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The purpose of this research is to review empirical research on customer involvement in innovation and identify future research directions that can better connect this research with marketing strategy literatures and offer opportunities for further theoretical development.

We conduct a review of empirical articles published in eight leading marketing and innovation journals between 2001 and 2017.

The review shows that the literature on customer involvement in innovation is highly diverse and fragmented, lacking a common understanding of what constitutes customer involvement in innovation and its theoretical underpinnings. There exists a multitude of conceptualizations of customer involvement in innovation, which limits effective accumulation of domain knowledge. A large number of studies have taken the customer’s perspective to examine their motivation to participate and ability to contribute, whereas less research has been done from the firm’s perspective to understand how firms may effectively manage the well-recognized challenges of customer involvement as well as the implications of customer involvement for long-term innovation strategy and overall performance. Based on the review, we offer recommendations for future research.

We identify important questions for future research that are highly relevant for the practice of customer involvement in innovation.

We provide a systematic review of the rapidly growing empirical research on customer involvement in innovation. We evaluate key points of differences in the literature and offer a synthesis that helps identify opportunities for future research.

In the agri-food industries, particular importance is given to distribution. Indeed, maintaining good relationships with distributors is a necessity for industries seeking sound marketing performance. In this context, Moroccan agri-food companies recognize the importance of developing customer loyalty. They focus on maintaining good relationships based on trust with their distributors. Considerable research has investigated trust in business-to-business (B-to-B) relationships; however, research in the agri-food industry needs further investigation. Indeed, some past research studied the effect of benevolence on loyalty (Chen, 2008; Rampl, Eberhardt, Schütte & Kenning, 2012) but they ignored studying the effect on two types of loyalty – attitudinal and behavioral – in agri-food industries.

The paper here contributes to the literature in a number of meaningful ways. First, we explore loyalty strategies used by agri-food industries to maintain distributors. This enables us to better understand how trust can boost agri-food B-to-B relationships and distributor’s loyalty. We also investigate exactly the trust dimension (benevolence; credibility) that affects more loyalty in the agri-food industry. A better understanding of the trust dimension should provide practical guidelines as to how to facilitate loyalty in B-to-B relationships. In addition, we test the two dimensions of loyalty and the importance of the attitudinal one. Using structural equation modeling to analyze data, our findings confirm the importance of benevolence in relationships between Moroccan agri-food industries and their distributors. Indeed, the results explain that the development of customer loyalty is influenced by the development of benevolence in relationships with distributors, especially on attitudinal loyalty.

Trust is a crucial element in business exchanges. Trust has been the subject of considerable research. Most prior studies are insensitive to context studies. However, the advent of the extended enterprise with the disintegration of production and innovation processes, the digitalization of interactions, and the increased competition in global markets, among other factors, fundamentally alter the contexts of buyer–supplier relationships. New enriched perspectives and adapted approaches of trust in B-to-B settings are necessary.

This volume addresses new issues showing evidence from advanced, emerging, and developing markets by applying different theoretical and methodological perspectives. The findings lead to identifying consistencies, richness, and distinctiveness of antecedents, processes, and consequences of trust in various B-to-B contexts. It provides suggestions for future research and new levers and guidance for managers to build successful business relationships.

This chapter identifies research advances in theory and analytics that contribute successfully to the primary need to be filled to achieve scientific legitimacy: configurations that include accurate explanation, description, and prediction – prediction here refers to predicting future outcomes and outcomes of cases in samples separate from the samples of cases used to construct models. The MAJOR PARADOX: can the researcher construct models that achieve accurate prediction of outcomes for individual cases that also are generalizable across all the cases in the sample? This chapter presents a way forward for solving the major paradox. The solution here includes philosophical, theoretical, and operational shifts away from variable-based modeling and null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) to case-based modeling and somewhat precise outcome testing (SPOT). These shifts are now occurring in the scholarly business-to-business literature.

This chapter provides novel theory that explicates how positive emotions of four actors (supervisors, employees, peers, and customers) in the service profit chain can foster the creation of positively deviant service businesses. It is suggested to incorporate studies and theories of positive organizational scholarship and particularly studies on positive emotions to the services marketing literature. This chapter elucidates how positively deviant behaviors, such as expressions of appreciation, helping others, gratitude, trustworthiness, and unselfishness, can foster the creation of such positively deviant performances that may generate supreme customer experience. These four positively deviant performances are trust in self and others, feeling of oneness, creativity, and seeing the bigger picture. The suggestion is that these positively deviant performances create climate for positivity in the supplier–customer interaction and foster the co-creation of mutual value in service businesses.

This chapter elaborates on the usefulness of embracing complexity theory, modeling outcomes rather than directionality, and modeling complex rather than simple outcomes in strategic management. Complexity theory includes the tenet that most antecedent conditions are neither sufficient nor necessary for the occurrence of a specific outcome. Identifying a firm by individual antecedents (i.e., noninnovative vs. highly innovative, small vs. large size in sales or number of employees, or serving local vs. international markets) provides shallow information in modeling specific outcomes (e.g., high sales growth or high profitability) – even if directional analyses (e.g., regression analysis, including structural equation modeling) indicate that the independent (main) effects of the individual antecedents relate to outcomes directionally – because firm (case) anomalies almost always occur to main effects. Examples: a number of highly innovative firms have low sales while others have high sales and a number of noninnovative firms have low sales while others have high sales. Breaking-away from the current dominant logic of directionality testing – null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) – to embrace somewhat precise outcome testing (SPOT) is necessary for extracting highly useful information about the causes of anomalies – associations opposite to expected and “statistically significant” main effects. The study of anomalies extends to identifying the occurrences of four-corner strategy outcomes: firms doing well in favorable circumstances, firms doing badly in favorable circumstances, firms doing well in unfavorable circumstances, and firms doing badly in unfavorable circumstances. Models of four-corner strategy outcomes advance strategic management beyond the current dominant logic of directional modeling of single outcomes.

From the supplier firm's perspective, a referral is a recommendation from A (the referrer) to B (the potential customer) that B should, or should not, purchase from C (the supplier firm). Thus, as referrals are for a specific supplier firm, they should be viewed as part of the supplier firm's marketing and sales activities. We recognize three types of referrals – customer-to-potential customer referrals, horizontal referrals, and supplier-initiated referrals – that have critical roles in a potential customer's purchase decision. We develop the concept of referral equity to capture the net effect of all referrals for a supplier firm in the market. We argue that supplier firms should view referral equity as a resource that has financial value to the firm as it affects the firm's cash flows and profits. We offer strategies firms can use to manage referrals and build their referral equity and suggest a research agenda.

Purpose – Policymakers hope that comparative effectiveness research will identify examples of widely used therapies that are no better than less expensive alternatives and, consequently, reduce health care spending. Comparative effectiveness research is unlikely to reduce spending if physicians are quick to adopt effective treatments but slow to abandon ineffective ones.

Methodology/approach – We present a theoretical model that shows how physicians will adopt new treatments in response to positive evidence more readily than they abandon existing treatments in response to negative evidence if the marginal costs of production decline post-adoption. We report trends in the use of two common procedures, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for patients with stable angina and routine episiotomy in vaginal childbirth, where comparative effectiveness research studies have failed to find evidence of a benefit.

Findings – Use of PCI and episiotomy have declined over time but are still excessive based on the standards implied by comparative effectiveness research.

Practical implications (if applicable) – The findings suggest that comparative effectiveness research has the potential to reduce costs but additional efforts are necessary to fully realize savings from abandonment.

Originality/value of chapter – There is a large literature on technological adoption in health care, but few studies address technological abandonment. Understanding abandonment is important for efforts to decrease health care costs by reducing use of ineffective but costly treatments.

In this chapter, we reexamine the notion that socially responsible behavior by firms will lead to increased financial performance. By identifying the underlying processes, institutional settings, and actors involved, we present a framework that is more attentive to the multiplicity and conditionality of the mechanisms operating in the often tenuous connection between firms’ social behavior and financial performance. Building and expanding upon existing analyses of the CSP–CFP linkage, our model helps to explain the mixed results from a wide range of empirical studies which examine this link. It also provides a novel theoretical account to help guide future researches that are more attentive to conditionalities and contextual contingencies.