A.S. Alexiev

Top Management Team Advice Seeking and Exploratory Innovation: The Moderating Role of TMT Heterogeneity

Research on strategic decision making has considered advice-seeking behaviour as an important top management team attribute that influences organizational outcomes. Yet, our understanding about how top management teams utilize advice to modify current strategies and pursue exploratory innovation is still unclear. To uncover the importance of advice seeking, we delineate between external and internal advice seeking and investigate their impact on exploratory innovation. We also argue that top management team heterogeneity moderates the impact of advice seeking on exploratory innovation. Findings indicated that both external and internal advice seeking are important determinants of a firms exploratory innovation. In addition, we observed that top management team heterogeneity facilitates firms to act upon internal advice by combining different perspectives and developing new products and services. Interestingly, heterogeneous top management teams appeared to be less effective to leverage external advice and pursue exploratory innovation.

Dynamic Capabilities for Service Innovation: Conceptualization and Measurement

For both managers and policy makers involved in innovation, capability failures regarding development of new services are a major concern. Efforts to strengthen those capabilities, and evaluation thereof, demand more comprehensive insight in firms’ actual abilities to source ideas and convert them into marketable service propositions. This paper aims to provide clarity by operationalizing a set of dynamic service innovation capabilities (DSICs). We first review how existing conceptualizations adopt recent insights from the dynamic capability view, which emphasizes the need to identify microfoundations corresponding to a limited set of common constructs. One of the encountered conceptualizations, consolidating earlier works in specific service sectors, was found appropriate for gauging DSICs across a wide range of industries. It exemplifies how DSICs can be conceptualized according to the so-called synthesis approach to service innovation by capturing insights on the evolutionary properties of the creation of novel solutions. Secondly, we operationalize a refined version of such DSICs and develop a measurement scale, using two subsamples from a dataset of 391 Dutch firms. The measured capabilities are found to correlate to different extents with performance measures. Our main contribution, a validated scale for five complementary DSICs, opens the way to comparative analyses which are of relevance for further research, management and policy development.

Exploring a Multidimensional Approach to Service Innovation

Given the fuzzy nature of services, it proves challenging to describe precisely what element of a renewed service offering can be regarded as innovative. Many existing characterizations are criticized for being too limited to capture distinctive features of new services accurately. This chapter describes the possibilities offered by a multidimensional approach to service innovation. Adhering to differentiated frameworks of where novelty can occur allows for comprehensive measurement and comparative analyses across sectors. Additionally, a multidimensional approach provides a basis for the application of system and complexity theory to service innovation. The rich but largely unexploited potential of this perspective is illustrated by testing a hypothesis regarding the relation between radicalness and innovation performance. Using survey-data from 341 firms, we operationalize a multidimensional conceptualization of service innovation and show that firms renewing a higher number of dimensions indeed tend to yield a higher percentage of their turnover from innovation. Further implications of treating services as multidimensional systems are discussed.

In the vanguard of openness: which dynamic capabilities are essential for innovative KIBS firms to develop?

Abstract In this paper, we examine whether the innovativeness of knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) firms is affected by their inherently high rate of interactions with clients and partners. Even if such firms do not deliberately follow an open innovation strategy, they are exposed to knowledge flows from other organisations. A particularly interesting issue is the connection between openness and the need to develop dynamic capabilities for distinct phases of knowledge processing. Building on resource-based views, we have developed hypotheses on the respective importance of KIBS firms’ dynamic capabilities and their inclination to engage in open innovation. Since clients and partners can contribute to activities especially at the beginning and end of the innovation value chain, KIBS should consider focusing on developing a ‘conceptualizing’ capability for translating raw ideas into marketable service propositions. The importance of this capability is confirmed by our regression analyses on survey data from 125 KIBS in the Netherlands. By contributing to the literature on KIBS and open innovation, we shed light on strategically balancing capability development and external capability sourcing.

Open Service Innovation: Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

Open service innovation enables business service firms to realize service innovations through engaging in external partnerships. The results of a review of studies investigating open innovation in a business service context indicate that prior work (1) primarily drew on a learning lens to explain service innovation and (2) adopted three levels of analysis, that is, alliance, alliance portfolio, and network, resulting in three disconnected research streams. In this chapter, we review each research stream and suggest future research opportunities. In addition, we suggest that factors tied to the three analysis levels directly and interactively influence service innovation. Therefore, we propose a multi-level open service innovation framework that can guide future research.

Service Innovation and Management Innovation: The Role of Service Tangibility

Although we have some knowledge about how different types of innovation can be combined together to improve firm performance, there is little research about the relationships that innovation types may have among them. In this paper, we examine how service innovation is related to organizational innovation. We posit that service innovativeness can put demands on and increase dissatisfaction with existing management processes, structures and practices and stimulate organizational changes. That, however, will be dependent on the level of service tangibility. We study three forms of service innovation: technological, customer interaction, and conceptual. We develop hypotheses based on interaction and materiality theories and test these with a sample of both manufacturing and service firms. Our findings show that for some service innovation forms, service tangibility will moderate the relationship with management innovation so that it will increase the relationship, while will decrease it for other forms.

Open innovation and KIBS Start-Ups: Technology- and market based alliance portfolio configurations

Firms are increasingly relying on combining internal resources with external knowledge to sustain firm renewal, which has led to open innovation being considered critical to a firm’s competitive advantage (Chesbrough, 2003). Successful open innovation produces first-mover advantages, superior financial returns, market growth, and market share (Lichtenhaler, 2011). In particular, knowledgeintensive business services (KIBS) start-ups—defined as “[new] expert companies that provide services to other companies and organizations” (Toivonen, 2006, 2)—rely on open innovation, as it is their primary knowledge input and output (Gallouj, 2002). However, KIBS start-ups are exposed to extant uncertainty because they face risk in the form of liability of newness, liability of smallness, and fundamental uncertainty. This uncertainty can be mitigated via a firm’s portfolio of alliance relationships (Ozcan and Eisenhardt, 2009).

Industry differences in strategic decision making of Dutch top management teams

Globalization has created new ways of doing business, new institutions to oversee them, and has introduced a spectrum of new protagonists to the international arena. Scholars and practitioners have been challenged by the evolving environment to find new ways to interact and, in the process, many of the traditional boundaries that have existed within and between organizations and institutions have become increasingly blurred. This unique compendium sheds light on these and other topics on the question of change, both within and between organizations and institutions. The contributors have expertly combined the insights of some of the biggest names in the fields of economics, business and strategic management, both present and future – and in doing so offer scholars a tailor-made, up-to-date study on the topic of economic change.