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This study aims to explore how manufacturing firms master customer lock-in through value creation by servitization innovation strategies from the perspective of asset specificity.

A multiple case study with triangulation fashion is adopted to identify servitization innovation strategies. Several manufacturing firms were investigated, which are distributed in different positions of the value chain. Content analysis and abductive approaches are adopted to analyze the data. Moreover, an in-depth interview and participatory observation were conducted to refine the analysis results.

This study identified four different focusing points of servitization operations. Based on these, the paper further induces an innovative servitization strategy matrix of customer lock-in, concerning communion, intellectual, existential and insubstantial strategies. Furthermore, a conceptual model of customer lock-in by servitization innovation from the perspective of asset specificity is elaborated. It is suggested that companies can use tangible or intangible resources by sharing or storing operations to create servitization value.

This study theoretically proposes a conceptual model to extend servitization innovation as an intangible asset and adopt the new perspective of asset specificity to illustrate the value creation in servitization to generate customer lock-in.

With the accelerated technological advancement, innovation has become a critical factor, which affects the core competitiveness of a company. However, studies about the relationship between internal stock option mechanisms and innovation productivity remain limited. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the impact of stock options and their elements design on innovation output from an internal mechanism perspective.

Using a sample of 302 stock option incentive plans announced and implemented between 2006 and 2016, this study uses the propensity score matching and difference-in-difference model to find out whether the implementation of stock options improves the innovation outputs of enterprises.

Based on the statistical analysis, it is concluded that: stock options can stimulate corporate innovation; a stock option may drive innovation outputs through two ways, performance-based incentives and risk-taking incentives, with the latter one playing a more dominant role and the risk-taking incentives of stock options, could be optimised when the non-executives granting proportion is larger, the granting range is limited, the incentive period is longer, the exercisable proportion is increasing, the price-to-strike ratio is lower and relatively loose performance assessment criteria are applied.

The conclusion reached in the study may provide valuable information to listed firms in designing and implementing the stock option plans.

This study aims to explore the innovative strategies of business model of the free-to-fee switch, the relationship between the business model innovation and customer knowledge and further develop a conceptual model.

This study adopts a multiple case study method with abductive research logic, following the replication logic to select samples. A total of eight outstanding companies with altogether 312 free-to-fee switch events were selected from 1998 to 2021.

A strategic matrix with four innovative business models for the free-to-fee switch is generated. The parallelism between the models and customer knowledge orientations is also found. Further, the study develops the conceptual model regarding customer knowledge orientation as a key mediation.

The study highlights the conceptualization definition of customer knowledge orientation and its mediation effect to the business model innovation of free-to-fee switch, which is a new issue compared with previous research. Furthermore, it reveals that there exists organizational ambidexterity, which brings a new definition of customer knowledge orientation.

This study suggests how to integrate customer knowledge orientations to support the marketing process of the business model of free-to-fee switch. It also proposes a specific mechanism to conduct the free-to-fee switch with the introduction of four innovative strategic models and eight evolutional paths.

This study creatively proposes the strategic matrix and the conceptual model of business model innovation of free-to-fee switch. Moreover, a new conceptual definition of customer knowledge orientation is specified.