Hardly anybody outside a company knows its products and processes better than its suppliers. Research confirms that intensive integration of suppliers in the value creation process positively influences the success of the company, particularly in highly competitive industries. This is a result of the progressing reduction in the depth of value creation of manufacturers and the increasing transfer of know-how towards suppliers. In multilevel business-to-business relationships, suppliers often have the best or the only access and comprehensive knowledge about the end users. Therefore, suppliers determine the scope of possible innovations, which most companies do not actively use. This unique volume provides a comprehensive overview of theories, concepts and especially empirical results on open innovation and the integration of suppliers. For this, authors from all over the world present their latest research results offering fascinating insights into collaborative approaches with suppliers.

There has been a dramatic shift towards more open forms of innovation. Drawing on practice-based insights, together with theoretical approaches developed in innovation studies & science & technology studies, this book brings together a collection of recent work that examines key aspects of this model of innovation.

'Its focus is the major theme of digital innovation and it tries to go beyond the hype associated with much of the discussion of this important area … The discussion in the book stresses the need to move our thinking about innovation beyond the level of enterprise to consider ecosystems and complementary assets … Overall this is a useful book, not least because in addition to opening up key lines for further research enquiry the book also has a strong international flavour with contributions from a wide and diverse set of contexts.'International Journal of Innovation ManagementThere is no doubt that digital technologies have the potential for disruptive innovation in a wide range of sectors, both in manufacturing and services, and the commercial and social domains. However, popular commentaries on the potential of digital innovation to disrupt have suffered from two extreme positions: either, simplistic technological determinism, often promoted by technology vendors, claiming that the impending widespread automation of products and services will provide step-changes in productivity and new products and services; or alternatively, very high-level broad discussions of business model innovation in traditional sectors, private and public. However, the impacts will not be universal, and the outcomes will be highly-differentiated. More fundamentally, neither a narrow technological perspective or broad business view adequately captures the appropriate level of granularity necessary to understand the potential and challenges presented by digital innovation. In this book, Digital Disruptive Innovation, we apply innovation concepts, models and research to provide greater insights into strategies for, and management of, digital innovation.

Intellectual property is a vital part of the global economy, accounting for about half of the GDP in countries like the United States. Innovation, competition, economic growth and jobs can all be helped or hurt by different approaches to this key asset class, where seemingly slight changes in the rules of the game can have remarkable impact. This book brings together diverse perspectives from the fields of law, economics, business and political science to explore the ways varying approaches to intellectual property can positively and negatively impact our economy and society. Employing approaches that are both theoretically rigorous and grounded in the real world, Perspectives on Commercializing Innovation is well suited for practising lawyers, managers, lawmakers and analysts, as well as academics conducting research or teaching in a range of courses in law schools, business schools and economics departments, at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

There has been growing interest on business models among academics and practitioners in recent years, as business model describes how an organization creates, distributes and captures value and, therefore, can be considered the DNA of the organization. Recently, factors related to digital transformation, the vital role of sustainability and social aspects, along with an increasing globalization, have pushed towards radical transformations in business models. This book aims to further our knowledge on business model innovation in new contexts of analysis and with new perspectives of investigation. Insights from business model innovation are presented from studies focusing on start-ups, small businesses and large businesses to provide a bigger picture on new dynamics connected to digital transformation, sustainability, new global relationships. As such, the scope is on new ways to create value, new components and dynamics (such as digitalization and sustainability) concerning the key elements of the business model (value creation, value configuration and value capture), and new relationships between actors that may foster business model innovation. It represents a valuable resource for practitioners willing to innovate business models, academics aiming at finding new research lines, and students keen to learn more about business models.

Innovation is nowadays a question of life and death for many of the economies of the western world. Yet, due to our generally reductionist scientific paradigm, invention and innovation are rarely studied scientifically. Most work prefers to study its context and its consequences. As a result, we are as a society, lacking the scientific tools to understand, improve or otherwise impact on the processes of invention and innovation. This book delves deeply into that topic, taking the position that the complex systems approach, with its emphasis on ‘emergence’, is better suited than our traditional approach to the phenomenon. In a collection of very coherent papers, which are the result of an EU-funded four year international research team’s effort, it addresses various aspect of the topic from different disciplinary angles. One of the main emphases is the need, in the social sciences, to move away from neo-darwinist ‘population thinking’ to ‘organization thinking’ if we want to understand social evolution. Another main emphasis is on developing a generative approach to invention and innovation, looking in detail at the contexts within which invention and innovation occur, and how these contexts impact on the chances for success or failure. Throughout, the book is infused with interesting new insights, but also presents several well-elaborated case studies that connect the ideas with a substantive body of ‘real world’ information.

This book explores customer-supplier relationships in B2B markets focusing on interaction between parties. Drawing on three fields of research – studies of relationships in marketing, social interactionism in sociology, and sense-making in social psychology – the author explores the concepts and roles of actors in business relationships and how the behaviour of actors within an interaction affects the development of those relationships. Based on a review of prior research and an original empirical study, the author argues that the presence of continuous close relationships between the customer and supplier organisations bestows features of a business network on B2B markets, with distinct interdependencies and ubiquitous interactions. Exploring buyer-seller interactions, the author contends that actors’ mutually perceived identities – continuously emergent and relationship-specific – are the main factor in the development of business relationships and discusses the implications for management practice and research.