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The past decade has seen substantial changes in how organizational leaders work with external stakeholders to improve innovation performance. As leaders have encouraged the extensive involvement of suppliers and customers into the innovation process this has led to the formation of supplier innovation triads that are often governed by a portfolio of strategic alliances. The purpose of this paper is to explore how leaders’ inter-firm relationships and strategic alliances influence the development of supplier innovation triads.

The sample of firms in the Toyota supplier association is constructed from multiple data sets, including the Japan Patent Office, BoardEx and S&PCapitalIQ. The authors test the hypotheses using multivariate techniques, moderation analysis and endogeneity tests.

The results indicate that leadership relationships to Toyota and its suppliers have a positive effect on the formation of supplier innovation triads. The authors find that firm–external leadership relationships and alliance partner diversity have differential moderating effects on how customer and supplier leadership relationships could be used to build supplier innovation triads.

The results focus on the firms within the Toyota supplier association, and this limits the paper’s generalizability. Although patent data provide a detailed information resource, it do not capture all collaborations.

The authors expand the leadership literature by undertaking one of the first studies of inter-firm leadership relationships and their differential effects on innovation triads. The authors contribute to the literature by exploring the antecedents and moderating factors that influence buyer–supplier–supplier triads within an innovation setting.

Responding in a timely manner to product recalls emanating from the supply chain presents tremendous challenges for most firms. The source might be a supplier from the same industry located next door, or one from a completely different sector of the economy situated thousands of miles away. Yet the speed of the firm’s response is crucial to mitigating the consequences of the recall both for the firm, and consumer health and well-being. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of geographic distance, industry relatedness and clustering on firm response time to a supplier-initiated product recall.

The authors test the theoretical framework via an examination of food recall announcements registered with the US Food and Drug Administration over a ten-year period. The authors develop a data set comprising 407 pairs of supplier and affected downstream manufacturing firms, and utilize cross-classified hierarchical linear modeling to understand the drivers of organizational responsiveness.

The results suggest that firm response time is lengthened by geographic distance but reduced when the supplier and affected firm operate in related industry sectors. The authors further find that as more firms in a given industry are affected by the same recall, response time deteriorates.

Product recalls in the agri-food industry are significant events initiated to protect consumer health and ensure the safety of the farm-to-fork food chain. The findings highlight how both geographic- and industry-related factors determine the speed of firm responsiveness to these events.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors which determine the degree of knowledge transfer in inter‐firm new product development (NPD) projects. The authors test a theoretical model exploring how inter‐firm knowledge transfer is enabled or hindered by a buyer's learning intent, the degree of supplier protectiveness, inter‐firm knowledge ambiguity, and absorptive capacity.

A sample of 153 R&D intensive manufacturing firms in the UK automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical, electrical, chemical, and general manufacturing industries was used to test the framework. To analyse the data, two‐step structural equation modeling in AMOS 7.0 was used.

The results indicate that a buyer's learning intent increases inter‐firm knowledge transfer, but also acts as an incentive for suppliers to protect their knowledge. Such defensive measures increase the degree of inter‐firm knowledge ambiguity, encouraging buyer firms to invest in absorptive capacity as a means to interpret supplier knowledge, but also increase the degree of knowledge transfer.

The paper illustrates the effects of focusing on acquisition, rather than accessing supplier technological knowledge. The paper shows that an overt learning strategy can be detrimental to knowledge transfer between buyer‐supplier, as suppliers react by restricting the flow of information. Organisations are encouraged to consider this dynamic when engaging in multi‐organisational, NPD projects.

The paper examines the dynamics of knowledge transfer within inter‐firm NPD projects, showing how transfer is influenced by the buyer firm's learning intention, supplier's response, characteristics of the relationship and knowledge to be transferred.

The aim of this review and of the papers in this special issue is to critically examine different approaches to teaching operations management (OM) in order to provoke and stimulate educators within the discipline.

The papers within this special issue include empirical assessments of a problem‐based learning enterprise resource planning (ERP) simulation; a computer‐based learning tool for material requirements planning (MRP); a simulation of assembly operations; an operations strategy innovation game; an extension of the production dice game; an experiential teaching method in different class settings; and problem‐based assessment methods in OM. A variety of data are used to support these empirical studies, including survey, interview, and observational data.

The papers within the special issue support the argument that OM is well‐suited to more applied methods of teaching focusing on the application of subject knowledge to real‐life situations through a variety of techniques.

It is hoped that this review and the papers within this special issue act to stimulate educators to re‐evaluate their approaches to teaching OM and encourage them to consider adopting experiential teaching methods, business simulations, role‐plays, group exercises, live cases, and virtual learning environments, instead of, or in addition to, the more conventional lectures that typically dominate many OM modules around the world.

A special issue on teaching OM appears timely given the significant changes to both the university landscape and to the nature of the discipline that we have witnessed over the last quarter of a century.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Lean Six Sigma (LSS) may help mitigate the impact of COVID-19 within health care environments. The goals of this study were to understand the current knowledge of LSS and COVID-19 through a systematic review of the current literature, identify the gap in the current knowledge of LSS in COVID-19 mitigation within health care environments and define the principles of LSS, within organizational resilience that support a health care organization’s ability to mitigate the impact of COVID-19.

A narrative literature review was conducted to identify relevant research. A total of 21 subject matter experts (SMEs) meeting the inclusion criteria were approached through a guided interview process. Content analysis was conducted to describe how LSS principles contribute to supporting health care organizations operating in the era of COVID-19.

Study results report that personal safety is the primary subject, followed by supporting dimensions of process redesign, and telemedicine. LSS topics that directly relate to COVID-19 are in four thematic areas: tools, applications, benefits and challenges. Particular areas of application, techniques, challenges and benefits are identified and discussed that could be applied proactively and reactively, to organizational and supply chain resilience to recover from COVID-19.

There were a number of limitations to the generalizability of this work. The sample size was small and purposeful, thus, external validity of the study results are not determined. The SMEs in this study have not implemented the practices noted in the results at the time of the study, and knowledge of results is limited to the study aims.

This study of LSS principles and COVID-19 has implications for practitioners and offers specific guidance for areas of health care adoption of LSS techniques and tools that benefit patient safety, challenges for the user to be mindful of and potential benefits in resilience of operations in the era of COVID-19.

Lean implementation has become popular over the past three decades in the industry and is becoming more prevalent in, service organizations. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of social and technical Lean practices on sustainable performance (i.e. economic, environmental and social) in service organizations.

The methodology includes the analysis of global results obtained from 139 managers from the service sector.

The results demonstrate that Lean practices have a positive effect on the three perspectives of sustainable performance, regardless of the company size and duration of Lean implementation. Furthermore, both social and technical Lean practices have a similar impact on environmental and economic performance, but their impact on social performance differs, since social Lean practices have a stronger impact on social performance.

This study has a significant contribution to Lean practitioners in service sectors, as it demonstrates that efforts to apply Lean practices can benefit economic results as well as environmental and social performance.

Majority of existing studies focused on the isolated impact of Lean on one of the triple bottom line performance aspects and with a scarcity of studies within the context of services. The intersection of these three strategic areas – Lean, sustainability and services – has not been extensively addressed. There is also a lack of studies that observe sustainability in environmental, social and economic performance, mainly in the service sector.

The purpose of this paper, builds on previous studies that explored the research patterns over 15 years, is to consider the current status of the integration of Lean and Six Sigma. More specifically, this research addresses whether Lean and Six Sigma are stronger together and explores the reasons why Lean researchers and practitioners may be less likely to integrate Six Sigma in their work.

The research utilises a survey of 25 established and respected academics and practitioners from 16 countries. The questionnaire is analysed using a direct content approach and coded in NVivo.

The findings suggest that challenges may lie in the perception and understanding of statistics as well as short-term rather than long-term focus on improvement. The findings also suggest that academics and practitioners believe that Lean Six Sigma has developed over time and will continue to develop and improve as a methodology rather than being replaced with a new methodology.

The survey has a sample size of 25, albeit all respondents are established and very experienced practitioners and academics.

For organisations that are introducing or refreshing their continuous improvement initiatives, this research identifies some of the challenges and provides the opportunity to address them to maximise the opportunities for success and sustainability.

The value of this paper is that it further addresses the debate over the integration of Lean and Six Sigma for many organisations which still employ Lean alone, but beyond this it explores how they will continue to develop and whether they are a permanent edition to the quality management landscape or a transition to something else.

The purpose of this empirical research is to understand the application of Lean practices (technical and social) and tools in the service sector, whose implementation is less studied, despite its economic relevance. The study aims to extend previous studies that focused on the relationship between Lean and operational and financial performance, and analyzing the impact on sustainability, encompassing economic, social and environmental perspectives.

A pilot survey was conducted with Lean experts in European service companies. The authors have utilized various professional contacts on LinkedIn and a satisfactory response rate was obtained for analysis.

The results of the study showed that there are several motivating factors for the implementation of Lean, the highlights being improving customer satisfaction, efficiency, delivery and cost reduction. The most frequently used Lean tools are related to the identification of improvement opportunities and causes of problems. The pilot survey also made it possible to identify the greater use of technical practices than social practices. The sustainability performance analysis showed that the better performance of service companies is in the economic dimension.

The authors have identified no empirical studies linking Lean and sustainable performance in the service sector. This study bridges this cognitive gap through a pilot study and therefore makes an original contribution to the current literature.

The purpose of this paper is to present the application of Design of Experiments techniques for the analysis of operating parameters of an industrial oven for the heat treatment process of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle filaments.

The focus is on evaluating new ways of operating the transformation process. The main issue is to raise what are the variables interfering with the performance of the oven. The complete 2k factorial for three factors of control was used to analyze the behavior of these variables and their relationships in the specific response parameter for the process.

The results presented in this work allow the company to have greater knowledge about the operation of the equipment. The study showed possibilities of 14.8% energy reduction.

The heat treatment activity was characterized as a critical point in the production process, and techniques with empirical approaches, based on statistical techniques, was an opportunity that the company has to improve the execution of activities without major investments for the quality of the final product. The application of statistical quality techniques showed to be very promising.

The fact that the study was conducted using subjective quality performance makes this work different from others presented in the literature, showing the possibility to apply Design of Experiments using main control factors based on the opinion of experienced personnel involved in the process analyzed.