Figure - uploaded by Steven P. Gaskin
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
A project funded by the Institute for the Study of Business Markets to develop an understanding of the current state of business-to-business marketing and a research agenda for the field identified a lack of understanding of how the marketing function can or should best contribute to firms’ innovation efforts as the top priority. A workshop of seni...
Citations
... Specifically, through the use of marketing intelligence, companies support new product development (Comai and Bogers, 2023) and take the important step of adding value to open innovation, especially in the inbound process. Not surprisingly, marketing can be an important partner in the innovation project, for example, through the provision of customer insights (Griffin et al., 2013). In conclusion, this paper proposes practical strategies for leveraging marketing intelligence to bolster open innovation processes, drawing from both theoretical insights and empirical examples. ...
Timely and accurate information is crucial for successful innovation strategies. While the significance of knowledge inflow in open innovation is well documented, less attention has been paid to the nuanced processes of analyzing and leveraging this information. Research has predominantly explored the types and quantities of knowledge sources, overlooking how these sources are internally analyzed and utilized. This gap suggests a pivotal role for marketing intelligence in transforming external knowledge into actionable insights. For example, Laursen and Salter (2006) found that when firms search deeply for external knowledge, the ideal number of sources related to the maximum innovative performance is 3, and results would be negative if companies used more than 6. More harshly, Dąbrowska and Podmetina (2017) noted that firms interested in recruiting open innovation managers reported scouting skills as the only method of proactively gathering external information across all firms. Open innovation is challenged not only by the acquisition of external knowledge but also by the organization's absorptive capacity, which is essential for integrating external innovations effectively (Bhadauria and Singh, 2023). For example, Bogers et al. (2017) suggested that it is not clear "why individuals differ in their ability to contribute to effective identification of external knowledge." In this vein, several papers have suggested the need for a better understanding of how managers orchestrate external resources (Alexy, Criscuolo, and Salter, 2012), how the knowledge acquisition process is embedded in the existing organization (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014), and how different types of sources can be combined in order to add value to open innovation (Radziwon and Chesbrough, 2023). A recent longitudinal analysis by Schäper et al. (2023) supports the complexity of this relationship, demonstrating how the strategic integration of external innovations can be critical to enhancing financial performance over time. Stanko et al. (2017) further illuminate the vital interplay between marketing efforts and open innovation strategies, highlighting the role of marketing intelligence in bridging external innovations with market needs These insights underscore the need for deeper comprehension of how organizations can optimize the utilization of external resources, a process potentially facilitated by marketing intelligence, given the role of technological uncertainty, partner selection, and identification of new business opportunities. Conversely, relying on limited external resources and informal practices can have negative consequences that may lead to project failure. To this end, this paper reviews the current literature on this topic and discusses possible implications anchored in the construct of market orientation (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990; Slater and Naver, 1990). Specifically, through the use of marketing intelligence, companies support new product development (Comai and Bogers, 2023) and take the important step of adding value to open innovation, especially in the inbound process. Not surprisingly, marketing can be an important partner in the innovation project, for example, through the provision of customer insights (Griffin et al., 2013). In conclusion, this paper proposes practical strategies for leveraging marketing intelligence to bolster open innovation processes, drawing from both theoretical insights and empirical examples.
... In fact, for successful product development, the role of customer participation (Fang, 2008) has been emphasized in both marketing and innovation literature (Coviello and Joseph, 2012). While marketing literature explains ways to understand and incorporate customer insights into a firm's product development process (Griffin et al., 2013), innovation literature broadly conceptualizes the customers' role in terms of customer development. Customer development, on the other hand, may be understood as a structured and cyclical process that comprises four stages: customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation and company building (Maurya, 2012). ...
Purpose
Entrepreneurship literature recognizes the founder’s involvement as a salient factor in determining the success of startups. Nevertheless, its role in conjunction with the marketing roles of founders has been relatively unexplored. Very little is known about how founder’s involvement in marketing tasks (i.e. developing products, sales and customers) helps attain success in early startups. To fill this knowledge gap, this study aims to qualitatively investigate the founder’s involvement under three vital functional areas (i.e. sales, customer development and product development) and also explain their entwined nature of the relationship as the early-stage startups grow to become a scalable businesses.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used purposive sampling for conducting in-depth interviews with 11 startup founders in the midwestern city of the USA. A constant comparative method was used to code the interview transcripts, while juxtaposing them with extant literature.
Findings
Using three levels of axial coding, this study identified 32 descriptive codes, 11 aggregate codes and 2 interpretive codes. Following this, the authors present five propositions that illustrate the relationship between founders’ involvement, customer development, product development and sales.
Practical implications
This study offers guidelines to founders on how they could generate initial sales, identify early customers and build and sustain mutually beneficial relationships with them.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the extant literature on entrepreneurship and innovation literature. It presents motivation and potential processes, including systematic activities performed by founders in generating sales in conjunction with customer development and product development, thereby making a novel contribution.
... Therefore, trying to penetrate the international market would pose the significant challenge for SMEs in the post COVID new normal business as the home market is not saturated yet. As for the cobranding, the products need to have a distinctive USP (Griffin, et al., 2013). SMEs need to have their USP firmly established in new normal. ...
In this paper as we draw on the earlier literature of the management issues of the SMEs, we can extend and examine the three types of significant SMEs' management challenges amid Covid-19 pandemic. We also analyse the role of new information system to revamp SMEs' operational activities in Covid-19 pandemic fallout. The challenges in SMEs' managerial perspectives, challenges in leading the SMEs into the strategic direction along with how SMEs can draw up responses to overcome Covid-19 impacts for profitable business operations are analysed for further research in this area. Moreover, as Covid-19 forced business to go online with technology based integrated information system, SMEs also need to follow suit to have a productive integrated information system to support business growth and expansion sustainably.
... We argue that consumer sentiment involvement (CSI) could improve the new product performance through big data analysis. One of the core characteristics of big data analysis is to understand consumer needs in the new products design [17,18]. Understanding consumers' emotions is of great value for marketing and financial market prediction in the business world [19]. ...
With the development of Internet technology and the digital market in China, consumption through e-commerce platforms and giving online reviews after purchase have become mainstream. However, current market research still uses traditional methods of surveys and questionnaires, which largely influences the efficiency of relevant enterprises in finding key product issues and lowers new product performance. This paper conducts the aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) method to study the impact of consumer sentiment involvement (CSI) on new product performance. We took the ceramic industry as a case study, and collected 3.22 million consumer responses for ABSA. A total of 22 performances of new products were analyzed for CSI hypothesis testing. We found that CSI big data analytics were positively related to new product performance and enterprise innovation. Our study contributes in three ways. First, we extend the concept of co-creation in open innovation studies into an intelligent data intensive context. The data-driven open innovation is conducive to product design and new product performance. Second, we enrich the empirical industry of ABSA sentiment analysis in the Chinese ceramic industry. Third, we contribute to the collaboration method to motivate consumers to participate, which means to make effective product reviews in this research.
... NPD projects usually go through multiple stages, where resources are allocated primarily to marketing or technical activities (Slotegraaf and Atuahene-Gima, 2011). At marketing stages NPD teams use resources to acquire intelligence of customer needs, market competition, and industry environment, so as to generate the idea, design product, and test the product (Cooper, 2019;Droge, Calantone, and Harmancioglu, 2008;Griffin et al., 2013). On the other hand, at technical stages resources are used for assessing and building product specifications and testing product prototypes (Cui, Chan, and Calantone, 2014;Dodgson, Gann, and Salter, 2006). ...
Given the plethora of new product introductions, managers often embrace modularity (i.e., decompose product or process design into components or sub-tasks, respectively) as part of new product development (NPD). Although modularity increases overall firm performance, a holistic view is missing for the relationship between modularity and new product advantage (i.e., a new product’s superiority relative to competing products). In addition, extant research has not examined modularity in juxtaposition with allocated resources, so it is unclear how their interplay will unfold as means to foster new product advantage. Accordingly, by building on resource theories (resource-based view and resource orchestration theory) and extant research on NPD, we bridge the modularity-new product advantage gap in a survey study of managers involved in NPD projects. Overall, we view product modularity and process modularity as NPD capabilities and contrast their roles in NPD. Our findings show that product modularity, rather than process modularity, directly fosters new product advantage. More interestingly, resources form different contingency factors for the two types of modularity to influence new product advantage. Resources allocated to marketing stages constrain product modularity’s positive impact, but they create a synergy with process modularity to increase new product advantage. On the contrary, the synergy between resources allocated to technical stages and product modularity generates more benefit for new product advantage, but resources allocated to marketing stages do not have a contingency effect on process modularity. These findings help firms understand how to leverage modularity to develop superior new products. At the same time, they offer insights into allocating and bundling different resources across NPD stages as the range of product modularity and process modularity vary in NPD.
... As shown in our review, a growing number of articles suggested various ways to better engage with customers (Cui & Wu, 2016;Fernandes & Remelhe, 2016;Santos-Vijande et al., 2016). Yet, Griffin et al. (2013) indicated that customer engagement is a difficult topic for firms, especially in B2B context, and this provides significant potential for future research. ...
This study aims to investigate the development of ‘marketing innovation’ defined as the implementation of new marketing practices involving significant changes in the design, distribution, promotion or pricing of a product or service. We conduct a systematic review to provide conceptual, methodological and thematic guidance for scholars interested in studying marketing innovation. Our findings suggest while marketing innovation is often merged with the dominant technological focus underpinning product or service innovation, there is a growing trend to consider the innovation potential offered by the development of new distribution channels, branding strategies, communication types or pricing mechanisms. Digitisation, a key driver for marketing innovation, enables new communication methods, branding strategies, offering designs, and transaction settings. There is a growing trend to focus on cocreation, service-dominant logic and user community perspectives.
... La innovación es la conductora más importante de la capitalización de las empresas, porque permite la diferenciación de los competidores y evita la competencia de bajos costos, la cual fomenta la mala calidad y el alto consumo de los productos y servicios (Porter, 2013). La innovación está redefiniéndose a una perspectiva que concierne a los métodos de producir y, de igual forma, a la identificación adecuada de los requerimientos y motivaciones de los clientes -como una aptitud para escuchar su voz- (Griffin et al., 2013). ...
Las pequeñas y medianas empresas (pymes) han desarrollado una capacidad de marketing que difiere de la convencional. La mayor parte de la literatura ha descuidado a la innovación en marketing, por considerarse una casualidad o por estar implícita en otro tipo de actividades, y solo recientemente se ha asociado a la competitividad. La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo verificar la relación de la innovación en marketing con el desempeño integral de las pymes y sus posibles implicaciones. Mediante la modelización de ecuaciones estructurales, se estimaron los efectos de esta innovación sobre el rendimiento empresarial. Los hallazgos revelaron su influencia significativa para orientar el desempeño, al implementar nuevos conceptos y medios de promoción, nuevos métodos de comercialización y modificación de sus envases, lo que impactó en mayor medida la parte comercial, además del ámbito administrativo, financiero y de recursos humanos.
... Fourth, this paper adds to the sparse empirical literature on NPD teams in B2B industries (Table 1). Both innovation and B2B researchers identify B2B NPD as a top research priority ( Griffin et al. 2013;Lilien 2016). A recent meta-analysis found that, compared to customers in the business-toconsumer (B2C) market, business customers possess more reliable and relevant knowledge, and are more motivated to share their knowledge with the NPD team (Chang and Taylor *We performed the same search for articles on the outcome of shared knowledge within NPD teams, but found none 2016). ...
Despite the common belief that knowledge sharing in new product development (NPD) teams is beneficial, empirical findings are mixed. We adopt a microfoundations perspective and draw from the socio-cognitive theory to propose a model that theorizes a nonlinear effect of customer knowledge sharing behaviors on NPD performance. In particular, we identify the underlying mechanism through which shared common customer knowledge and perceived diagnostic value shape the nonlinear returns to customer knowledge sharing behaviors. In Study 1, data from the biotechnology industry provide support for the hypothesis that customer knowledge sharing behaviors in NPD teams have an inverted U-shaped relationship with NPD performance. In Study 2, data from business-to-business (B2B) industries demonstrate that customer knowledge sharing behaviors are positively related to shared common customer knowledge in NPD teams, and the latter has an inverted U-shaped effect on NPD performance. Finally, this nonlinear effect is moderated by the team’s perceived diagnostic value of customer knowledge, such that the inflection point of the inverted U-shaped curve is shifted upward in teams with high levels of perceived diagnostic value of customer knowledge, strengthening the impact of shared common knowledge on NPD performance.
... As one of the key departments in business organisations, marketing develops key firm assets such as customer relationships, market knowledge, channels and partners (Srivastava et al., 2001). The marketing department (MD) influences other functions of the firm to embrace the marketing concept, promotes cross-functional coordination and hence fosters an organisational culture that endorses improved innovation outcomes (Griffin et al., 2013). Although marketing and management research has historically recognised the important role that marketing plays in determining business performance (Day, 1992;Moorman and Rust, 1999;Morgan et al., 2009), the impact of innovationrelated capabilities of the MD on innovation performance has largely been neglected. ...
... A few prior studies address the link between marketing's functional task capabilities and firms' innovation success (Weerawardena and O'Cass, 2004;Ngo and O'Cass, 2012;Alpay et al., 2012, but analysis of the impact of marketing department capabilities on innovation performance is scant (Drechsler et al., 2013). The discipline of marketing is uniquely situated to play an active role in this continuing dialogue regarding innovation's importance, necessity and process (Griffin et al., 2013). ...
... O'Dwyer et al. (2009) emphasise that marketing's role in innovation is to provide the concepts, tools and infrastructure to close the gap between innovation and market positioning to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. The relevant literature notes that the knowledge the marketing unit provides about current and future customer needs is essential to the success of innovation projects (Griffin et al., 2013). For example, Verona (1999) emphasises that market information gained from the customer and market-connecting capabilities of the MD affect the success of new products in the market. ...
Innovation performance is a potential source of competitive advantage for any firm. A capable marketing department (MD) can contribute significantly to the market success of the new products and services offered. Therefore, understanding the impact of marketing’s innovation-related capabilities in the innovation process is an important area of inquiry to achieve a more innovative and competitive company. This study examines the relations among relevant MD capabilities, marketing’s decision influence on innovation development and a firm’s innovation performance. The results indicate that the capabilities of the MD are strongly associated with the firm’s innovation performance. Our findings also demonstrate that marketing capabilities have a positive relationship with the department’s influence on innovation development. However, the department’s influence on innovation decisions has no effect on the firm’s innovation performance. We proposed a moderated mediation model considering a set of firm-level and environmental contingency variables. Results reveal that the proposed model relationships are indifferent for all the sub-groups of moderators.
... We suggest that CDA is of particular relevance to the Business-to-Business (B2B) domain because business markets, as compared to consumer markets, often involve fewer customers but more complex product purchase (Lilien, 2016). These customers represent individual organizations whose requirements and problems cannot be readily recognized and understood (Griffin et al., 2013). This requires B2B marketers to extend beyond merely gathering customer knowledge (La Rocca, Moscatelli, Perna, & Snehota, 2016), and to involve customers in NPD for better solutions of customer problems (Cortez & Johnston, 2017). ...
... One core function of big data analytics is to understand customer needs for NPD (Griffin et al., 2013;Lilien, 2016). We therefore examine how characteristics of customer needs can moderate the proposed effects of customer involvement in big data analytics on new product performance. ...
... As open innovation yields more opportunities, firms start to cross their organizational boundaries and pursue new product ideas from outsiders (Rigby & Zook, 2002). Accordingly, researchers have called for new methods of involving customers in NPD (Griffin et al., 2013;Lagrosen, 2005). Open innovation studies consistently emphasize empowerment of customers in NPD (Fuchs & Schreier, 2010), underlining more intensive collaboration between firms and customers in the process of product development (Nijssen, Hillebrand, de Jong, & Kemp, 2012). ...
Extant literature assumes that customers mainly serve as passive data providers and that firms take responsibility for big data analytics. In line with a current trend in real-world practice, this research, based on the open innovation literature, challenges this assumption and argues that customers can have more engagement in big data analytics. The authors distinguish two constructs: Customer as Data Provider (CDP) and Customer as Data Analyst (CDA). The former is consistent with the mainstream view that customers serve as the data source. The latter, on the other hand, sheds light on an active role customers play in big data analytics – that is, customers participate in a co-creation process where they acquire, analyze and act on big data. Using survey data of 148 Business-to-Business (B2B) innovation projects, the authors find that both types of customer involvement facilitate B2B product innovation. Furthermore, the authors examine moderation effects of customer need tacitness and customer need diversity. Results show that customer need tacitness negatively moderates the relationship between CDP and new product performance while customer need diversity yields a positive moderation effect. Customer need tacitness is also found to positively moderate the relationship between CDA and new product performance.
