A preview of this full-text is provided by World Scientific.
Content available from International Journal of Innovation Management
This content is subject to copyright.
SHADES OF THE INNOVATION-PURCHASING
FUNCTION —THE MISSING LINK
OF OPEN INNOVATION
ROMARIC SERVAJEAN-HILST
*
,
‡
and RICHARD CALVI
†
*
Management Research Center (CRG-I3),
Ecole Polytechnique –CNRS –Universit
eParis,
Saclay –828, Boulevard des Mar
echaux –91762 Palaiseau, France
†
IREGE Laboratory, Universit
eSavoie Mont Blanc,
2, Route de Saint-Cassin, IAE SMB,
Bat 23, 73011 CHAMBERY, France
‡
romaric.servajean-hilst@polytechnique.edu
Published 28 April 2017
This paper seeks to instigate a new area of research in the Early Purchasing Involvement
(EPI) literature around the question: How should a Purchasing function evolve in order to
identify and capture innovation in the supplier market? Particularly, we attempt to char-
acterise the specificities of the Innovation-Purchasing function, an emerging function
acting in the fuzzy-front-end of projects. The contribution of this paper is a reification of
the role of this function in an Open Innovation context, through the description of Early
Purchasing Involvement in the Innovation (EPI
2
) agenda. For that, we collected data
through an internal benchmarking study within a multinational/multidivisional firm of the
automotive sector. Our study reveals similarities and differences between the observed
practices of what we call EPI
2
and the more classical EPI activities in a New Product
Development (NPD) context. This study provides a model that can help practitioners and
raises some propositions to test in new research.
Keywords: Early purchasing involvement; open innovation; organisation of purchasing
function.
Introduction
During the last decade, firms have multiplied their collaborative innovation
programs to respond to both the acceleration of innovation and increase in
‡
Corresponding author.
International Journal of Innovation Management
Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 2018) 1850008 (30 pages)
© World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd.
DOI: 10.1142/S1363919618500081
1850008-1