Managing innovation in smaller firms imposes challenges of a specific nature. Such challenges include scarcity of resources for R&D and innovation activities, complexity of scientific fields, coordinating innovation activities with operational functions of the firm and availability of access to...

Hardly anybody outside a company knows its products and processes better than its suppliers. Research confirms that intensive integration of suppliers in the value creation process positively influences the success of the company, particularly in highly competitive industries. This is a result...

Research has improved our understanding of the managerial challenges inherent in exploratory intermediation. For instance knowledge brokers help to solve well-defined problems based on existing competences. But what if the relevant actor networks are not known, if there is no clear common...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically study challenges faced by product and service providers when innovating openly with customers in business-to-business (B-to-B) markets. The study aims to fill the research gap of how the challenges vary in different types of customer involvement in...

In this paper, we develop and test a firm-level contingency model of inbound open innovation in an attempt to contribute to explaining the substantial disparities in open innovation payoff that exist between firms. Integrating elements from the resource- and knowledge-based views and the...

Searching for external knowledge has frequently been characterized as crucial for firm success. However, little is known about how the direction of search strategies influences innovation performance. In this paper, we argue that firms need to specialize their search strategy and that its...

"Open innovation" and "external search" for new ideas are central topics in the recent discourse in innovation research. External search helps firms to identify new opportunities for innovation and alleviates the risks of local search. It is widely acknowledged that novel ideas regularly emerge...