This paper explores whether the manager’s physical office work environment can stimulate the manager’s creativity. A total of 60 managers from a large manufacturing company participated in the study. They rated the creativity potential and physical elements of office environments shown in 25...

This paper examines how firms succeed to leverage supplier involvement in product development. The paper extends earlier work on managing supplier involvement by providing an integrated analysis of results, processes and conditions both at the level of individual development projects and the...

Social networks matter in the innovation processes of young and small firms, since ‘innovation does not exist in a vacuum (Van De Ven, 1986: 601).’ The contacts a firm has could both generate advantages for further innovation and growth, and disadvantages leading to inertia and stagnation....

Blue ocean strategy seeks to turn strategic management on its head by replacing ‘competitive advantage’ with ‘value innovation’ as the primary goal where firms must create consumer demand and exploit untapped markets. Empirical analysis has been focused on case study evidence and so...

Services constitute a major part of the economy, and, contrary to popular believe, service firms do innovate. In this paper I take a closer look at one aspect of innovation in services: appropriability. I discuss the different elements that are possibly of importance for appropriability, and...

The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship seeks to explain the fundamentals and consequences of entrepreneurship with respect to economic performance. This paper uses the knowledge spillover theory to explain different innovation outcomes. We hypothesize that a high rate of...

What kind of innovative competences are credibly developed by private entrepreneurs in China’s transition economy? On the basis of original empirical fieldwork in 45 software enterprises in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, we propose a working theory of innovative competence development in an...

We analyze a newsboy problem with resalable returns. A single order is placed before the selling season starts. Purchased products may be returned by the customer for a full refund within a certain time interval. Returned products are resalable, provided they arrive back before the end of the...

Already for a long time retailers take back products. In this paper we explore the factors contributing to the decision of combining vs. separating inbound and outbound flows during the return handling process. We do so through a comparative analysis of the operations in nine retailer...

This paper evaluates the impact of misinformation for inventory systems with product returns. If one could exactly know how much is going to be returned and when, one would certainly benefit from incorporating this perfect information a priori in the management of production, inventory, and...