Paolo Landoni, Simone Franzò, Davide Viglialoro, Alessandro Laspia and Roberto Verganti
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their positioning among innovation policy measures. A growing number of companies have implemented initiatives to access external knowledge to increase their innovativeness, consistently with the open innovation paradigm. Competition-based approaches have received increasing attention by the private sector as a way to access external knowledge. However, despite their potential role as innovation policy measures, a limited attention has been devoted so far to investigate them from the policymakers’ perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
To this aim, a two-stage empirical analysis has been carried out to develop a taxonomy of competition-based approaches. The first stage leveraged a multiple case study methodology including a sample of 20 competition-based approaches, while the second one leveraged interviews with Italian and European key informants.
Findings
This paper proposes a novel taxonomy including eight competition-based approaches, which differ among each other in terms of policy strategy, scope breadth and output required. Moreover, this paper enriches a well-established taxonomy of innovation policy instruments with the identified competition-based approaches.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the current debate on innovation policy by providing a taxonomy that includes eight competition-based approaches that can be exploited by policymakers to foster external knowledge search as well as their positioning among the innovation policy instruments. The taxonomy will hopefully support policymakers in identifying of the most suitable instruments in the light of their policy strategy and objectives.
Details
Keywords
Mattia Bianchi, Anthony Di Benedetto, Simone Franzò and Federico Frattini
The purpose of this paper is to bring new empirical evidence to the controversial role of early adopters in the diffusion of innovations in industrial markets.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to bring new empirical evidence to the controversial role of early adopters in the diffusion of innovations in industrial markets.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply an actor market configuration perspective to the analysis of four longitudinal case studies regarding the commercialization of new products in the textile, plastic and energy industries.
Findings
The diffusion of innovation is an interactive and iterative process where the commercializing firm engages in repeated interactions with different categories of companies that are targeted as potential early adopters. This process ends when the commercializing firm identifies a category of early adopters that can stimulate subsequent acceptance in the later market, by playing one of the following two roles, i.e. word-of-mouth trigger and industry benchmark. During this process, through which the role of the early adopters is constructed proactively by the commercializing firm, the product innovation is also subject to changes to provide a better fit with the selected category of early adopters.
Research limitations/implications
The paper calls for a re-conceptualization of the diffusion process, from a passive identification of early adopters to an interactive process that entails a trial-and-error approach in the targeting and involvement of different categories of early adopters, which ends when the innovation reaches the desired levels of diffusion.
Practical implications
The study provides managers with a number of recommendations for selecting the most proper category of early adopters for their innovations, depending on the role they are more likely to play and the influence they will exert on subsequent acceptance in the later market.
Social implications
The study provides managers with a number of recommendations for targeting, through a trial-and-error process, early adopters and working with them to champion the dissemination of new technologies.
Originality/value
This paper significantly adds to existing literature on the diffusion of innovation, which has up to now conceived early adopters as static and given entities, which cannot be proactively selected by the commercializing firm, and innovation as an immutable object.