Dear colleagues,
The editorial team of Industry and Innovation wishes everyone happy holidays, a restful break, and a great start into 2025! We take this chance to thank everyone who has contributed to the development of the journal in this past year.
As a season's gift to our community, we are very pleased to share with you the tenth and last issue of Industry & Innovation for the year 2024.
This issue opens with an interview featuring Bernhard Lingens discussing the research process behind the paper "The Architecture of Innovation: How Firms Configure Different Types of Complementarities in Emerging Ecosystems," coauthored with Veronika Seeholzer and Oliver Gassmann, which received the 2024 Industry and Innovation Best Paper Award.
The issue also proposes new findings on how capability sources influence technological diversification, the impact of partner concentration on R&D returns, ecosystem internationalization mechanisms, and the role of R&D coopetition in innovation.
We hope you will enjoy the reading:
Interview
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13662716.2024.2420776
Click to follow link." target="_blank" rel="noopener">Exploring the foundations of 'the architecture of innovation: how firms configure different types of complementarities in emerging ecosystems'
https://www.tandfonline.com/author/Acebo%2C+Enrique
Click to follow link." target="_blank" rel="noopener">Enrique Acebo
Abstract
In this interview article, we explore the research journey of Bernhard Lingens, Veronika Seeholzer, and Oliver Gassmann, whose work on 'The architecture of innovation: how firms configure different types of complementarities in emerging ecosystems' earned them the 2024 Industry and Innovation Best Paper Award. This study stands out for its significant contribution to understanding the complexities of ecosystem management, offering valuable insights into how firms strategically navigate complementarities to foster innovation. The interview delves into the motivations behind their research, revealing the driving questions that led them to explore this under-researched area. The authors discuss their findings, particularly how the initial configuration of complementarities can dictate the developmental trajectory of an ecosystem, making these early decisions crucial for long-term success. They also share the practical implications of their work, emphasising its relevance for today's fast-paced business environment, where firms must adapt quickly to remain competitive. The authors candidly discuss the challenges they encountered during the research and writing process, including the difficulties of translating practitioner-focused insights into academic discourse. They reflect on the importance of generating actionable knowledge that can be directly applied to management practice, highlighting the path-dependent nature of ecosystem development and the vital role of initial strategic decisions. This interview not only underscores the distinctive aspects of their award-winning paper but also offers valuable guidance for young researchers aspiring to make a meaningful impact in the fields of management and innovation studies, ensuring their work remains relevant and practically applicable.
Research Articles
Capability flows and technological diversification within multi-locational firms in Europe
Anthony Frigon
Abstract
This paper examines the sources of capabilities influencing technological diversification in multi-locational firms in Europe. Using European patent records and firm ownership and geographical information, 686 firms with patenting activities across different locations are analysed. Three main capability sources are identified: individual establishments, their locations, and other units of the parent firm. Findings underscore the primary role of the establishment's accumulated capabilities, with location-based capabilities and other units of the firm also having a positive and significant impact. However, the influence of each capability source varies with the technology's novelty. Separating domestic from between-country intra-firm flows further reveals that domestic flows exert a stronger influence in shaping technological diversification. This paper overall enriches our understanding of capability sources in the development of new technologies in the particular case of multi-locational firms, further extending the existing body of work by looking at these dynamics within the European context.
R&D investment and innovation performance under vertical partner concentration
Vidya Oruganti, Isabel Maria Bodas Freitas & Jojo Jacob
Abstract
Vertical exchange partners, both customers and suppliers, are key sources of knowledge about new components, technologies, and markets, exerting a critical influence on firms' innovation performance. While firms' reliance on a few suppliers and/or a few customers has become a regularly occurring phenomenon, there is only an insufficient understanding of the effect of vertical partner concentration on the returns to firms' R&D investments. Building on transaction cost and evolutionary economics theories, we conjecture that vertical partner concentration negatively moderates the relationship between R&D investments and innovation performance. Our analysis is built on a dataset of 768 R&D-active French manufacturing firms derived from two independent and temporally separated surveys, enabling the use of lagged values of the key independent variables. The results reveal that customer concentration, whether accompanied or not by supplier concentration, weakens the positive relationship between R&D investment and innovation performance, but this is not observed in dynamic industry settings.
Foreign market expansion of ecosystems: a process model
Peter Gustafsson & Zsuzsanna Vincze
Abstract
Ecosystems of actors that need to interact to create value for end users are becoming an integral part of firms' strategic realities as they reach new markets. However, the phenomenon of ecosystem internationalisation has not been explored in comparison to its practical prevalence. We conceptualise this phenomenon as agent-led structuration on new markets. We build on the structural ecosystem literature and literature on internationalisation challenges to create our recursive process model of ecosystem creation on foreign markets. Creating ecosystems on foreign markets necessitates new ecosystem structures that are adjusted to value propositions by orchestrators through interaction with foreign market actors. The model explains how ecosystem orchestrators drive the international expansion of ecosystems through blueprinting and aligning mechanisms and how these mechanisms help manage liabilities of foreignness. The model accounts for the agency of involved actors, and with the help of the bottleneck concept bridges international business and ecosystem literatures.
International and domestic R&D coopetition: the influence of information redundancy on innovation performance
María Jesús Nieto, Alicia Rodríguez & Luis Santamaría
Abstract
We delve into the heterogeneity of R&D coopetition to understand when this complex relationship contributes to innovation. To do this, we examine two dimensions: (i) geographic location of the competitor – in the home-country or abroad; and (ii) prior knowledge acquired from competitors that leads to the theoretical concept of 'information redundancy.' We analyse how these dimensions result in innovations with different levels of novelty (new-to-the-market and new-to-the-firm). Using a large panel data of firms (2004–2016), we find that international R&D coopetition exerts a higher positive effect on new-to-the-market innovations than does domestic R&D coopetition. In contrast, the positive impact of domestic R&D coopetition is higher on new-to-the-firm innovations. For its part, prior knowledge from competitors weakens the relations between R&D coopetition and innovation performance, thus revealing the importance of information redundancy in bettering our understanding of the innovation results of R&D coopetition.
Best regards
Alessandra Perri and Vera Rocha
Co-Editors-in-Chief, Industry and Innovation
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Vera Rocha
Copenhagen Business School
Kilevej
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