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The purpose of this paper is to develop a radical innovation launch model that shows the relationship of the market, entrepreneurial and learning orientations with each other, with radical innovation launch marketing capabilities and the subsequent effect on radical innovation launch success. It will provide practitioners with best practices and add to current marketing theory.

An online survey was done, resulting in a usable sample of 176 radical innovation launch practitioners from a cross-section of US companies, namely, small to large, business-to-business and business-to-consumer firms offering a variety of products and services. A partial least squares structural equation modeling technique was used to test construct relationships and the effect on each other.

An organizational learning orientation has a direct effect on the market and entrepreneurial orientations. Learning and marketing orientations are critical links to having radical innovation launch marketing capabilities. While an entrepreneurial orientation has a direct effect on radical innovation launch success, proper, dynamic marketing capabilities are a significant driver. Over 40% of the variance in radical innovation launch success is directly or indirectly affected by the three studied strategic orientations and radical innovation launch marketing capabilities.

This study was conducted only in the USA. A cross-cultural study could be undertaken. Type and size of firm, type of external environment, radical innovation department structure, transformational leadership strength and competitive intensity effect could be studied. New, up-to-date adaptable marketing capabilities should be researched and validated.

For radical innovation launch success, it is critical that a firm develop the market, entrepreneurial and learning orientations and have specific, dynamic marketing capabilities in place. Existing managers should be trained, or new talent hired, to give the firm the capability to develop unique, radical innovation launch strategic, brand identity and new target market plans, to select and manage new downstream partners, and to have quick, customer launch feedback mechanisms in place.

An empirical study of the effect of all three strategic orientations on radical innovation launch marketing capabilities and subsequent radical innovation launch success has not been previously addressed.

This study aims to shed lights on the dynamics of involving and sharing knowledge with stakeholders in the process of new service development (NSD) over time.

The paper is based on a paradigmatic case focused on the development of the digital MBA program by the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano. Primary and secondary data have been largely collected and analyzed, involving multiple stakeholders of the development process.

This study describes how several stakeholders have been involved during the phase of the NSD process, showing two variables that ruled their involvement: the level of control exerted by the School on the stakeholders and the level of flexibility of the stakeholders.

This research offers insights to the understanding of the dynamics of involving and sharing knowledge with multiple-stakeholders in NSD. From a theoretical perspective, it contributes to stakeholder theory linking it with the service management literature, highlighting the role of cyclical fluctuations in the involvement activities.

This research offers insights to managers dealing with the development of new services, offering them a novel view on how various stakeholders may be involved over time, in different moment and in different ways, to properly enhance the development process thanks to their knowledge sharing.

This paper contributes to the service management literature emphasizing the role of multiple stakeholders while providing insights and suggestions to manage the complex relationships created by their involvement and their knowledge.

In the wake of the growing popularity of the open innovation approach, leveraging suppliers as external sources of innovation has attracted increasing interest from scholars and practitioners. Successful supplier involvement largely depends on an effective performance measurement process, but both supply chain management and innovation management literature have paid limited attention to this aspect. This paper aims to fill this gap by illustrating how companies measure the performance of the suppliers involved in their innovation projects and what role is played by the purchasing department.

This study interviews project stakeholders from nine different organizations acting as focal companies in the supply chains of various industries. This paper complements this on-field information with a vast amount of data collected from secondary project documents. Structured data coding and analysis allow us to discuss how companies redesign their performance measurement systems to ease the collaboration with suppliers in innovation and what factors underly these decisions.

The findings show that, in many cases, supplier performance measurement systems deviate from their typical characteristics to support collaboration in innovation projects. They integrate quantitative and qualitative measures, include contributions from different project stakeholders and are oriented toward high visibility and transparency with suppliers. A more substantial redesign of these systems is favored when purchasing is assigned to strategic project responsibilities and possesses higher absorptive capacity.

The results complement the knowledge for the supply chain management field, where supplier performance measurement systems have been discussed in the context of traditional buyer-supplier relationships, but not comprehensively in innovation projects and not considering the role of purchasing. Findings also contribute to the innovation management literature, which has mostly focused on what aspects need to be measured for innovation partners, rather than how to manage the performance measurement process in practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study aims to assess the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and development culture and the role of willingness-to-change in this relationship and analyzes their effect on new product exploration in small enterprises.

A model based on structural equations with partial least squares (PLS) analysis is used to test the hypotheses. This model was tested on a sample of 250 respondents from 125 small enterprises, with less than 50 employees, located in all seven emirates of the UAE.

The results suggest that EO will induce organizational members’ willingness-to-change and will favor the advancement of a development culture in small enterprises; in addition, EO, willingness-to-change and development culture can lead to new product exploration in small enterprises.

The study findings are subject to potential limitations. First, the research design for the quantitative study was cross-sectional and self-reported, which could cause problems of common method and inflation bias. Second, the conceptual model may not be completely representative of the perspective the authors aim to elucidate. Third, as this study is country-specific, further research investigation in other developing economies is recommended to further understand the possible influences of cultural or socioeconomic contexts on the relationships presented in the model.

The article includes several practical implications about the relationships between willingness-to-change and development culture. It sheds light on the controversial link between EO and new product exploration in small enterprises.

The present study expands current knowledge on the EO–new product exploration relationship by investigating some key mediating variables such as willingness-to-change and development culture in an under-researched context such as UAE.

Drawing on the literature on dynamic skills, this study builds upon and empirically tests a conceptual model that connects business and political ties, organizational unlearning, organizational learning and firm performance. Specifically, this study suggests that business ties enable and political ties inhibit organizational unlearning (i.e. regenerative dynamic capability), which may, in turn, affect exploratory (i.e. renewing dynamic capability) and exploitative (i.e. incremental dynamic capability) innovation behaviors of the firm. Thus, the purpose of this study is to offer a theoretical framework in which organizational unlearning and learning act as mediating mechanisms between business and political ties and firm performance.

Structural equation modeling and mediation analyzes were used on a sample of 302 small and medium-size enterprises in Turkey.

This study found that business ties enable organizational unlearning while political ties impede it. This study further demonstrates that business ties positively and political ties negatively relate to organizational learning through organizational unlearning. In addition, this study shows that political ties are mostly negatively and indirectly related to firm performance through organizational learning while business ties positively and indirectly relate to firm performance.

The findings demonstrate the critical role that personal networks play in organizational learning and firm performance. This study provides evidence to the need to recognize and evaluate the potential and undesirable impacts of political ties on cultivating innovation skills and firm performance. In addition, this study recommends managers to embrace the significance of organizational unlearning in strategic renewal, particularly as it applies to building renewing and incremental dynamic skills for enhanced firm performance.

This study offers a deeper perspective of the dissected relations of social ties in emerging economies to firm performance by considering organizational unlearning and learning behaviors as mediating mechanisms.

Posits a stagewise learning process involved in the building of brand equity: brand birth; the creation of brand awareness and associations; the building of quality and value perceptions; the emergence of brand loyalty; and the launching of brand extensions. Also reports on an empirical study which explored the evolution, existence and extensibility of brand equity in a particular business‐to‐business market. Concludes with practical implications for managers in business‐to‐business product or service firms.

Expert systems are computer systems, built through interaction with actual experts, that mimic human experts within a narrow domain. This paper describes the development of an expert system, NEWPRODEX, designed to screen industrial product concepts, identify potential financial successes, and diagnose opportunities for concept enhancement to improve its chances of success on the international marketplace. A running example illustrating a sample application of the NEWPRODEX system is provided. The concluding section discusses directions for model improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction of pricing strategies with other aspects of launch, in particular, timing, logistics/inventory strategy, and coordination with support organizations, and the effect on profit and competitive performance.

The paper presents an empirical study of 215 recent new product launches, focusing on pricing and other strategic and tactical launch decisions and the resulting profitability and competitive performance. Clusters of new product launches are identified and the profitability and competitiveness of each cluster are discussed.

The paper finds that some clusters are related to greater success than others. The most profitable and competitively successful cluster contained launches supported by solid market research and marked by good timing decisions. By contrast, the least profitable/successful cluster were higher price launches unsupported by adequate research.

The study is limited by the fact that the sampling frame is made up of members of a professional association of product development and management, and may therefore be more representative of “best practice” in new product development (NPD) than of NPD in general. The authors believe the use of the key informant method is justified in this study, however this method has been criticized in the past.

The pricing decision for a new product is sometimes oversimplified as a “high‐low” or “skimming versus penetration” choice. The study finds that the actual effect of pricing on ultimate success is much more complex, and that one must consider not only price level, but also the timing of the launch, the logistics and inventory strategy, the extent of market research, testing, and planning, and so forth.

This study aims to develop and empirically examine a model that investigates the mediating role of technology development capability (TDC) on the relationship between customer focus (CF) and technology leadership (TL).

The analysis and interpretation of a partial least square model include the following two stages: the first stage focuses on assessing the reliability and validity of the measurement model, while the second pertains to evaluating the structural model.

The general understanding prevailing in practice and literature is that management sponsorship (MS) has a positive impact on the relationship between CF and TDC. It is also generally understood that MS has a positive impact on TL initiatives. However, the findings of this study contradict these assumptions. Specifically, the study indicates that MS has a negative moderating effect on CF and technology development capabilities, and has no impact on CF and TL relationships.

CF, TDC and MS, and their interplay and impact in enhancing firms’ TL position, have not been explored thus far in an integrated manner in the context of the automobile industry in developing countries. The research relating to CF, technology development capabilities, technology innovation capabilities, MS and TL reported in the literature has drawn inferences from case studies, anecdotal evidence and experiences of industry leaders, experts and consultants. This study attempts to fill the gaps mentioned above by presenting and testing a new moderated mediation model that shows the relationship between CF, TDC, MS and TL.