Services form an important part of the economy today. Innovation for service firms is as important as for manufacturing, but the innovation process for service firms is comparatively little studied. In this paper, I review the literature there is on the innovation process for service firms, and...

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...

This chapter focuses on the gap between the speed of proliferation of theoretical and empirical contributions and the speed of accumulation of the acquired scientific knowledge regarding absorptive capacity. To contribute to narrowing this gap, we will in particular review the conceptual...

This chapter offers a theory and method for the analysis of the dynamics, i.e. the development, of clusters for innovation. It employs an analysis of three types of embedding: institutional embedding, which is often localized, structural embedding (network structure), and relational embedding...

Large-scale strategic change projects in companies may be supported by using alliance networks. This paper shows that IBM’s change from an exploitation strategy towards an exploration strategy required a radically different network strategy as well. By entering into more non-equity...

This article provides empirical tests of the hypothesis of ‘optimal cognitive distance’, proposed by Nooteboom (1999, 2000), in two distinct empirical settings. Variety of cognition, needed for learning, has two dimensions: the number of agents with different cognition, and...

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...

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...

This article studies density and strength of ties in innovation networks. It combines issues of ‘competence’ with issues of ‘governance’. It argues that in networks for exploration there are good reasons, counter to the thesis of the ‘strength of weak...

New-product announcements (NPAs) have considerable effects on competitors in industrial markets. Several studies have shown that the perceived threat caused by an NPA may trigger severe competitive reactions. Yet it is still unclear how the perception of threat by competitors is related to the...