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Extending thirty years of NPD best practice studies, this article presents the results of the most recent 2021 global best practice survey on product development management practices conducted by the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA). With responses from 651 companies in 37 countries, the results reveal once again that no single capability is necessary nor sufficient to explain best performance. The Best firms rely on the skillful combination of multiple new product development (NPD) practices to achieve greater overall innovation success. However, for the first time in this series of research, having an innovation strategy that encourages radical innovation, is oriented towards risk-taking and long-term, and strives for growth through new markets and new technologies is now a more important component of these practices than was previously found. Further results regarding the practices of the Best are discussed in the article, and implications are provided.

We investigate the performance of the Danish research and innovation system while linking with related policies. In an international comparison, Denmark fares extremely well regarding the research performance. Likewise, Denmark is positioned as an innovative leader in Europe, and has been for several years. Even if the overall innovation performance appears superior by European standards, the numbers for innovation performance of firms call for attention, as negative development trends are observed. Based on the diagnosis of the system, we identify a challenge and four stepping stones for continued Danish innovation performance. These support our discussion of the effectiveness of the research system in transforming research to innovation output, and how future policies should become more systemic to enhance Danish innovation.

Traditionally, universities have focused on two missions: teaching and research. While the universities still fulfill these missions, a third mission has been added: university research must establish its direct value to society. However, a lingering question is how this third mission should be carried out. While the earliest models focused on the universities operating similarly to an R&D department in a private company – seeking to patent research inventions and then capitalising on intellectual property rights – the focus today is much more nuanced and incorporates both invention- and innovation-oriented activities. This article captures existing knowledge of universities’ third mission activities and identifies five different models of how universities seek to fulfil the third mission. These models are empirically investigated through two multi-level case studies based on insights from universities’ top management, innovation and/or technology transfer offices, and research units within the emerging drone technology area. The findings illustrate how the two universities seek to fulfil the third mission, based on the same starting point but following different models. Moreover, a sixth model is identified, namely the Ecosystem Model, where the universities engage more extensively and with greater responsibility in collaborative efforts with a range of public and private actors on addressing comprehensive industrial and societal challenges through technology development and market insights. In doing so, the university’s role becomes more active in advancing the development of an industry. This emerging way of fulfilling the third mission is discussed with respect to university management and the achievement of societal goals.

This article aims to make idea screening studies even more relevant to innovation management by coupling a set of assessment criteria so that they can be used for identifying early product ideas with innovation potential. We develop a framework, which integrates the complementary theoretical perspectives from the creativity and innovation literatures. The approach draws novelty and usefulness insights from the creativity literature and combines these with novelty and market potential insights from the innovation literature. The resulting framework encompasses novelty of a product idea and its usefulness to the intended recipients, but with a distinct focus on the value to the firm that can be created through market potential. This set of criteria makes it possible to couple creative ideas for new products directly to potential innovation performance. For the study, industry and market experts made assessments of 106 student-generated projects; these assessments underline the distinctiveness of the three criteria and support the value of each criterion's independent role in assessing the innovation potential. Two student project cases particularly shed light on the relevance of each criterion and on its unique relationship within the framework.

Some start-ups treat regulatory constraints as exogenous and beyond their control, while other start-ups treat regulatory constraints as endogenous and possible to influence. However, thus far, no explanation has been offered for why start-ups differ in their responses to regulatory constraints. Based on 49 interviews with start-ups and other industry actors this paper examines start-ups’ responses to regulatory constraints in the market for drone applications. We find that variation in start-ups’ responses is instigated by start-ups’ temporal orientation. Start-ups pursuing applications targeted at present markets or future potential markets treat regulation as exogenous. In contrast, start-ups that pursue market applications bridging current and future potential markets are more likely to treat regulation as endogenous.

Innovation research most often focus on innovation barriers from a firm-level perspective, and it is well-recognized that commercialization barriers are an important hurdle for innovating firms. Ho...

Public and private funding bodies make massive investments in research to address the grand challenges of the world. These require collective research efforts of a large number of partners to generate knowledge and ultimately create technologies to meet today’s grand challenges. Surprisingly, little research is conducted on how to design the research consortia appropriately that actually result in the development of new technologies. This article argues that when organisational knowledge integrators are involved in large-scale projects, they ensure that the research findings of earlier technology development efforts in a project are pulled towards innovation outcomes through their own position in the innovation value chain. This article uses a data-set with 376 collaborative R&D projects within energy technologies. Most importantly, this article confirms the existence of organisational knowledge integrators and the positive effects on project outcomes. These results are discussed with implications drawn for both applicants and funding bodies for future projects.

The R&I Observatory country report 2017 provides a brief analysis of the R&I system covering the economic context, main actors, funding trends & human resources, policies to address R&I challenges, and R&I in national and regional smart specialisation strategies. Data is from Eurostat, unless otherwise referenced and is correct as at January 2018. Data used from other international sources is also correct to that date. The report provides a state-of-play and analysis of the national level R&I system and its challenges, to support the European Semester., JRC.B.7-Knowledge for Finance, Innovation and Growth

This article analyses the challenging collaboration between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and knowledge institutions. The aim of the article is to shed light on the barriers, which hinder collaboration, and to investigate the particular role of research and technology organizations (RTOs) as potential mediators of collaboration between SMEs and universities. On the basis of a unique sample consisting of 151 SMEs, RTOs and universities from seven countries, the differences across dyads of potential collaborations are identified. In particular, the article finds that both firms and universities with collaboration experience with the other partner in general perceive higher barriers than inexperienced firms or universities. In terms of the mediating role of RTOs, the article illustrates that universities perceive lower barriers when collaborating with RTOs than with SMEs. A similar tendency to a mediating role of RTOs can be found among the SMEs' perception of university collaboration. Finally, the analysis shows that the knowledge institutions perceive the SMEs as very important collaboration partners, but the same sense of importance is not shared by the SMEs regarding collaboration with the knowledge institutions. Hence, there seems to be a quite unbalanced view on the potential of the collaborative ties, which is further discussed in the conclusion.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the specific practices of management in the dispatching unit and to identify mechanisms for supporting transfer of shop floor knowledge embedded in operating manufacturing equipment.Design/methodology/approach– The paper applies an inductive and a case study approach for exploring three empirical cases that represent different manufacturing facility relocation processes and differences in the applied managerial practices.Findings– The paper identifies two important gaps in international production literature when firms relocate equipment to other sites; a time gap (from dismantling to re-assembly of production facilities) and a space gap (from the current to the new site abroad). These gaps are important for understanding why relocation processes are difficult and what management can do to facilitate such processes.Practical implications– The paper identifies four issues that management faces in the dispatching context when relocating manufacturing facilities.Originality/value– The paper gives new insights to a limited literature of shop floor knowledge transfer when relocating manufacturing facilities.

Despite the massive interest in open innovation, limited attention has been expressed concerning the intra-organizational challenges in implementing it. An exemplary issue is the unwillingness of employees to undertake extra-organizational knowledge transactions in the form of negative attitudes against the sourcing of external knowledge (the not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome) and against the external exploitation of knowledge assets (the not-shared-here (NSH) syndrome). Using survey data collected from 331 firms, this article empirically assesses the theoretical assertion that the NIH and NSH syndromes have negative impacts on the adoption of inbound and outbound open innovation. Furthermore, it investigates how their effects can be reduced through competence-building programs based on the training of employees. By focusing on two attitudinal antecedents to openness, the findings offer an explanation for the problems that firms face in benefiting from inflows and outflows of knowledge and possible guidance as to how managers can disengage such attitudes.

The interaction between product innovation and companies’ activities aimed at improving the energy efficiency of production facilities has been relatively little studied, but is of great relevance to society and companies given the strong focus of governments on grand challenges like climate change, green innovation technologies, and environmental problems in general. This paper utilizes the 2009 European Manufacturing Survey for the Danish sub-sample including 335 manufacturing firms. Through factor analysis, this paper confirms three main areas of focus of new product development: efficiency considerations, market attention, and greening of innovation. Logistic regression analysis demonstrates that while market attention is important for the development of new products, green aspects of innovation and efficiency considerations are important for production companies wanting to improve their energy efficiency. When these models are combined, the results highlight that energy efficiency moderates the effect of market attention to new product development. This paper therefore finds that aligning product innovation and energy efficiency is a complex and intertwined process – focusing on one may have indirect detrimental effects on the other. These results point to the conclusion that researchers and practitioners in innovation management have to consider more carefully the specificities and interactions of different types of products and process innovations and their environmental implications, and must formulate new, more sustainable managerial practices combining energy efficiency and product innovation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

In a world of increasing global knowledge flows with better potential access to domestic as well as international external R&D providers and collaboration partners, innovation management is increasingly challenged to access and relate to the right sources, for the right knowledge at the right time, to ensure long-term innovative performance. Identifying providers and collaborating with appropriate partners that possess heterogeneous and tacit knowledge are truly challenging tasks for even the most experienced innovation managers.

Stimulation of creativity has long been assumed to enhance innovation. Accordingly, organizing the work environment to unleash the creative potential of employees has been studied extensively. However, the present creativity literature has yet to produce sufficient empirical evidence to confirm this assumption, and therefore the generalizability of the relationship between organizational creativity and innovation remains indeterminate. This paper adopts the leading creativity and innovation models to identify the work environment characteristics stimulating creativity, and subsequently analyses whether this environment leads to product and process innovation in small and medium sized firms. The findings demonstrate that this environment does not yield the same results for product and process innovation, and particular factors of the work environment do not behave according to the expectations to enhance the likelihood of doing innovation. The study discusses these findings and advances the literature by showing that the relationship between organizational creativity and innovation is not generalizable, but is contingent upon the innovation type and, as the discussion will show, particular characteristics related to the firm. Accordingly, the paper suggests new research opportunities to further explore organizational creativity and innovation.

For every inbound activity by a firm in open innovation, a reciprocal outbound activity by another firm must be generated. The reciprocal outbound activities range from transferring of knowledge and ideas to solutions delivered to other firms' new product development projects. This paper names the firms that produce the reciprocal outbound activity for “providers,” and is the first to empirically investigate such providers of ideas, solutions, and technologies for other firms' open innovation activities. The literature review shows a surprising shortage of research on who the providers are, how they engage with other firms, and not least what potential benefits can be achieved from supporting other firms' innovation activities. The paper uses a quantitative survey on Danish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) carried out in 2010 to identify the providers, the role they take on, and the main benefits the providers gain. This paper finds that firms that are providers are indeed an under-researched and important phenomenon for firms' innovation activities. Compared to receivers of knowledge, the providers are younger, have a higher R&D intensity, adopt more open innovation practices, have higher absorptive capacity, and fewer barriers toward knowledge sharing as demonstrated by the NIH and NSH syndromes. Finally, although only tentatively, the paper finds that the provider firms are more product innovative compared to nonproviders. The paper further finds that more projects, more embedded relationships, and mutual rather than one-way exchange relationships significantly raise the probability that a firm experiences a substantial benefit from providing to other firms' new product development projects. The overall ambition of the paper at this point is to inspire other researchers to pursue the agenda on the provider perspective for future research. To support such research, the paper suggests a broadening of the research perspectives from the receiver of knowledge, in the literature on interorganizational relationships and open innovation, to include the provider, and even suggests some preliminary ideas for such research. Hence, the contribution of this paper lies not only in opening a new research topic but also in identifying some first characteristics of the phenomenon adding a substantial perspective to the literature on open innovation and interorganizational relationships. The paper formulates three indicative recommendations for managers that consider becoming a provider to other firms' NPD.

This paper charts an unnoticed theme in the current debate on open innovation, namely the foundational question whether increasing openness is beneficial? The paper approaches this question by conceptualising the degree of ‘openness’ and analyses the importance of increasing degrees of openness for NPD performance. Inter-organizational relationships in New Product Development lay the foundation for operationalising openness because these represent important sources of ideas and knowledge in purposive inbound open innovation. This exploratory paper finds that on immediate NPD performance measures the single firm strategy is performing better than the collaborative strategy. However, we also find that the use of internal and external relationships is highly correlated and that these interact with each other. Finally, with increasing degrees of openness the product development projects are slower than the norm in the industry, slower than what is usual for the firm’s projects and had higher cost than the norm in the industry and the firm’s usual projects. These results offer a more critical perspective on openness and NPD performance than the literature on the open innovation paradigm suggests. The paper discusses these results and offers some challenges for management and research of open innovation.

This study examines how manufacturing firms should organize their human resources by maximizing the value of individual employees for different forms of innovations. In particular, it examines the hiring, developing, and structural organization of human resources for optimizing different innovation outcomes. An analysis of 335 survey responses of the multi-topic and multi-country European Manufacturing Survey (EMS) results in a number of interesting findings. First and foremost, although there are commonalities in organizing employees in flexible team arrangements for new product development versus product-related service innovations, there are also important differences between these. In particular, whilst the educational level of employees has a significant and positive effect on new product development success, hiring highly educated individuals has a significant and negative effect on new product-related service development success. At the same time, while investing in individual training programmes is beneficial for new-product related services, such programmes have no impact on new product development. Combining our findings on these differences, it seems that in order to maximize the value of human resource hiring and developing practices for new product development success; organizations will find it more beneficial to invest predominantly in employees with the highest possible educational level, whilst for product-related service innovations; employees with more general skills should be hired. For the latter case, these employees’ individual careers must be developed internally once hired. The paper therefore carries important implication for the innovation management literature and related human resource practices at different organizational levels.

This article develops a typology that describes and measures different types of technological competence accumulation. The notion of accumulation comprises not only the state but also the change in competence, and hence it complies with the criticism of the static approaches to competence management. The typology of competence accumulation enables a comparison of firm profiles that lead to identification of four groups of firm behavior across the telecommunications industry. The relationship between the firm and the industry level is established on the condition that each firm's competence level depends on the firms' mutual relationships with other firms in the same industry (known as Red Queen evolution). The four groups of firm behaviour are therefore not considered as groups of independent firms that are similar by coincidence, but as patterns of behavior within the telecommunications industry, which allows for a discussion of more general implications for management of technology. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.

A key organizational barrier related to the implementation of open innovation strategies refers to the unwillingness of employees to undertake extra-organizational knowledge transactions. ...

The relationship and network literature has primarily focused on particular partner types, for example, buyer–supplier relationships or competitor interaction. This article explores the nature and relative importance of different types of interfirm relationships for new product development (NPD) success. The underlying premise of the study is that not only the type of interfirm relationships but also the combination of relationships are important for NPD performance. The interaction with a specific type of partner is expected to influence innovative performance by means of appropriate knowledge transfer. Varying needs for external knowledge, and thus types of relationships, are observed depending on the particular stages in the NPD process, the character of the knowledge base of the firm, and the industrial conditions. The absorption of external knowledge is discussed using the degree of redundancy in knowledge, which is defined as the degree of overlap in the knowledge base of the sender and the recipient of knowledge. Hence, the degree of redundancy has direct implications for the ease and, hence, use of knowledge shared with an external partner. The article is based on data from the Know for Innovation survey on innovative activities among European firms, which was carried out in 2000 in seven European countries covering five industries. The article explores the extent of use of external relationships in collaborative product development and finds that customers are involved more frequently in joint development efforts. Second, the industry association of the most important relationship is studied, and the results show that firms tend to partner with firms from their own industry. The danger in this approach is that firms from their own industry tend to contribute similar knowledge, which ultimately may endanger the creation of new knowledge and therefore more radical product developments. The analyses combine the finding that relationships with customers are used most frequently at both early and late stages of the product development process, with a second and more contradictory finding that at the same time customer relationships have a negative impact on innovative success. Moreover, the combination of customers, with both universities and competitors, has a significant negative effect on innovative performance. The potential causes of this apparent paradox can be narrowed down to two: (1) the average customer may be unable to articulate needs for advanced technology-based products; and (2) the average customer may be unable to conceptualize ideas beyond the realm of his or her own experience. Based on this evidence the article cautions product development managers to think explicitly about what certain customers can contribute with and, more importantly, to match this contribution directly with their own sense of what direction product development should go in the future. Finally, the role of complementary as well as supplementary knowledge is investigated for innovative success finding that sharing of supplementary knowledge with external partners in NPD leads to a positive effect on innovative performance. The article is concluded by a discussion of the implication of this finding for building knowledge within the firm and for selecting external partners for NPD.

This article focuses on the international purchasing behavior of small- and medium-sized industrial firms in Denmark. Based on taxonomy of internationalization configurations defined by the import and the export share of firms, the article explores the differences in these configurations seen from a purchasing perspective. The taxonomy reveals four internationalization configurations: international sourcers, globals, locals, and international sellers. Based on the taxonomy, the researchers diagnose the differences between firms in each of the configurations and find that psychic distance, risk, and control are unimportant factors compared to conventional findings. On the other hand, close cooperation between the firm and the international partners is important when explaining differences in internationalization configurations. The paper concludes by recommending possibilities for future research and by advising managers as to increase their success.

Inspired by the resource- and knowledge-based views, much attention has been focused on knowledge transfer as a process of strategic importance. Still, many open questions regarding knowledge transfer processes need to be addressed to complete our understanding. For instance, what are the barriers to knowledge transfer, and what are the facilitators? A review of the literature reveals that it is divided into two streams: articles on intra-firm knowledge flows and articles on inter-firm knowledge flows. Part of the incompleteness of our understanding of knowledge transfer processes, we argue, derives from the fact that it is unclear in which way intra- and inter-firm knowledge flows are different. The paper investigates three questions: first, how knowledge transfer is defined differently in intra- and inter-firm knowledge flows; second: how barriers to knowledge transfer processes differ; and thirdly: what we need to know to be able to formulate a management view of organizational knowledge flows, whether intra- or inter-organizational. The concluding section argues five research questions whose answers may enable research to formulate a management view of knowledge flows.

This paper investigates the role of internal contingencies in explaining performance implications of open innovation by addressing the questions: does openness drive innovation performance? And if so, what organizational activities impact the effectiveness of both the inbound and the outbound approaches to openness? The empirical basis of the study is a survey carried out in 321 Danish SMEs in manufacturing industries. The paper finds limited evidence of the direct effects of inbound and outbound open innovation on performance, as measured in terms of innovative output and profitability. It also finds that the effect of openness is mediated by the use of internal coupling activities that give employees latitude, information and skills to work autonomously. A key result is that the benefits of open innovation are fully captured only when firms adopt a number of activities that provide employees with autonomy and empowerment to conduct their work. The paper concludes with implications to theory and practice.