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Moving beyond traditional measures of innovation such as the use of R&D expense or patent related data, this study examines the relationship between slack resources and innovation productivity, a measure of innovation efficiency defined as the marginal revenue generation outcome associated with a given level of increase in R&D expense. Using a sample of 449 manufacturing firms across six years, a fixed effects panel analysis is utilized to examine how available, recoverable, and potential slack impact innovation productivity. The results from this study both support and conflict with prior slack and innovation research utilizing other innovation measures. Specifically, the analyses support the argument that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between available slack and innovation productivity. However, the results fail to support a significant relationship between recoverable or potential slack and innovation productivity, a departure from prior literature examining more traditional measures of innovation. Both practical and theoretical implications are discussed. Keywords: Slack, Innovation, Research Quotient, Organizational slack and innovation are both key factors of success within organizations and as such have been heavily examined in the strategic management literature (Marlin and Geiger, 2015; Wang et [...]

The literature on technology management has increasingly focused on the sociocognitive elements of the industry life cycle. One of these elements, category labels (words, in most cases) and its role in shaping market understandings, has recently become of interest to scholars. As industries evolve, stakeholders generate a plethora of category labels. However, we know relatively little about why some category labels are used repeatedly, whereas others are abandoned. Drawing on semantic networks theory, we argue that the familiarity and creativity of category labels drive their adoption. We hypothesize that low levels of familiarity hinder comprehension, but too much familiarity increases the cost of obviousness. Likewise, low levels of creativity do not trigger curiosity, whereas too much creativity spurs dissonance. We use two methods to address these hypotheses. First, we study the early smartphone industry, finding support for an inverted U-shaped relationship between both the familiarity and creativity of category labels and their adoption, even after controlling for alternative explanations, such as technology and design characteristics. Second, we find consistent results through two online experiments that broaden the scope of our study and address potential endogeneity concerns in our field data. Our paper expands the literature on the evolution of technology industries by showing that familiarity and creativity are distinct dimensions that influence the sociocognitive dynamics of an emerging industry. We also contribute to the categorization literature by theorizing about the contestation that occurs among category labels and providing empirical evidence of the factors that affect their adoption. Funding: Financial support was received from the National Science Foundation [Grant 1027408] and the Slatkin Family Fund Research Grant. Keywords: technology management * category labels * categories * industry evolution * creativity * familiarity * semantic networks, Introduction During an industry's early stages, stakeholders hold multiple, simultaneous understandings of the industry's products (Kaplan and Tripsas 2008, Anthony et al. 2016). Scholars have examined this sociocognitive dimension through [...]

We adopt a sociopolitical perspective to examine how an employee's political skill works in conjunction with social network structure to relate to the employee's innovation involvement and job performance. We find that employee innovation involvement mediates the relationship between political skill and job performance and that the number of structural holes employees have in their social network strengthens the positive relationship between political skill and employee innovation involvement. Hypotheses were tested in a large microprocessor manufacturing firm using a sample of 113 employees responsible for generating technological innovations in support of the development of computer microchips. The results of a constructive replication study among medical professionals provide substantial support for our model. This study's contribution is in showing that political skill both leads to innovation involvement and enables employees to take advantage of the innovation-enhancing potential of certain social network positions. Funding: This research was partially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation [Grant 1033150] awarded to David Obstfeld (PI) and by a grant from the Cardiovascular Institute (full name withheld for confidentiality) awarded to Emily W. Choi (PI) and Virginie Lopez-Kidwell (Co-PI). Keywords: employee innovation * political skill * social networks * structural holes * job performance, Introduction Understanding the antecedents and outcomes of employee innovation involvement--the extent to which an employee is involved in generating and implementing innovations in his or her organization--is critical because innovating [...]

This paper presents a novel theoretical framework of how members of multicultural teams leverage their diverse knowledge to produce creative outcomes. I develop and test a model of cultural brokerage, which I define as the act of facilitating interactions between actors across cultural boundaries. I find that team members with multicultural backgrounds engage in cultural brokerage on behalf of monocultural team members. Among multiculturals, 'cultural insiders' (those whose cultural background overlaps with other team members') brokered by integrating knowledge from different cultures, whereas 'cultural outsiders' (those whose cultural background has no overlap with any other team members') brokered by eliciting knowledge from different cultures. Both integrating and eliciting significantly enhanced creative performance at the team level. These findings advance our understanding of the process of creativity in culturally diverse teams. Open Access Statement: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to download this work and share with others for any purpose, even commercially if you distribute your contributions under the same license as the original, and you must attribute this work as 'Organization Science. Copyright [c] 2017 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1162, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.' Keywords: cultural brokerage * multicultural teams * cultural diversity * creativity * multicultural individuals * cultural overlap, Introduction Multicultural teams are becoming increasingly prevalent and important as tools for creative collaboration. Against the backdrop of accelerating globalization, organizations ranging from Pixar (Solomon 2016) to NASA (Montagnon 2012) [...]

This study investigates the role of boredom from front line service employees FLEs. To have a better comprehension about the role of boredom from FLEs, the proposed framework uses the Critical Incident Technique CIT as a method to capture insights that previous studies have not been able to identify. The results from this strategy were useful to uncover a dual effect from the relationship between boredom and job creativity. The CIT analysis provided evidence for a positive effect out of boredom. FLEs reported incidents in which they engage in creative projects for the benefit of services businesses. On the other hand, results from quantitative data taken from the same sample replicate findings from previous research that identify a negative relationship between boredom and job creativity. In addition to job creativity, this study includes in its investigation two critical outcome variables for services business: FLEs job satisfaction and FLEs Counter Productive Work Behavior CPWB. Both outcomes represent key variables for services managers when trying to sustain a customer orientation. Results indicate a positive relationship between FLEs feeling bored and CPWB. Meanwhile, when FLEs feel bored they show lower evaluations for their job satisfaction and a decreased attitude toward job creativity. The study's results legitimize boredom as a relevant emotion from FLEs and declare the importance to further understand its effects in different businesses' contexts., Emotions are embedded in human nature and are very common; they emerge in social contexts and in work organizations (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1995; Fineman, 2000). Workplace boredom is an emerging [...]

The main purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the link between individual (IC) and organization (OC) cultural competence leading to the multicultural organization development (MOD), as proposed in earlier studies. We built on theoretical postulates that define OC as management of IC and that assert that MOD is achieved through organizational adaptation to multicultural surroundings. We proposed the managerial role as the independent variable reflecting the link between the IC and OC and assigned MNC subsidiary organizational innovativeness (OI) the dependent variable role reflecting the degree of MOD. Accordingly, we constructed a new expatriate IC model and tested its impact on OI as MNC's subsidiary. We introduced contingency variables with the aim to increase the robustness and the merit of the research model. The survey was carried out in Croatia, on a sample of 146 expatriates by using the questionnaire method. The research results confirmed most of the hypotheses. The main contributions of this paper are the theoretical formulation of the new IC model (as an independent variable) and its empirical verification through examination of its relation with a subsidiary OI, as a dependent variable. Keywords: cultural competence; subsidiary organizational innovativeness; multicultural organization. Temeljni cilj ovog rada je empirijski istraziti povezanost izmedu individualne (IC) i organizacijske kulturalne kompetencije (OC), kao i vode li prema razvoju multikulturalne organizacije (MOD), kako se predlagalo u prethodnim studijama. Pritom se polazi od teorijskih postulata OC kao produkta upravljanja IC te postizanja MOD prilagodbom organizacije multikulturalnom okruzenju. Polazi se od pretpostavke da je menadzerska uloga neovisna varijabla, koja reflektira povezanost IC te OC, dok je organizacijska inovativnosti (OI) podruznice multinacionalnog poduzeca (MNC) zavisna varijabla, koja reflektira razinu MOD. U skladu s navedenom pretpostavkom, kreiran je novi IC model za ekspatride i testirano njegovo djelovanje na OI podruznice multinacionalnog poduzeca. U analizu su ukljucene i kontingencijske varijable, kako bi se povecale robusnost i povezanost modela. Anketno istrazivanje je provedeno u Hrvatskoj, na uzorku 146 ekspatrida. Empirijski su rezultati potvrdili vecinu postavljenih hipoteza. Najznacajnijim znanstvenim doprinosom rada mogu se smatrati formulacija novog teorijskog modela IC (koji se tretira kao neovisna varijabla) i njegova empirijska verifikacija istrazivanjem povezanosti s OC (koji se tretira kao zavisna varijabla)., UDC 005.73 1. INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Since the introduction of the cultural competence (CC) concept, organization and individual CCs were commonly observed separately. Contemporary studies, however, proposed a link [...]

The analysis presented here provides a new explanation for why vertically integrated and specialized firms may continue to coexist as industries evolve, especially during time periods when conditions unequivocally favor [...]

The dynamics of the contemporary environment with all its characteristics has greatly encouraged further research of the impact of innovation on the company's performance due to the paradigm that defines an innovation as means to enhance the competitiveness of enterprise. Thanks to the efforts of scientists, corporate managers and owners of capital can now choose from a variety of management tools to measure the innovation and success of the enterprise. In this paper, the methodology of Croatian Innovation Score (in Croatian: Hvatski Kvocijent Inovativnosti - HKI) is applied to assess the condition and the activities undertaken in order to build innovation capacity, and an assessment of the perception of innovation at the enterprise level, whereas the methodology of BEX index (Business Excellence Index) was used to measure business excellence of an enterprise. Applying the methodology on a sample of large manufacturing companies from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the composite innovation indices and business excellence indices were first calculated. The standard multiple regression has been applied to explain the relationship between innovation and business excellence of an enterprise. The results obtained in this research are encouraging and stimulating for the managers of the studied companies to strengthen the innovation capacity in order to advance on the business excellence ranking scale. Dinamicnost suvremenog okruzenja i njegovih karakteristika su uvelike potaknuli istrazivanje djelovanja inovacija na rezultate poduzeca, s obzirom na paradigmu, koja promatra inovaciju kao nacin za unapredenje konkurentnosti poduzeca. Zahvaljujuci rezultatima znanstvenog istrazivanja, menadzeri i investitori mogu birati izmedu velikog broja menadzerskih alata, kako bi mjerili inovacije i uspjesnost poduzeca. U ovom se radu koristi metodologija hrvatskog kvocijenta inovativnosti (HKI), kako bi se procijenili uvjeti i aktivnosti izgradnje inovacijskog kapaciteta, kao i procjena percepcije inovacija na razini poduzeca. Metodologja Business Excellence Index (BEX) se koristi za mjerenje poslovne izvrsnosti poduzeca. Koristeci opisanu metodologiju na uzorku velikih proizvodnih poduzeca iz Bosne i Hercegovine, izracunati su kompozitni indeksi inovacija i poslovne izvrsnosti, nakon cega je na njih primijenjena standardna multipla regresija. Na ovaj se nacin objasnjava povezanost izmedu inovacija i poslovne izvrsnosti poduzeca. Rezultati istrazivanja su ohrabrujuci i stimulirajuci za menadzere analiziranih poduzeca, a kako bi povecali svoj inovacijski kapacitet te napredovali u ostvarenju poslovne izvrsnosti., 1. INTRODUCTION This paper is based on the presumption that the implementation of innovation positively affects the financial performance of companies that are being assessed for their business excellence. In [...]

Are market leaders more likely to be early adopters of business process innovations? Although they tend to enjoy economies of scale in adoption, leaders may find that adjustment costs also increase with scale. Prior work has focused on how misalignment of incumbents' internal capabilities may affect their technology strategy. However, technology-capability misalignment may exist outside the firm boundary as well. In this paper, I build on mainstream product innovation concepts to predict when market leaders will adopt certain business process innovations. I then test these predictions in a large data set on early e-business adoption, leveraging its novel insight into focal firms, their markets, and their customers. I find market leaders were significantly more likely to embrace new information technology-enabled practices--except when customer adjustment costs were a significant concern. These findings highlight the strategic significance of external capabilities in the face of technological change. Keywords: information technology; innovation; business processes; electronic commerce; firm capabilities; technological change History: Received February 16, 2011; accepted February 18, 2014, by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy. Published online in Articles in Advance January 12, 2015., 1. Introduction Since the pioneering work of Joseph Schumpeter (Schumpeter 1934, 1942), scholars have repeatedly explored why certain innovations are embraced quickly by market leaders while others are resisted by [...]

This paper investigates the knowledge influences of the ethnic community on the quality of innovations of Indian immigrant inventors in the U.S. semiconductor industry. Membership in the Indian ethnic community [...]

Drawing on previous literature proposing that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) reflects a disposition toward, rather than actual involvement in, entrepreneurial activity, and on the resource-based view of the firm, we complement [...]

Because of the predominance of the assumption of profit maximization as the goal of the firm and its decision makers, especially in the competitive strategy literature, research has yet to [...]

This paper examines organizational boundary choice from an entrepreneurial perspective. Entrepreneurs create new profit opportunities by recombining existing assets into novel combinations based on their subjective judgment under conditions of [...]

In structural analyses of innovation, one substantive question looms large: What makes radical innovation possible if peripheral actors are more likely to originate radical ideas but are poorly positioned to [...]

Using resource-based logic, we integrate and extend theory and research on familiness and innovation in family firms. Supporting our efforts to do this is the suggestion that recent mixed results [...]

We collected longitudinal data from 160 high-tech small-business owners to analyze if the planned behavior constructs are related to their decision to innovate, as evidenced by their behavior (rather than [...]

ABSTRACT This paper empirically examines the relationship between a firm's financial success and its innovation strategy, that is, how it utilises or does not utilise professional service workers and researchers. [...]

This paper presents a framework for action that accounts for both how organizations get routine things done and how .1 they pursue markedly new things through 'creative projects.' Based on [...]

During the last decade, pressure on companies to transcend the Focus on economic success and technological innovation in order to address more ecologically and socially desirable outcomes has increased. Commitment [...]

The article provides insights into the successful configuration of the innovative business strategy shared value. We examine small, German, fair-trade and organic apparel labels--a niche market of the highly competitive [...]

Abstract Social innovation is becoming a core value of the EU flagship initiative Innovation Union, but it is not clearly demarcated as it covers a wide field of topics. To [...]

Absorptive capacity (ACAP) is defined as the ability to recognize new external knowledge, to assimilate it, and to apply it to commercial ends (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990). Although ACAP has been a widely researched construct during the last two decades, survey-based empirical studies in this field have focused only on linear relationships. The present research addresses this gap by comparing the linear and curvilinear relationships between ACAP and performance measures. Findings indicate that linear specifications result in a good approximation, but that curvilinear models are better at explaining certain relationships. To address the question of resource allocation, this study draws on the dynamic capabilities view and on the theoretical considerations of Zahra and George (2002) to reveal these curvilinear effects between ACAP and performance., INTRODUCTION Absorptive capacity (ACAP) is defined as one of the firm's key learning processes with regard to identifying, assimilating, and exploiting knowledge from the environment (Cohen and Levinthal, 1989; Lane [...]

When firms seek to innovate, they must decide where to locate their innovation activity. This location choice requires firms to make a simultaneous choice about the organizational structure of innovation [...]

This paper has three goals. The first is to understand why members of one organizational department are blind to the reasons why members of another department do not share their [...]

Byline: Diane M. Sullivan (1), Cameron M. Ford (2) Keywords: Creativity; Organizational creativity; Measurement; Measurement models; Formative indicators; Reflective indicators Abstract: Purpose Organizational creativity research has a curious misalignment between construct definitions and measurement model specifications--definitions embrace multiple facets, but empirical measures do not. The purpose of this study was to examine potential measurement model misspecification in organizational creativity research. We compare whether creativity is best assessed as a unidimensional common latent construct model with reflective indicators or as a multi-dimensional composite latent construct model with formative indicators. Design/methodology/approach To assess potential measurement model misspecification, two studies were conducted in organizational and professional settings. For Study One, MBA students (n = 152) evaluated stimuli from entrepreneurship and advertising. For study, two professional artists (n = 167) evaluated art domain stimuli. Findings CFA results suggest composite latent construct models with two factors (novelty and usefulness) represent creativity assessments in entrepreneurship, advertising, and art better than one- and three-factor models. Implications Results suggest that failure to acknowledge inconsistencies between construct definitions and measurement models may put researchers at risk of reporting findings with limited statistical conclusion validity. Further, improved theories and empirical models should include facets of creativity. Broader implications of measurement model misspecification for organizational science research are also discussed. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to examine the potential measurement model misspecification in organizational creativity research. We examined this potential using data from three domains and across two domain-specific samples. The results were robust across all samples and settings and suggest concern with respect to current methods used for measuring organizational creativity. Author Affiliation: (1) Management and Marketing Department, University of Dayton, 300 College Park, Dayton, OH, 45469-2271, USA (2) Department of Management, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA Article History: Registration Date: 27/10/2009 Online Date: 08/11/2009 Article note: Diane M. Sullivan and Cameron M. Ford contributed equally to the development of this paper.

A study on the influence of structure and composition of a firm's alliance network on its exploratory innovation is presented. The longitudinal study of 77 telecommunications equipment manufacturers showed that innovation was increased by technological diversity of its alliance partners. The influence of diversity was also strengthened by network density among the partners.

Creativity management is a management practice that jump-starts the innovation process by encouraging officials to act and respond with increased creativity and initiative. This article describes recent practices of a major metropolitan city, Seoul Metropolitan Government (the world's eighth-largest city), to increase initiative through modification of existing reward, management, and training systems. Detailed descriptions are provided. Results of a multimethod study show that during a two-year period, employees and managers proposed 62,666 ideas, of which 13 percent were selected for implementation. Survey results among 1,194 managers and employees also show that the percentage of officials who now view their divisions as innovative doubled in a two-year period, from 16 percent to 33 percent, thus providing further evidence of jump-starting innovation. Creativity management is presented as an effective approach for encouraging new ideas and solutions and broadening innovation practices in public organizations. KEYWORDS: creativity management, East Asia, innovation, performance DOI 10.2753/PMR1530-9576330405

A longitudinal study investigates the dynamics of social networks of employees on the adoption of innovation in product development projects. Results highlight that positive social networks of employees across units facilitate the adoption of innovation in product development projects.

The objective of the present study is to further advance the understanding of the role of learning orientation for successful performance through the product innovation development and technology dynamism as a moderator, in the context of Thai manufacturing firms. Through field research accompanied by a review of the related literature, this study identifies learning orientation and product innovation development that are important to successful performance. The model is tested using the data collected from 102 electronics and electrical equipment industry in Thailand. The results indicate that commitment to learning, shared vision, open-mindedness, intra-organizational knowledge sharing and product innovation development have positive influence on performance. Shared vision, open-mindedness and intra-organizational knowledge sharing have a positive effect on product innovation development. However, product innovation development is not a mediator of the performance. Thus, contributions and suggestions are also provided for further research. Keywords: Learning Orientation, Commitment to Learning, Shared vision, Open-Mindedness, Intra- organizational Knowledge Sharing, Product Innovation Development, Technology Dynamism and Performance, 1. INTRODUCTION A key component in the success of industrial firms is the extent of their product innovation development. A firm's ability to employ new and successful product innovation development [...]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2009.04.011 Byline: Roman Inderst Abstract: This paper poses the question of how a firm should optimally choose both its organization and its compensation in the pursuit of innovation. One key result is that incentive pay arises as a robust instrument of innovation management both with and without delegation, although in the present model its primary purpose is not to elicit more effort for the creation of new ideas, but to ensure that new ideas are implemented if and only if this is efficient. While without delegation, the firm may 'underinvest' in innovation, with delegation the opposite bias may arise as new ideas may be implemented too often ('overinvestment'). The optimal organizational choice trades off these two biases. Author Affiliation: University of Frankfurt and LSE, Germany Article History: Received 31 October 2007; Accepted 28 April 2009 Article Note: (footnote) [star] This paper is a fully revised version of an earlier draft entitled 'Incentives to Generate and Implement New Ideas,' which focused on the design of the incentive scheme only.

The effects of firms' search to innovate on product innovation are examined. Findings indicate that firms are likely to introduce more new products if they search after their competitors, and more innovative new products if they search ahead of their competitors. It is suggested that innovating firms should strive to be different from its rivals.