Supplier Contribution to Buyer Innovativeness: The Influence of Customer Attractiveness and Strategic Fit

Abstract

Buying companies increasingly need suppliers that significantly contributes to their innovation and capability resources. Customer attractiveness and the strategic fit with a supplier are likely to play an important role in new product development projects. However, no research has addressed and simultaneously investigated the interplay of strategic fit, customer attractiveness, and supplier’s contribution to buyer’s innovativeness. This study fills these gaps by carrying out a quantitative survey study among 81 members of the branch organization for the Dutch metal industry. The findings largely confirm the positive relations between the core concepts of this study. The results suggest that purchasing professionals should invest in customer attractiveness, rather than forcing business partners into coercive supplier development programs.

Critical factors for involvement in customers’ product development: an SME perspective

“…A supplier’s willingness to contribute and invest in the project is influenced by their expectations of the current and long-term benefits of the relationship (La Rocca et al , 2012). However, there are additional long-term benefits, such as the opportunity to receive new ideas and information from the customer, access to new markets (Walter et al , 2001), the opportunity to learn (LaBahn and Krapfel, 2000) and future business opportunities (Steenstra et al , 2020). In addition, customers should be aware that a one-sided commitment can weaken this relationship.…”

Editorial: Purchasing and innovation: Past, present and future of the field of research

“…'Buyer-supplier relationships' is the third unit of analysis adopted in both private (14 papers) and public sectors (7 papers) to explore the enabling factors of supplier contributions to buyer innovativeness, such as customer attractiveness (Steenstra et al, 2020) or trust (Bag, 2018), but also the potential tensions between partners around, for example, property rights (Heikkila et al, 2016) or opportunistic behaviour (Steinle et al, 2020).…”

Leveraging the supply base for innovation: how does supply base management affect innovation performance?

“…After many rounds of discussions and experiments, they introduced a technical upgrade scheme to realize the fine control of 90% humidity and the adaptive control of oxygen concentration in the refrigerator [2]. Firms who adopt supplier innovation focus can choose the right suppliers according to innovative needs, so as to effectively obtain available market knowledge and ideas and support the realization of strategies while meeting the changes in customer needs (Steenstra et al, 2020). Firms need to improve supply-base structuring to create conditions which are conducive to communication with suppliers and obtain a wider range of information about customer needs from supply base.…”