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Three configurations of corporate innovation programs and their interplay
Abstract and Figures
Purpose – The success of corporate innovation is based less upon the success of a single innovation program than on a holistic and overarching corporate innovation system integrating various activities. Taking this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to extend existing research on the design of innovation programs.
Design/methodology/approach – Utilizing an inductive theory-building case study approach, this study provides a detailed analysis of how one of the largest and most successful German technology companies structures its many innovation activities.
Findings – The analysis identifies key elements of innovation programs and suggests three configurations that illustrate how these generic elements can be structured so as to offer the best fit with the underlying logic of the respective innovation program. Furthermore, this study highlights how the identified configurations come together to deliver overarching strategic innovation goals.
Originality/value – Existing research too often focuses solely on single innovation programs. The current research is among the first to take a holistic and overarching perspective, considering different innovation programs within a single company and analyzing their configuration and their interplay.
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... The high failure rate is attributed in particular to the fact that the innovation activities were not able to meet the promised strategic goals of the parent corporation and the operational business units. For this reason, a more detailed examination of the integration of innovation programs into the organizational structures of their parent corporation is required (Kötting & Kuckertz, 2019;O'Connor & DeMartino, 2006). ...
... However, this perspective is important for examining the organizational embedding of the innovation unit and, in particular, its interactions with other innovation and operational business units within the corporation. Individual innovation units often represent only one component of a larger, corporation-wide innovation system (Kötting & Kuckertz, 2019). ...
... Following Kötting & Kuckertz (2019), a corporate innovation system usually consists of several different innovation units that are highly interdependent. For this reason, an analysis of individual innovation units is not sufficient for a holistic understanding of the innovation mechanisms within a corporate group. ...
Innovations have always been an essential factor for the long-term success of corporations. This is all the more true at times like the present, which is becoming increasingly dynamic and fast due to such effects as digitalization and globalization. However, as important as innovations are for the success of corporations, their systematic development is just as challenging. This fact can be demonstrated not least by numerous practical examples in which formerly successful corporations were unable to react appropriately to changing market and competitive conditions and consequently had to give up their market position. The challenges in the development of innovations can be traced back to different organizational conditions, which are necessary for the efficient exploitation of existing products on the one hand and the exploration of new innovations on the other. The scientific literature recommends, among other things, the separation of exploration and exploitation into different organizational units to meet the challenges mentioned above. In addition to the operational business units, which are usually responsible for the exploitation of existing products, it is advisable to establish innovation units, such as corporate incubators or corporate venture capital units, and to entrust them with the exploration of innovations. For a detailed examination of the current state of research on corporate incubators and corporate venture capital, two systematic literature analyses were carried out within the scope of this thesis. As a result, it was discovered that further research is needed, particularly concerning the organizational integration of such innovation units into the overall organization and the associated conflicts of objectives. To make an initial contribution to closing the research gap mentioned above, a further study of this work is devoted to the organizational integration of different innovation programs in an established corporation. This study differs from previous studies in that it takes an overarching perspective and considers the entire organization, including the innovation units, as a holistic innovation system. Such a corporate innovation system consists of at least three different types of innovation units in addition to the operational business units: exploration-oriented innovation units for the generation of disruptive innovations, exploitation-oriented innovation units for the further development of existing products and transformation-oriented innovation units for the transformation of the corporate culture. Such a system can ensure the systematic and sustainable generation of innovations, especially in the interaction of the various innovation units. In addition to the basic establishment of the innovation units mentioned above, however, appropriate organizational framework conditions are required to ensure that innovations can be developed successfully. The fourth study in this thesis is dedicated to the question of how continuity, competence and cooperation affect the innovation performance of corporations. It could be analyzed that the continuous implementation of innovation activities has the greatest positive effect on the innovation performance of enterprises. While cooperation, in combination with continuity, has a short- to medium-term impact on innovation performance, competence and continuity have a long-term effect on innovation performance. Cooperation and competence are complementary concepts in that cooperation should be used for short-term innovation activities, while competence should be used for the long-term sustainable development of innovations within the enterprise. As a result, this work addresses existing research gaps with regard to the integration of innovation units and the organizational structures of corporations and provides valuable insights and approaches for further research. For this purpose, it was necessary to link findings from the field of innovation management and corporate venturing with concepts of organizational theory. Through this connection, we have succeeded in gaining new scientific insights that previously could not be gained independently within the individual research streams. We are convinced that our findings on Corporate Innovation Systems and the effects of continuity, competence and cooperation on innovation performance have made an important scientific contribution. That is all the more true at a time when successful innovation is becoming increasingly important for corporations and a growing number of newly emerging innovation units can be observed in practice.
... To maintain their business performance, the restaurant sector SMEs in Indonesia need to carry out a business strategy in the form of a lot of Innovation to suit market needs and desires. Business innovations that can be carried out include product innovation and service innovation [64]; [25]; [40]. Product innovation consists of Innovation in the form of the product, Innovation in packaging, Innovation in taste, Innovation in food raw materials sold [4]. ...
The purpose of this study is to develop a business strategy concept for SMEs in the restaurant sector during the COVID 19 pandemic. The approach used is to analyze and synthesize the literature on the concept of business strategy and the factors that influence the choice of business strategy, namely entrepreneurial orientation and its impact on business performance. The research was conducted on SMEs in the restaurant sector to clarify the implementation of business strategies during the COVID 19 pandemic. The results of the study were the development of a conceptual model of business strategies to maintain business performance. The limitation of this article lies in only developing a conceptual model based on previous empirical studies. This research implies that it can help the next researcher to test the validity of the resulting model.
... Burgelman, 1983;Cooper, 1983;Tushman & Nadler, 1986); then, from the mid-1990s onward, new studies emerged that proposed that a focus on a single innovation project would not be sufficient to remain competitive. This wave of research suggested that sustainable success is significantly more dependent on organizational processes and procedures to develop multiple innovation projects in a standardized and repetitive manner (e.g. Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997;O'Connor, 2008;O'Connor & DeMartino, 2006;Kötting & Kuckertz, 2019). ...
The constant generation of innovation is a major factor in explaining a firm’s long-term success. Accordingly, previous literatures have identified several organisational, processual, and cultural factors that enable firms to promote successful innovation. Although these success factors appear to be rather different, most of them revolve around continuity, competence, or cooperation. As little prior research has focused on the complexity and interdependence of these various interlinked theoretical concepts, we adopt a configurational and longitudinal approach to analyse the effect of continuity, competence, and cooperation on the innovation performance of a firm on short-, mid-, and long-term bases. Based on a longitudinal data set that captures the innovation behaviour of 220 firms from 2009 to 2015, we find that continuity is the basic requirement for constant innovation performance. In addition, cooperation is likely to be supportive of innovation performance in the short term, while competence supports innovation performance in the long term.
... The data has been collected into a database and analyzed using a MaxQDA software. The research strategy relied on selecting organizational actors who would help build a shared consensus on emerging constructs (Kötting & Kuckertz, 2019;C. Wang & Ahmed, 2004;Yin, 1994). ...
Purpose: Industry 4.0, the integrated digital process world in production, is an under researched area. Especially for the wine industry, 4.0 theoretical base up to date is weak, impeding further digital transformation of the wine industry. Some basic-level digital capabilities exist in most of the researched business models, which is why further digital transformation requires strategic redefining of business models in order to further transform the whole industry.
Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative research approach based on the concept of business model innovation (BMI) has been deployed in order to identify business models and consensus building between industry´s stakeholders. Semistructured interviews delivered primary data.
Findings: The diversity of existing business models in the wine industry as well regarding BMI is confirmed, where each one occupies a specific place in the innovation ecosystem for Industry 4.0.
Research limitations/implications: This qualitative research is exploratory and directed toward theory building. The findings confirm the importance of environmental scanning and market sensing for convergent technologies as well as the need to develop core value proposition.
Practical implications: This study has important implications for companies and their capabilities inside wine industry 4.0, while its main practical value being a systematical organization of weak signals to support small entrepreneurs’ transition to digitalization and Industry 4.0
Originality/value: The paper nourishes the theory on innovation trajectories for Industry 4.0 by including previously unidentified BMIs and a convergence–divergence continuum on the example of wine Industry 4.0.
The article researches the problem of increasing investment activity, determines the impact of investment activity fordevelopment of innovative activity of industrial enterprises. The analysis of the dynamics of capital investment and foreign direct investment in the Ukrainian industry by industrial activities was made; their structure by sources of financing and types of assets was examined; the structure of foreign direct investment from abroad in the Ukrainian economy was analysed. It was concluded that the decrease in investment from the leading countries of the world is caused by unsustainable social and economic development, overload of the legal system, excessive tax obligations, reduction in financial stability of industrial enterprises, aggravation of the economic crisis. It was determined that in conditions of political, economic and social instability, foreign investors have no interest to invest due to insufficient assurance of receiving revenues.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a changing environment posing many challenges that call for innovative solutions, leading to a changing innovation landscape. We explore particular organizational actors' innovation response time by analyzing data from a commercial innovation database. Arguing that innovation response time mostly depends on how organizations perceive time, we expect innovative start-ups to be the quickest and universities to be the slowest in responding to the crisis. Controlling for a set of external drivers of structural change, we find support for our hypothesis about start-ups. Contrary to our expectations, universities do not significantly differ in their innovation response time compared with incumbents. To underpin the robustness of our findings, we provide a specification curve analysis. Our results indicate the significance of start-up-corporate collaboration and open innovation, especially in the aftermath of the crisis.
Corporate venture capital (CVC) investors are regularly painted with the same brush, a fact underscored by the often observed belief in the extant literature that corporate venture capitalists (CVCs) form a homogeneous group. In contrast to this simplifying perspective, this paper categorizes CVCs into subgroups by examining their levels of strategic and financial investment motivation using computer-aided text analysis and cluster analysis. To validate the resulting clusters, this paper studies the impact of CVC type on startup valuation from an intra-group perspective by applying hierarchical linear modeling, thus illustrating which particular investment motivation might be preferable to others in the context of negotiating valuations. An empirical analysis of 52 CVC mission statements and 147 startup valuations between January 2009 and January 2016 revealed that first, CVCs with a strategic investment motivation assign lower startup valuations than CVCs with an analytic motivation that have moderate levels of the two scrutinized dimensions, suggesting that entrepreneurs trade off these CVCs’ value-adding contributions against a valuation discount; second, CVCs with an unfocused investment motivation pay significantly higher purchase prices, thus supporting the hypothesis that they have a so-called liability of vacillation; and third, the valuations of CVCs with a financial investment motive are not significantly different from those of their analytic peers. In sum, our results add to the knowledge of the continuum of corporate investors’ investment motivation by illustrating how startup valuations differ across CVC types.
Purpose
Opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation are two central concepts in the entrepreneurial process. However, there is a lack of both a clear specification of the content domains of the constructs and valid and reliable multi-item scales for their measurement. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper first reveals existing issues around the definitions and measures relating to the concepts, then defines their content domains, and also proposes scale items to measure the concepts. Four samples are used to develop the measurement instruments.
Findings
Two scales are suggested, one to measure opportunity recognition, and other to measure opportunity exploitation. The scales demonstrate reliability and construct, discriminant, and nomological validity.
Originality/value
The resulting instruments provide tools for research and practice that could prove valuable when examining the antecedents and consequences of both opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation.
- This paper describes the process of inducting theory using case studies from specifying the research questions to reaching closure. Some features of the process, such as problem definition and construct validation, are similar to hypothesis-testing research. Others, such as within-case analysis and replication logic, are unique to the inductive, case-oriented process. Overall, the process described here is highly iterative and tightly linked to data. This research approach is especially appropriate in new topic areas. The resultant theory is often novel, testable, and empirically valid. Finally, framebreaking insights, the tests of good theory (e.g., parsimony, logical coherence), and convincing grounding in the evidence are the key criteria for evaluating this type of research.
Innovation is an ever-increasing focus for modern organizations; yet research studies on organizational culture have tended to neglect this aspect. This paper specifies the key factors characterising a company’s innovation culture and examines the top managers’ executed impact as organizational leaders from the individual perspective on implementing and fostering it in their respective organizations. Based on a conceptual framework, the empirically identified key factors of the (1) formal embedment, (2) climate, (3) incentives and reward allocation, (4) integration into decision process, (5) cross-hierarchical communication and (6) communication style are presented. Within the empirical study, 37 top managers of 21 leading companies in the industries of “fashion and accessories” and “watch and jewelry” were interviewed. The results indicate that the impact of top managers lag behind their potential to advance innovativeness through innovation culture, and the detected deficit represents scope for improvement. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications of the study and its limitations.
Corporate venture (CV) units constitute vehicles through which firms may act ambidextrously, thereby increasing their longevity, but they suffer from a high failure rate. The authors examine why and how some CV units last significantly longer than others. They argue that CV units endure by developing an ambidextrous orientation themselves—they build new capabilities for the parent firm while simultaneously leveraging its existing strengths. They argue that CV units become ambidextrous by nurturing a supportive relational context, defined by the strength of their relationships with three different sets of actors—parent firm executives, business unit managers, and members of the venture capital community. Using primary data collected from 95 CV units over a three-year period, the authors test and find support for these arguments.
Alliances between entrepreneurial and large firms can create economic value. In many circumstances, however, much of that value is appropriated by the larger partner. In these situations, the performance and even long-term survival of entrepreneurial firms can be put at risk. This article describes the conditions under which the value created by alliances will be appropriated by the large firms, and describes actions that entrepreneurial firms can take to appropriate more of the value created by these alliances.