Search

The growth of interest in supply chain management continues unabated. Supply chain journals continue to climb in impact, and the importance of supply chains continues to bourgeon because of the con...

In this essay we summarize the state-of-the art of innovation studies shadowed by the daunting challenges this eclectic subject domain incurs as a result of discipline silo structures in most universities. Indeed, developments in technology and other external forces like competition and regulatory changes have pushed organizations towards development and adoption of new approaches particularly salient in Operations Management (OM). We show, however, that in the academic community, these discipline-based efforts have created an impediment to development of a strategic theory of innovation processes. We conclude with an upbeat and optimistic appraisal of possible ways forward and suggest a process to accelerate theory-building that might deal with the growing feeling among many scholars that many academic journals are becoming irrelevant. Examples from the current literature and reflections on the past 40 years of research in the field are liberally sampled. Although our essay views innovation through a bro...

The purpose of this symposium is to bring scholars together to discuss potential tensions between value creation and value capture in the context of open innovation. While value creation generally ...

Anecdotes proliferate about how dreams at night become reality during the day. Is there evidence that there a general relationship between dreams and acquired behavioral predispositions—especially ...

The open innovation paradigm places renewed emphasis on the boundary spanning role for technical organizations. Previous research shows that heterogeneous groups are superior to homogeneous groups for creative responses to uncertainty. For boundary spanners in engineering projects it is proposed that weak, external links are a source of the information needed to deal with task uncertainty. Weak links are used as a metric of differences in the technical advice received from outside the R&D groups. Data support the proposition that for high performing project groups, weak external technical advice links compensate for a lack of internal group heterogeneity.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on nine in‐depth case histories of manufacturing firms introducing significant new service innovations. Manufacturing firms are under increasing pressure to diversify into lines of business that offer unique contributions to long term profitability and this paper increases understanding of how incumbent firms successfully accomplish this transition.Design/methodology/approach – Using analytical induction the authors sample published announcements of significant new service offerings by well‐established manufacturing firms. An example of this type of service innovation would be General Motor's offering of OnStar remote driver support systems (not included in this sample). A total of nine cases (43 percent of the companies contacted) participated in this case study approach.Findings – The paper identifies two primary strategies pursued by these firms development and launch of significant new service innovations representing important diversification moves for...