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This study aims to explore the enablers and barriers to design-driven innovation, defined as the innovation of product meanings, in the product-development process. Previous research provides some insights into what enables and hinders design-driven innovation; however a detailed understanding of these factors is missing.

A long-term case study was conducted at a furniture company between 2009 and 2016. Interviews were conducted with respondents within the company, as well as with partners such as retailers and designers.

This paper presents an overview of the identified enablers and barriers. The results demonstrate that enablers and barriers occur in all phases of the product-development process. Second, the connections between enablers and barriers are presented. These are found both within and across different phases, and extend beyond the company’s influence.

This study demonstrates how the innovation of product meanings is influenced throughout all phases of the product-development process. Therefore, there is a need to go beyond the mere identification of enablers and barriers. More is gained from generating a thorough understanding of the causes and connections of these factors, including the changes over time.

This study demonstrates the need for companies to be able to map what enables and hinders design-driven innovation in their product-development process, where a distinction needs to be made between internal and external factors, to enhance value creation.

This study presents a rare long-term case study on design-driven innovation. This study provides new knowledge on the enablers and barriers a company faces while adapting its product-development process to accommodate design-driven innovation.

Although the significance of international markets is recognised in innovation management, there seems to be a lack of studies on how the international context is actually present in the process of disruptive‐innovation development. This paper aims at filling this gap and at analysing the manifestation of the international context in market proactiveness during this process. It begins with a brief discussion of the concepts of market proactiveness and disruptive innovations. The international scope of market proactiveness at the idea‐generation, development, and launch stages is then analysed in the light of the ethnocentric, polycentric, regiocentric, geocentric (EPRG) model, and described in the context of the development of three disruptive drugs. The results of this study indicate that both the degree and international scope of market proactiveness differ considerably in demand‐related and competition‐related comparisons.

This chapter reviews the key findings and innovation leadership insights from this book, as well as pointing out directions for future research. We find a series of learning insights for people engaged in innovation leadership, at the distinct levels of self-leadership, team leadership, organisational leadership, and ecosystem leadership. We also find commonalities across these levels, as well as differences that reflect the complexity of these different leadership arenas. Leadership practice that orchestrates contributions from diverse viewpoints, seeing itself as with the group, rather than above it, is most likely to help turn ideas into value in repeatable ways. We also find evidence that mindset, skills, and behaviours are all important in the make-up of competencies. We point to the requirement for further research at all four levels, to bring further insights in what is still an emerging field; as well as a need for more research into competency development for innovation leadership; and we advocate a research approach that emphasises relational leadership, acknowledging that most leadership practice is shared across people.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the degree of customer‐related proactiveness in the process of developing radical innovations.

The initial framework for this study is first created on the basis of the theory and then modified in the light of multiple retrospective case studies.

The results show that the stage of the innovation development process seems to influence the degree of proactiveness. Contrary to many earlier studies, this research indicates that anticipation plays an important role already at the idea generation stage.

The study introduces a way of describing a firm's proactiveness as a dynamic pattern. Thus, the process approach adopted in this research may encourage further longitudinal studies on the phenomenon. Given the explorative nature of the study, the propositions arising from the modified framework should be evaluated according to additional data.

The results of this study indicate that a systematic search for new market opportunities, and the firm's previous experience of customers, may generate not only incremental but also radical innovations. Proactiveness is not always needed, however, as the cases indicate. Firms ought therefore to consider carefully when it is appropriate to invest in customer‐related proactiveness, and when it is not.

The main contribution of the study stems from the combination of customer‐related proactiveness and the process of radical‐innovation development. It is among the first to combine these streams of research.

This study offers a lens for exploring women leaders’ production of resistance through postfeminist discourses. Through the case study of Bozoma Saint John, a high-profile Black C-Suite executive, this study examines micro-acts of subversion and considers the extent they can promote feminist thinking in the corporate world and the implications for feminist theorising about women in leadership.

Interviews with Saint John were collected from YouTube and examined using feminist critical discourse analysis informed by intersectionality, feminist poststructuralism and Foucault’s notion of “reverse discourse”.

Saint John reproduces elements of the postfeminist confidence discourse to defy stereotypes of Black women, while simultaneously reversing the individualistic conception of confidence in favour of corporate and collective action. This has the potential to facilitate positive change, albeit within the boundaries of the confidence culture.

Combining reverse discourse, intersectionality and feminist poststructuralism with a micro-level analysis of women leaders’ language use can help to capture the ways postfeminist concepts are given new subversive meanings.

Whereas existing studies have focused on how elite women’s promotion of confidence sustains the status quo, this study shifts the research gaze to the resistance realised through rearticulations of confidence, illustrating how women-in-leadership research can advance feminist theorising without vilifying senior women even as they participate in postfeminist logics of success.

The purpose of this paper is to study the national and international expansion of small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in Anhui, China. The paper focuses on the interaction of SMEs with the Government, assessed through the development of specific industries as well as ownership and funding by the State, and the origins of the relative weakness of Chinese SMEs' competitive position.

Data were collected from 154 SMEs and analysed using multivariate regressions; the models used the firms' export intensity at the regional, national, and international level as dependent variables. In total seven models were run: the first analysing the industry where SMEs operate, the second and third studying state funding and ownership, and the last four analysing a set of barriers hindering firms' expansion as independent variables.

The results show that: SMEs operating in labour‐intensive industries have better access to international markets; ownership and/or funding by the state do not play an important role in regional, national and international expansion; and there are 11 barriers related to weak management skills and knowledge hindering the expansion of Anhui's SMEs. The findings are then analysed vis‐à‐vis recent works on Chinese firms and conclusions are drawn.

The paper contributes to the increasing body of literature on the expansion of Chinese SMEs by providing an empirical analysis in a region different from the increasingly studied coastal areas.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why large firms often fail to develop disruptive innovations. This study identifies several key inhibitors or barriers that hinder those developments. A conceptual model is presented that examines the interrelationship and interdependence of these inhibiting factors, in an effort to provide a better understanding of how companies can improve their disruptive innovation capabilities.

This paper focuses on disruptive innovation rather than incremental innovation and is limited to research findings on large corporations. Recently published works (1990‐2004) have examined success factors as the determinants of disruptive innovation capability. A complementary approach is to examine the inhibitors of disruptive innovation and investigate their interrelationship and interdependence. The study is based on an extensive review of literature available, and examines both internal and external inhibiting factors to develop a conceptual model of disruptive innovation capabilities.

Many large corporations fail to develop disruptive innovations. It is argued that the basic constraints to creating successful disruptive innovation stem in large part from several inhibiting factors, and we have identified different clusters of interrelated and partly‐interdependent inhibitors: the inability to unlearn obsolete mental models, a successful dominant design or business concept, a risk‐averse corporate climate, innovation process mismanagement, lack of adequate follow‐through competencies and the inability to develop mandatory internal or external infrastructure. The conceptual disruptive innovation capability model provides a better understanding of the interrelationship among these limiting factors. There is still a vast gap between intention and actual disruptive innovation capability. Developing distinctive capabilities to bridge this gap should be an integral part of a company's strategy for growth.

This paper is based on an extensive review of literature on disruptive innovation barriers. In it is proposed a conceptual interrelationship model of innovation inhibitors as a basis for determining and improving a company's disruptive innovation capability. It is suggested that, in addition to the theory presented in this paper, further empirical research studies be carried out to validate the key inhibitors of our conceptual model, their interrelationship and interdependence, and the impact on disruptive innovation development.

The study is intended to provide practical insight into clusters of inhibiting factors that prevent large organisations from improving their disruptive innovation capability. The conceptual model facilitates the development of distinctive competencies and mindsets to improve these capabilities.

The authors review literature that focuses on women and minorities in the context of mergers and acquisitions (henceforth referred to as mergers for the sake of simplicity) aiming to explore how and to what extent diversity and gender issues are studied in merger research. The authors sort the reviewed research into three themes: the impact of gender on merger outcome, the impact of merger on women and minorities, and the impact of merger on diversity management and equality work. The authors suggest that it is important to conduct further studies on the topic but also assert that merger managers can learn from diversity management literature and practices how to manage employees with diverse backgrounds during the post-merger integration.

The principal aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between technological, marketing, organizational and commercialization risk management on new product development (NPD) performance.

Based on questionnaire, the data were collected from a sample of general automotive industry in Iran. Based on theoretical considerations, a model was proposed and descriptive statistic and hierarchical regression were used to measure the relationship between risk management factors and NPD performance.

Data analysis revealed that if organization can amplify their knowledge and information about risk and main factors that affect NPD process, not only can they do their work better but can also increase their ability to predict future happenings that affect performance.

First, due to the relatively small sample size, caution should be exercised when interpreting the results. Second, the data were collected from automotive producer in Iran, which may restrict to some extent generalizability of the findings.

The results suggest that managers should consider more attention to risk management. If managers spread the risk management in all aspects of the NPD project, total performance will be increased and it can develop the probability of NPD success. Also organizations should perform great market research due to best commercialization.

Past researches have presented complete information about NPD process. But identifying and considering the effect of the risk management parameters that are connected to the NPD process were the main thrusts to perform the study. In this paper, based on past research about risk management of NPD, the extra aspect of process that can improve total performance of NPD has been examined.

The aim of this research is to provide insight into how organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of customers experiencing vulnerabilities, thereby paying attention to their organizational practices (i.e. recursive or routinized patterns of organizational actions and behaviors).

To investigate, this research relies upon a multiple case study in a group of nursing homes in Flanders that had the ambition to engage family members in service journeys of their loved ones while measuring their value perceptions as a performance indicator (here, satisfaction with nursing home services).

The case evidence shows that nursing homes co-create value with family members through caring practices that focus on their role as secondary customers (i.e. welcoming, connecting and embedding) and empowering practices that focus on their role as partial employees (i.e. teaming up, informing and listening practices). However, the way in which the different caring and empowering practices are enacted by the nursing home and its staff affects their value co-creation potential.

By focusing on the practices with which organizations can co-create value with family members engaged in service journeys of their loved ones, this research bridges the service literature with its attention for value co-creation practices and the literature on customers experiencing vulnerabilities with its focus on extended customer entities.