Introduction to Innovation WITHIN and ACROSS Borders: A Review and Future Directions

Abstract

Innovation is an integral part of every firm's ongoing operations. While new product and service creation is an essential task to ensure a firm's immediate success in the marketplace, process and supply chain innovations can also create a unique source of competitive advantage for the future. Encouraging innovative thinking, developing new innovations, and managing the processes by which those innovations are developed are critical aspects of today's firm. Consequently, research which aids in the creation and maintenance of innovative firms is an important topic of inquiry for research communities on innovation management, including the operations management and information systems communities. We review the literature in this important area and offer suggestions for future research on the following topics: innovation within a firm and across the supply chain, technology management, and new product and service development.

Human Behavior in Project Portfolio Selection: Insights from an Experimental Study

“…Numerous project portfolio selection studies are related to the knapsack setting (Fox, Baker, & Bryant, ; Kavadias & Chao, ; Hu & Szmerekovsky, ) addressing problems like selection of automotive (Loch et al., ), aviation (Dickinson et al., ), or pharmaceutical (Girotra, Terwiesch, & Ulrich, ) projects. Depending on technological (Krishnan & Bhattacharya, ), organizational (Mullins, Forlani, & Walker, ), or market (Carrillo, Druehl, & Hsuan, ) circumstances, the outcome of a new project is typically risky. The underlying knapsack problem (Martello & Toth, ) considers a set of I items, with expected value and required resources of each item.…”

Operations in Space: Exploring a New Industry

“…In the quest of expanding the scope of OM research, we examine potential research opportunities arising in the emerging space industry. We do so in a similar vein to OM research in operations and logistics arising from emerging geographic markets (Iyer, Lee, & Roth, ), global OM (Narasimhan, ), health care operations (Smith‐Daniels, Schweikhart, & Smith‐Daniels, ; Roth et al., ), innovation management processes (Carrillo, Druehl, & Hsuan, ), interdisciplinary work with SCM (Sanders, Zacharia, & Fugate, ), socially responsible operations (Lee & Tang, ), and sustainable SCM (Sarkis, ; Brandenburg, Govindan, Sarkis, & Seuring, ). Singhal, Sodhi, and Tang () summarize the thrust of such research thusly: “To make research still more meaningful for practice and more vibrant, the OM community needs to take proactive steps to ensure our research is driven by practice so that our research can also influence practice.” There are examples where focused, rigorous academic research has led the way and changed how markets operated—such as the economic order quantity formula for inventory management—even if adoption has lagged the discovery in some cases (Erlenkotter, ).…”

Innovativeness as an Unintended Outcome of Franchising: Insights from Restaurant Chains

“…Tikoo and Nair () develop a model relating franchise royalty rate to optimal sales volume. As franchising entails cross‐boundary governance between firms, renewed interest in the domain is warranted given recent focus on interorganizational arrangements and strategic outcomes (Carrillo et al., ).…”

“…We focus on two innovativeness outcomes, product and process innovativeness (Carrillo, Druehl, & Hsuan, ; for a more detailed review see Rubera and Kirca, ), measured as the number of product and process innovations, respectively. A product innovation is one that results in the development of a new product (in this case, a menu item) and a process innovation is one that results in a change in the firm's operations, including in customer‐facing service provision.…”