Discontinuous innovation and supply relationships: strategic dalliances

Abstract

The authors address the need for supply relationships to generate, support, and respond to discontinuous innovation (DI), noting that established ways of working appear insufficient. The peculiarities of DI are explained and contrasted with well‐known concepts within innovation. The need for customer firms to be both closely collaborative with suppliers while also exploring potential, unpredictable DI elsewhere is proposed, by means of strategic dalliances. A model is presented for understanding and exploring this emerging management challenge.

Opposites attract: organisational culture and supply chain performance

“…Such authors admit to this limitation and call for further research including phenomenological methodologies and supply chain studies to enrich the findings (Ambrose et al, 2010;O'Toole and Donaldson, 2002). As cultural fit is clearly a major cause of concern for organisations involved in strategic buyer-supplier relationships (McHugh et al, 2003;Phillips et al, 2006), this study attempts to shed additional insight into inter-organisational relationships by gathering data from beyond the dyad (quantitative and qualitative) from within a buyer organisation and tier one and tier two strategic suppliers in a best performing and an underperforming supply chain in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector.…”

“…Lately, the significance of interorganisational cultural fit on firm performance is recognised in the supply chain management literature (Whitfield and Lenderos, 2006), few empirical studies focus on the influence of interorganisational cultural fit on strategic buyer-supplier relationship performance (Winklhofer et al, 2006). Yet, firms are increasingly forming strategic buyer-supplier relationships to achieve success (Chen and Paulraj, 2004;Dyer, 2000;Krause et al, 1998;Phillips et al, 2006) with inter-organisational cultural fit recognised as an essential ingredient within these relationships to achieve success (Fawcett et al, 2008;Lau and Goh, 2005;McHugh et al, 2003). Many papers discussing strategic buyer-supplier performance make fleeting or inferential references to the significance of cultural fit in achieving increased and sustained performance but most do not focus specifically on or develop the concept (Barringer and Harrison, 2000;Lamming, et al, 2004;Prahinksi and Benton, 2004).…”

Old habits die hard: exploring the effect of supply chain dependency and culture on performance outcomes and relationship satisfaction

“…Cultural fit within supply chain relationships is widely recognised as a construct that changes over time and is multifaceted (McHugh et al 2003;Phillips et al 2006). As such, the approach of this study captures the temporal changes of cultural fit and the complexity of the cultural construct.…”

“…At that time, purchasing was a transaction-based function (McIvor and McHugh 2000) and relationships tended to be adversarial or arms-length (Lamming et al 2004;Phillips et al 2006;Sako 1992). Relationship characteristics of short-term focus, cost focus, and transaction orientation prevailed.…”

“…While popular in the joint venture or merger and acquisition relationship literature, increasingly, supply chain researchers are reporting the benefits of cultural fit within supply chain relationships (Barringer and Harrison 2000;Cousins and Menguc 2006;Fawcett et al 2008;Lamming et al 2004 Lau andGoh 2005;McAfee et al 2002;Mello and Stank 2005). For example, Fawcett et al (2008), suggest that incompatibility of cultures between buyers and suppliers results in lower performance outcomes, while Cousins et al (2008), Humphreys et al (2011) and Phillips et al (2006) make inferential comments about the influence of appropriate organisational cultures in determining supply chain success.…”