Research in Innovation Management

Recent research suggests that effectuation principles such as flexibility, precommitments, and affordable loss may differ substantially from one another. Responding to the call to clarify the effectuation concept, our study introduces the distinction between promotion‐ and prevention‐focused effectuation principles. It argues that promotion‐focused (prevention‐focused) principles are positively (negatively) associated with a firm's entrepreneurial orientation (EO). It further argues that causation is also promotion‐focused and positively associated with EO. An analysis of 151 Swiss energy small and medium‐sized enterprises supports this account. Thus, our study suggests that some effectuation principles are more similar to causation in their underlying regulatory focus and their relationship with EO than they are to other effectuation principles. We offer several paths for future research on effectuation, causation, and EO that emerge from these findings.

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Strategic management scholars have long emphasized the importance of innovation for a firm's competitive advantage and performance. However, the current state of knowledge about the strategic management of innovation is characterized by conflicting theoretical predictions, persisting knowledge gaps and theoretical inconsistencies. Adopting a ‘systematic’ approach to reviewing the literature, this paper combines different quantitative methods – co‐word analysis, cluster analysis and frequency analysis – to review 342 articles on the strategic management of innovation published in seven journals from 1992 to 2010. On the basis of these analyses, suggestions are developed for future research which could help to promote future theory development and provide relevant material for policy decisions that managers and executives have to make when they manage innovation.

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In this article, the authors analyze the field of international entrepreneurship (IE), which is in desperate need of further theory development. They study the field of IE since its inception by offering a comprehensive review of 179 articles on IE published in 16 journals over 14 years, covering the academic disciplines of strategic management, international business, entrepreneurship, and technology and innovation management. From a systematic content analysis of this literature, the authors develop an organizing framework to analyze the field's current status. On the basis of this analysis, the authors can identify theoretical inconsistencies, conflicting predictions, and knowledge gaps that all forestall the further development of IE research. They then develop directions for future research that can help to overcome these obstacles and promote future theory development.

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Research and development are subject to different location drivers. The analysis of 1021 R&D units, each distinguished by its main orientation towards either research or development work, reveals that research is concentrated in only five regions worldwide, while development is more globally dispersed.

Our research is based on 290 research interviews and database research in 81 technology-intensive multinational companies. We identify two principal location rationales—access to markets and access to science—as the principal determinants for four trends that lead to four archetypes of R&D internationalization: ‘national treasure’, ‘market-driven’, ‘technology-driven’, and ‘global’. Their organizational evolution is characterized by four trends. The model is illustrated with short cases of international R&D organization at Kubota, Schindler, Xerox, and Glaxo-Wellcome.

Differences in R&D internationalization drivers lead to a separation of individual R&D units by geography and organization. Current belief is to integrate R&D processes; separation seems to contradict this trend. We argue that this need not be the case, for there are good reasons to maintain some independence between research and development.

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Open Innovation is a phenomenon that has become increasingly important for both practice and theory over the last few years. The reasons are to be found in shorter innovation cycles, industrial research and development's escalating costs as well as in the dearth of resources. Subsequently, the open source phenomenon has attracted innovation researchers and practitioners. The recent era of open innovation started when practitioners realised that companies that wished to commercialise both their own ideas as well as other firms' innovation should seek new ways to bring their in-house ideas to market. They need to deploy pathways outside their current businesses and should realise that the locus where knowledge is created does not necessarily always equal the locus of innovation - they need not both be found within the company. Experience has furthermore shown that neither the locus of innovation nor exploitation need lie within companies' own boundaries. However, emulation of the open innovation approach transforms a company's solid boundaries into a semi-permeable membrane that enables innovation to move more easily between the external environment and the company's internal innovation process. How far the open innovation approach is implemented in practice and whether there are identifiable patterns were the questions we investigated with our empirical study.
Based on our empirical database of 124 companies, we identified three core open innovation processes: (1) The outside-in process: Enriching a company's own knowledge base through the integration of suppliers, customers, and external knowledge sourcing can increase a company's innovativeness. (2) The inside-out process: The external exploitation of ideas in different markets, selling IP and multiplying technology by channelling ideas to the external environment. (3) The coupled process: Linking outside-in and inside-out by working in alliances with complementary companies during which give and take are crucial for success. Consequent thinking along the whole value chain and new business models enable this core process.

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Cisco is regarded as one of the world's most innovative companies. It does very little research and acquires most of its technology from external sources. After Solow (1957) had found innovation and technical progress to be the main drivers for economic growth, researchers and managers associated the establishment of a strong internal R&D capability with innovativeness. Innovations, after all, were generated by a company's own researchers, the firm's own engineering department realized the transition of ideas to commercial products, and the diffusion and exploitation of innovation was driven by the innovating firm itself.

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Institutional openness is becoming increasingly popular in practice and academia: open innovation, open R&D and open business models. Our special issue builds on the concepts, underlying assumptions and implications discussed in two previous R&D Management special issues (2006, 2009). This overview indicates nine perspectives needed to develop an open innovation theory more fully. It also assesses some of the recent evidence that has come to light about open innovation, in theory and in practice.

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There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside‐in process of open innovation, while the inside‐out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge‐intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.

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