Vera Blazevic

• RWTH Aachen University

Managing big data benefits organizations via efficient and effective data-driven decision making, productivity gains, customiza-tion potential, or innovation opportunities. Data-driven innovation opportunities are particularly valuable in open value creation (OVC), that is, the collaboration of independent stakeholders who open their boundaries to...

Industrial incumbents aim to foster their digitization by applying digital technologies in their innovation activities , either through process optimizations or via business model innovations. While firms agree on the importance of these digital innovation activities, they often struggle with implementing effective means to tackle it. We show the i...

Digital manufacturing technologies offer many opportunities for established companies to innovate. They promote data‐driven gains in operational efficiency and enable the transformation of current business models or the creation of entirely new differentiation opportunities. However, many digital innovation projects in manufacturing fall short of t...

The use of transformer‐based language models in AI has increased adoption in various industries and led to significant productivity advancements in business operations. This article explores how these models can be used to augment human innovation teams in the new product development process, allowing for larger problem and solution spaces to be ex...

Transformer-based language models are a new type of machine learning model that have shown great promise for many applications, including knowledge extraction and generation. In this paper, we explore the potential of transformer-based language models for innovation processes and identify some example use cases. We discuss the benefits of using tra...

Industrial incumbents aim to foster their competitive position by applying digital technologies in their innovation activities, either through process optimizations or via business model innovations. Despite these ambitions, they often struggle with implementing effective measures to tackle digital transformation. We show the important role of inno...

Purpose Service providers increasingly use conversational agents (CAs), such as chatbots, to effectively communicate with customers while managing interaction costs and providing round-the-clock customer service. Yet, the adoption and implementation of such agents in service contexts remains a hit-and-miss, and firms often struggle to balance their...

Innovation in business-to-business (B2B) contexts deals with highly dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous constellations of stakeholders with a diversity of goals, motives, and capabilities that further challenge successful management of B2B innovation processes and outcomes. Complex challenges, such as sustainability and digitization trends, push th...

Recent studies have shown the significance of disruptive innovation activities in the context of digital transformation for incumbent organizations. These companies strive to move towards data-driven business models through applying digital technologies which were attested a disruptive nature. However, it is unclear why many of those innovation pro...

The prominence of inter-organizational networks for innovation raises questions about how to support collaboration between multiple, diverse stakeholders. We focus on network orchestration and examine the practices that support orchestrators in dealing with the challenges brought by the number and diversity of stakeholders. Using qualitative, longi...

Innovating in today’s complex, globalized, interconnected markets requires collaborating in stakeholder value networks. It is increasingly unlikely that a single organization possesses all the required resources, power and competences to effectively conduct the full innovation process on its own (Sarkis et al. 2010). Organizations have to find new...

Firms use ideation contests to generate ideas from consumers. This type of collaboration provides access to new knowledge and reveals latent consumer needs. But it also is risky, as firms give up control to an unknown crowd. Some contestants use ideation contests to post content that is unintended and unwanted by contest hosts, a behavior that repr...

To develop innovative solutions for complex societal and scientific challenges, organizations need to move beyond the boundaries of single firms and engage in collaborative networks. In these networks, multiple, diverse stakeholders are working together to co-create innovative value. Co-creation in a network creates new challenges in terms of chang...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the microfoundations of customer knowledge acquisition during logistics innovation development. Specifically, the authors explore the activities and behaviors of employees with customer contact (i.e. boundary-spanning employees (BSEs)) to deepen and broaden their knowledge about customers for th...

To develop innovative solutions for complex societal and scientific challenges, organizations need to move beyond the boundaries of single firms and engage in collaborative networks. In these networks, multiple, diverse stakeholders are working together to co-create innovative value. Co-creation in a network creates new challenges in terms of chang...

Ideation contests are a common way to integrate consumers into firms’ ideation activities. During this collaboration firms can benefit from several advantages (e.g. access to new knowledge and latent consumer needs), however they also bare risks, as firms give up a control to an unknown crowd. Consumers may use ideation contests as blank canvas to...

While there has been growing recognition that considering environmental and social aspects of sustainability is important for a firm’s reputation and long-term survival, research so far focused on strategic goals and how sustainability becomes relevant and less so on how sustainability practices become embedded and mainstreamed. Our paper addresses...

Hierarchical loyalty programmes are popular in many service industries, as a means to tie customers to the company and improve customer relationships. In these programmes, customers obtain more benefits if they spent more but are demoted if they spent less. This study focuses on demotion and suggests that customer demotion can have an asymmetrical...

The interactive nature of the Internet has boosted online communication for both social and business purposes. However, individual consumers differ in their predisposition to interact online with others. Whereas an impressive stream of research has investigated media interactivity, the existence of individual differences in the use of different onl...

Purpose – Business and academia alike have become aware of the crucial role of customer‐to‐customer interactions. Facilitated by the increasing customer connectedness through online media possibilities, companies need to understand how customers influence each other and how to manage these customer interactions. The purpose of this paper is to conc...

Customer co-creation during the innovation process has recently been suggested to be a major source for firms’ competitive advantage. Hereby, customers actively engage in a firm’s innovation process and take over innovation activities traditionally performed by a firm’s employees. Despite its suggested importance, previous research has revealed con...

Cross-and up-selling in inbound call centers is a growing business practice, with the promise of enhanced revenue generation and customer retention. Yet firms struggle to create conditions that are conducive to customer service representatives' (CSRs') concurrent engagement in service and sales. By developing a framework of the antecedents and perf...

Customer trust is of vital importance for relationship marketing in services. Service providers increasingly market their services globally, yet few researchers have addressed differences in customer trust across cultures. Our research fills this void by proposing a model, based on existing trust literature, that suggests the overall feeling of tru...

Because of suggested beneficial effects of word-of-mouth (WOM) referral, service companies have invested large amounts of money in customer referral programs as well as programs aimed at fostering positive communication among their existing customers. The question of cross-cultural differences in the effectiveness of WOM has recently gained increas...

Firm-hosted virtual peer-to-peer problem solving (P3) communities offer a low-cost, credible, and effective means of delivering education and ongoing assistance services to customers of complex, frequently evolving products. Building upon the social constructivist view on learning and drawing from literature on the firm-customer relationship in ser...

Marketing theory and practice both recognize the increasing importance of customer collaboration for service provision and innovation. As part of such customer collaboration, customers of electronic services coproduce knowledge in varying degrees. An evolving phenomenon, knowledge coproduction has yet to receive much research attention; we therefor...

This article theoretically and empirically examines the antecedents and consequences of project learning during the new financial service innovation process. We analyze the impact of project learning on project performance and performance of the financial institution. Next, we investigate the antecedent role of the nature of communication and organ...

Mobile service innovations are crucial for the long-term success of companies operating in turbulent and uncertain environments. These innovations need to be introduced at a rapid pace while at the same time companies have to absorb market information during the new mobile service development. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to construct a conc...