Making incremental innovation tradable in industrial service settings

Abstract

How do organizations develop, buy and sell incremental innovation as a service? In many knowledge-intensive business-to-business settings the locus of interaction has shifted from stable, discrete, and articulated products and services to the exchange of somewhat nebulous capacities of problem-solving, innovation and R&D services. In these exchanges, tensions and conflicts between actors can arise in seeking clarity as to what is being exchanged and how it is valuable, while at the same time attempting to keep the interaction open for future adjustments to the scope and content of the exchange. We combine a longitudinal case study of a chemical services firm with Galison's (1999) concept of a trading zone and contributions in industrial services marketing to assess how actors offer, value and exchange incremental innovation. Focusing on the contentious nature of innovation processes, our contributions to the understanding of intra-and interfirm behavior in marketing and purchasing are threefold:(1) We examine how incremental innovation is formatted as a tradable service; (2) We explain how buyers, sellers and developers exchange the service of incremental innovation even when this service remains contentious in its specification; (3) We argue that trading zones complement relational processes and contractual arrangements by allowing actors to preserve their own logics and expertise pertaining to innovation.

Are rigor and transparency enough? Review and future directions for case studies in technology and innovation Management

“…(e.g. Geiger and Finch, 2016; Makkonen and Komulainen, 2018). In those instances, each coder read the paper and justified their coding.…”

Antecedents of co-development and its effect on innovation performance

“…Whether the relationships are among individuals or organizations, the relationships will make the actors more flexible, the information or resource exchange between actors will improve and become more stable, and the actors will be able to adopt tailored collaboration (Wang et al, 2013). Additionally, the locus of interaction between actors has now shifted to the exchange of somewhat nebulous capacities of problem solving, innovation and research and development (R&D) services in knowledge-intensive B2B relationships (Geiger and Finch, 2016), and collaboration and engagement among service ecosystem actors have become increasingly important (Storbacka et al, 2016). Therefore, this study proposes collaborative network as an enabler within a business ecosystem.…”

Gestión del conocimiento y capacidades de innovación incremental en empresas de México y Bolivia

“…Entonces, si se visualiza a esta variable -innovacióncomo un producto o resultado de la gestión del conocimiento (Akram et al 2011;Quintane et al, 2011), se requiere mejorar los procedimientos que fomenten la creación y difusión del conocimiento dentro de las organizaciones latinas. Asimismo, por medio de una muestra de empresas de México y Bolivia fue posible observar que todas las etapas del proceso de gestión del conocimiento juegan un papel crucial para fomentar las capacidades de innovación incremental, lo cual concierne a todo tipo de empresas y, retomando que se carece de innovación radical en esta zona, se debería dar mayor énfasis a la innovación incremental, la cual permite resolver problemas (Geiger y Finch, 2016) y mejorar el desempeño (Scaringella, 2016).…”

“…La innovación incremental se basa en el aprovechamiento de los recursos disponibles con el propósito de adaptar los productos o servicios para resolver problemas (Geiger y Finch, 2016), lo cual implica bajos riesgos (Ringberg et al, 2016), y un menor nivel de novedad en contraste con la innovación radical (Souto, 2015). De esta manera, la innovación incremental se encuentra orientada hacia el desarrollo de ciertas habilidades encaminadas hacia la resolución de problemas dentro de la organización.…”