and behavioural antecedents that influence users’ behaviour toward financial technologies are not fully