Industry 4.0 is expected to bring several conversions for industrial value creation, encompassing entire value-added networks. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which play an important role for both the German as well as the European economy, struggle to integrate the concept of...

Cross-company networking is essential to successfully implement Industry 4.0. In this context, numerous new demands on suppliers arise leading to integration challenges that require specific integration strategies. While these topics are important in business practice, an aggregated holistic...

Purpose: Industry 4.0's potentials can only unfold exhaustively if information is shared across company boarders and along supply chains. Exchanging information, however, implies several challenges for companies. This holds especially true if it is transmitted automatically and digitally, as...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide the first empirical evidence on how consumption-supportive packaging functionality influences consumers’ purchase intentions. Consumption-supportive packaging functionality implies that the packaging itself serves a function that actively helps...

Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times,...

Developing new innovative products in the automotive industry means investing huge sums in advance, as one does not know if th product will be successful on the market after launch. The paper discusses the results of a qualitative meta-analysis of 16 empirical studies on New Product Development...

For decades suggestion systems have been used include employees in innovation process. However, in order to gather superior ideas, integrating external stakeholders is critical to the innovation process. Wwwithin this paper the authors derive a sophisticated model of an integrated idea...

"Strong brands are more profitable!" An actual study – where heads of marketing and salesfrom the European Top 500 companies were interviewed – shows that brand-oriented companiesare almost twice as successful as comparable companies without this focus. Hence, themost important companies...

The picture of managers in big enterprises has fundamentally changed in the last decades. Informer times, there was assumed that these persons are “extraordinary” human beings: alwaysabsolutely rational and objective, almost like machines. But in the course of time, this imagechanged in such...