Special Section on Innovation

Citation

Bates, K. and Filippini, R. (2012), "Special Section on Innovation", Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Vol. 23 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmtm.2012.06823eaa.002

Special Section on Innovation

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Volume 23, Issue 5

About the Guest Editors

Dr Kimberly A. Bates is an Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, and is currently serving as the Director of the MBA in the Management of Technology and Innovation. Her research interests focus on how institutions and social norms shape the adoption of manufacturing innovations and strategies. In operations strategy she pursues research in corporate governance, particularly the ownership structures and boards in the adoption of sustainability-oriented innovations through shareholder proxies. Dr Bates regularly reviews for several journals and conferences and she is Chair of the Organizational Theory Division at the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada.

Dr Roberto Filippini is a Professor at the University of Padua and currently Vice Rector for the European Research Programme and Member of the Board of the CUOA Business School. He has published widely in refereed journals on the subject of innovation and product development, improvement of competences and knowledge management. Dr Filippini regularly reviews for leading journals and, among other journals, he has published in Operations Management Research, IEEE Transactions, Research-Technology Management, International Journal of Production Economics and Journal of Product Innovation Management, as well as Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management.

This special section of Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management on “Innovation” consists of three papers selected from the Third World Conference on Production and Operations Management, held in Tokyo and sponsored by Japanese Operations Management and Strategy Association (JOMSA), European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) and Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). Its publication concludes a long process to select only three of a host of papers originally submitted from the conference. They all have something important to contribute regarding the nature of innovation in manufacturing and, to a lesser extent, in the service sector, because each challenges and extends existing paradigms for how to innovate in the context of operations.

The first paper, by Ana Serrano-Bedia, Concepción López-Fernández, and Gema García-Piqueres, challenges the commonly held notion of a trade-off between innovating through exploration versus exploitation (March, 1991) and increases our understanding of the complementarities between differing types of innovation. Their findings that external and cooperative innovation only affect performance when coupled with internal innovation activities add to our understanding of absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990), and they also challenge the notion that the “make or buy” decision as modelled by transactions costs approaches (Williamson, 1975), is not a discrete set of options. Human and social capital must be maintained within firms in order for them to appropriate knowledge from external sources, or through cooperation with other firms.

The second article, by Beatriz Minguela-Rata, M. Concepción Rodríguez-Benavides, and José Ignacio López-Sánchez, challenges our notions of firm boundaries and the importance of absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990) and complexity (Simon, 1962) in franchise systems. Here, we find that absorptive capacity and complexity are not related to unit performance in a franchise setting. However, franchisees with stronger ties to franchisors perform better. One obvious implication of these results is that franchisees are effectively buffered from the external environment – at least in factor markets where innovation, such as product design and materials development, are important. Also, franchisees that carried out productive activities on site performed better, which suggests that some level of participation in production is important for fostering performance. This article raises several issues that can be applied across sectors, for example in manufacturing organizations with multiple production facilities. First, it seems that firms with less participation in production are unable to perform as well as locations with higher participation. Firms with higher skill requirements, which implies more investment in human capital perform even at simple tasks better. Second, franchisors effectively buffer individual units from the need to innovate, making absorptive capacity and complexity of little importance to performance. Clearly, for stable product environments such as franchises, which have high levels of contracting for the production and delivery of services, innovation can be retained centrally with the franchisors.

Finally, the third article, by Paolo Taticchi, Luca Cagnazzo, Roger Beach, and Kevin Barber examines the issue of how to foster innovation in regions and sectors where individual organizations are too small to support the level of innovation needed to compete in global markets. From their case study, we see that in a situation where there is a history of regional cooperation, a coordination role can be successfully created for a virtual organization. One of the key components of this Virtual Development Office, which was able to coordinate innovative activities between firms, was a high level of trust and a history of collaboration between them. This suggests that coordination roles can be effective for aggregating resources across firms, and suggests that government or non-governmental organizations might play key roles in regional economic development where organizations may lack the capacity for innovation.

The contributions to the innovation literature across the three articles in this special section are apparent in both the hypotheses supported with statistically significant results, and those without. The absence of results is often viewed as a failure in research settings, but sometimes it can provide as much insight as those that are supported. Although some of the findings on the role of absorptive capacity may be counter-intuitive, finding the limit of the utility of a concept can make a valuable contribution to both theory and practice. Each article also points to the importance of human and social capital as necessary for innovation – without an “honest broker” the Virtual Development Office is unlikely to be successful, and without internal innovation firms cannot benefit from external and cooperative innovative investments, while franchisees with higher levels of production within each setting perform better. The surprising results about the limits of the absorptive capacity concept, and the role of human and social capital, both add to our knowledge of creating effective operations processes.

Kimberly Bates, Roberto FilippiniGuest Editors