What is the relationship between innovation and firm value? Does the type of innovation make a difference? To answer these questions, the authors examine how breakthrough and incremental innovations affect three different facets of firm performance: normal profits, economic rents, and total firm risk. They argue that each of these metrics is of independent interest to shareholders and managers and that examining one without the others results in an incomplete picture of the true financial value of innovation. Using data on more than 20,000 new products from consumer packaged goods industries, the authors find that breakthrough innovation is associated with increases in both normal profits and economic rents and that, on average, each breakthrough innovation in the sample is associated with an increase in firm value of $4.2 million. Breakthrough innovation is also associated with increases in the risk of the innovating firm, but this higher risk is offset by above-normal stock returns. In contrast, incremental innovation is associated with increases in normal profits only and has no impact on economic rents or firm risk.
Responsibilization, or the shift of functions and risks from providers and producers to consumers, has become an increasingly common policy in service systems and marketplaces (e.g., financial, health, governmental). Because responsibilization is often considered synonymous with consumer agency and well-being, the authors take a transformative service research perspective and draw on resource integration literature to investigate whether responsibilization is truly associated with well-being. The authors focus on expert services, for which responsibilization concerns are particularly salient, and question whether this expanding policy is in the public interest. In the process, they develop a conceptualization of resource integration under responsibilization that includes three levels of actors (consumer, provider, and service system), the identification of structural tensions to resource integration, and three categories of resource-integration practices (access, appropriation, and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. The findings have important implications for health care providers, public and institutional policy makers, and other service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes.
Existing studies on the role that strategic orientation plays in companies' innovation efforts primarily focus on identifying the relationship between strategic orientation and innovation performance for launched new products. In contrast, this article investigates how the different types of strategic orientation (i.e., customer, competitor, and technology orientations) influence the front end of innovation. Specifically, this research examines how strategic orientation relates to new product ideation outcomes such as ideation volume (i.e., how many new product ideas are generated) and ideation novelty (i.e., how innovative ideas are). The model developed in this study includes both direct effects of strategic orientation on new product ideation and indirect effects on ideation, mediated by an organization's market search behavior targeted at uncovering new product ideas. A survey of 182 marketing and technical managers, whose responses are analyzed with partial least squares (PLS), reveals that firms characterized by a competitor orientation search their markets significantly more for new product ideas than firms marked by a technology or customer orientation. An emphasis on market search behavior, in turn, leads to significantly greater quantities of new product ideas generated by the firm. Neither a competitor nor a customer orientation significantly enhances the novelty of new product ideas, which is augmented only by technology orientation. The data also reveal that product ideation novelty is significantly enhanced by a technology orientation regardless of the level of market turbulence faced by the innovating firm. Together, these findings suggest that market orientation may have a greater influence on the implementation and commercialization stages of new product development than on new product ideation.
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