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While strategic alliances is a concept increasingly discussed in the field of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), an emerging and more crucial concept regarding alliances—namely, the alliance portfolio—is mostly ignored in the SSCM context. Mainly drawing on the categorisation–elaboration model (CEM), this research develops a three-layer model to explore the effects of three alliance portfolio diversity facets on the three triple-bottom-line SSCM performances through the mediation of sustainability collaboration.

The field data are collected from 321 Vietnamese manufacturers. Scale accuracy is assessed through the confirmatory factor analysis method. Hierarchical linear regressions are applied to test the proposed model and hypotheses.

Partner, governance, and functional alliance portfolio diversities have a U-shaped, inverted U-shaped, and positive linear effect, respectively, on sustainability collaboration. Sustainability collaboration is in turn found to enhance the SSCM performances in terms of economic, environmental, and social.

This research introduced a new theoretical lens, CEM, to the SSCM field. It also provided findings that can help firms to manage their alliance portfolios more dynamically in terms of the nature and diversity level of the portfolio and in a way that adds to the triple bottom line through the mediating effect of sustainability collaboration.

How does university-firm collaboration affect the performance of both universities and firms? The purpose of this paper is to evaluate university-firm collaborations aimed at expanding the treatment effects of collaboration ambition on university academic performance as well as collaboration ambition focused on the firm’s production of innovation and financial performance for the top 110 US universities and the top 200 US R&D performing firms.

“Two studies, based on the three archival data sets (National Bureau of Economic Research-Rensselaer Scientific Papers Database and the Harvard Dataverse Network (DVN) US Patent Citations database and Compustat database), are undertaken in the top 110 US universities and the top 200 US R&D performing firms.” The study introduces a theoretical model that explicitly addresses collaboration diversity, number of collaborations, knowledge stock and the endogeneity problem that is generated by self-selection of collaboration ambition in university and firm’s performance.

The results suggest that the effects of adopting proactive collaboration decision on academic performance are insignificant in the firm subsample. However, more interestingly, the authors find supporting evidence of the negative impact of collaboration on university groups. The authors also find that collaboration diversity, knowledge stock and collaboration ambition lead to stronger firm performance but the number of collaborations is smaller on firm performance. Furthermore, the authors find that collaboration ambition moderates the positive effect of the number of collaborations on firm performance.

University-firm collaboration is a multifaceted relationship, suggesting that the empirical analysis can be interpreted through the university and the firm view to enhance the understanding of the collaboration for performance creation. This study articulates the positive role of collaboration diversity, knowledge stock and collaboration ambition and the negative role of the number of collaborations on university-firm collaboration in terms of university and firm performance. Moreover, proactive collaboration ambition has the positive effect of a higher number of collaborations on firm performance. The authors conclude that policy should refrain from overly focusing on collaboration diversity, number of collaborations, knowledge stock and collaboration ambition, and the authors consider the interactions between the number of collaborations and collaboration ambition on university-firm collaboration when discussing their effects on mutual performance.

This study demonstrates the effects of university-firm collaboration on academic performance. In addition, the authors discuss the factors that influence collaboration to help the firm to increase its innovation and financial performance. Therefore, it would be interesting to see simultaneously how university-firm collaboration affects the performance of both partners.

Due to the constantly increasing competitiveness along with the complexity of knowledge, firms perceive collaboration as a key strategy that preserves firms' radical innovation performance. In this context, this paper aims to examine how firms’ partners’ diversity in open innovation activities influences the development of radical innovations, critical for social development. In particular, this study analyzes how the functional and geographical breadth of the firm’s collaboration portfolio affects its radical innovation performance. Furthermore, it also explores the role of firm size as a moderator in the relationships proposed.

This research employs panel data analysis, using a sample of 4,677 Spanish firms, with data sourced from the PITEC database.

The results of this study show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the functional and the geographical breadth of collaborations and the firms’ radical innovation performance. Moreover, this study finds partial support for the moderating role of firm size, in the sense that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large firms vary in their optimal number of diversity of partners.

This research provides a better understanding on how partners’ functional and geographical diversity, along with organizational characteristics such as firm size, affect how firms benefit from collaboration for innovation. This study shows that both SMEs and large firms experience diminishing returns when their collaboration networks become overly diverse in pursuit of radical innovation, due to increased costs. However, in SMEs, the turning point occurs at a later stage, consistent with the idea that small firms need broader functional networks to access complementary and novel resources they usually lack.

This study aims to investigate the importance and effect of asymmetric technological collaborations’ key success factors in developing countries. The number of collaborations between large enterprises and SMEs, known as asymmetric technological collaborations (ATC) is growing considerably. But this asymmetry in itself can increase the number and intensity of collaboration challenges. So far, limited studies have been conducted on the stability of ATCs, and most of them have been in the context of developed countries. Meanwhile, studying the strength and stability of collaboration in the nano industry with growing market value and increasing newcomers is of particular importance.

Here, with bionic engineering approach, we used chemistry for the first time to identify the main stability factors of ATCs and build our hypotheses and research model. To this end, we introduced the factors affecting the stability of the dative chemical bond as a bionic counterpart of corporate venture capital (CVC), which is a type of ATC, and proposed 4 hypotheses. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) method to examine the hypothesized relationships.

The analysis of survey questionnaire data from 26 asymmetric collaborations in Iran’s nanotechnology industry shows that “learning of the acceptor company” with a negative effect, “network ties” and “development of the collaboration host region” with a positive effect and “diversity in the collaboration portfolio” with an inverted U-shaped effect are the most influential factors in the stability and continuity of CVCs, respectively.

The findings of this research can be the beginning of a broad path leading to exploring and getting inspiration from chemistry to analyze management issues.

This paper provides empirical evidence for how gender diversity in top management teams (TMTs) and collaboration with university and technological centres lead to innovation outcomes. The authors review past research on these concepts and illustrate their individual and joint effects on process innovation specifically in the unique context of family firms (FFs).

The authors used a sample of 788 Spanish manufacturing family firms in 2016 and applied logistic regression models since the dependent variables are dummies.

The authors found a positive relationship between gender-diverse TMTs, process innovation and research and development (R&D)-based process innovation. Similarly, the collaboration with university technological centres is positively associated with higher innovation outcome of FFs. In addition, the authors also found that the presence of women in TMTs shapes the relationship between the collaboration with university technological centres and process innovation.

This paper contributes to the research on collaborative innovation in FFs by emphasizing the collaboration with university technological centres, an external partner often ignored by this stream of literature. This research also responds to the calls for further study of the effect of the heterogeneity of the TMTs on the innovation outcome of FFs, from the perspective of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firms.

Open innovation breadth (OIB) considers the diversity of external collaboration partners for innovation. The authors investigate the moderating effect of OIB on the relationship between industrial innovation activities (innovation inputs) and industrial innovation results (innovation outputs).

This study is based on secondary data from the Brazilian innovation survey, representing more than 30,000 innovative companies across 55 industrial sectors.

This study’s results show that OIB has different moderating effects regarding the several innovation input–output relationships. While OIB benefits some relationships, others are hampered by the diversity of collaboration partners.

Few studies have addressed OIB at the macro level. Using the perspective of transaction cost economics (TCE), the authors discuss the contributions and limitations of OIB at the industry level.

Firms are driven to ride on the digital wave in today’s open innovation ecosystem. This study aims to explore the effect of digital transformation (DT) on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms’ innovation ambidexterity, namely, radical versus incremental innovation, respectively. Meanwhile, the authors evaluated the moderating role of the complexity of R&D collaboration portfolio (i.e. organizational diversity and geographic diversity) in the above relationships.

Using a panel data set of 171 Chinese listed firms in the information and communications technology services industry from 2010 to 2018, the proposed hypotheses were empirically attested.

It is found that DT has a positive relationship with radical innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship with incremental innovation. In terms of the R&D collaboration portfolio, organizational diversity positively moderates the relationships between DT and innovation ambidexterity, respectively. The geographic diversity weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of DT on incremental innovation; however, its moderating role in the link between DT and radical innovation is not empirically verified.

Extant scholars mainly addressed the interplay between KIBS firms and their manufacturing clients, while this study reveals the different consequences of DT on KIBS firms’ innovation ambidexterity to highlight the role of KIBS firms is an independent and essential innovator in a knowledge-driven economy. Notably, the findings contribute to knowledge management (KM) and R&D literature by confirming the diversity of the R&D collaboration portfolio is a critical KM strategy for KIBS firms to develop and promote external knowledge resources.

As other researchers have done previously, we conceptualize innovation not as a linear process but as a cyclical one (e.g., Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999), which consist periods of innovation initiation, implementation, adaptation, and stabilization (West, 1990). Within this cycle it is possible to distinguish two major components: the beginning of the cycle, which is dominated by the generation of ideas that is generally also designated as creativity; whereas the dominant activity at the end of the cycle which is the implementation of ideas (hereafter referred to as the implementation of innovation). Creativity is then likely to be most evident in the early stages of the innovation process, when those in teams are required to develop or offer ideas in response to a perceived need for innovation. Creative thinking is also likely when teams proactively initiate proposals for change and consider their initial implementation. As the innovation is adapted to organizational circumstances, there is less need for creativity. At the outset of the process, creativity dominates, to be superseded later by innovation implementation processes. Of course, it can be argued that creativity is important throughout the innovation process, but in general, the requirements for creative ideas will be greater at the earlier stages of the innovation process than the later stages.

This study aims to introduce a new prescriptive model to aid both managers and researchers in partner selection for innovation-orientated collaboration. This framework demonstrates how prospective partner firms’ complementing bodies of knowledge and goal alignment interact to affect the success of a collaboration.

The authors use geometric modeling to represent the interrelationships among knowledge similarity/dissimilarity, goal congruence, knowledge complementarity (KC) and innovation in alliance formation. Using this model as a framework, the authors derive relationships among predictors of innovation success and determine how they affect the nature of partnerships under varying conditions of KC.

This research shows how innovation success is strongly determined by partner selection. Specifically, the authors examine the influence of KC and partner goals on three aspects of a potential research and development (R&D) alliance – the potential level of innovation outcome for the alliance, the boundaries of knowledge sharing and limitations arising from knowledge and goal incongruence and the nature of cooperation.

Although there is broad empirical support that innovation success is influenced by the similarity of R&D partners’ knowledge, further research is still needed to model the relationship more precisely between partner KC and goal alignment. The authors address this gap by developing a model that is both prescriptive and predictive of how innovation success can be achieved in the context of disparate but complementing knowledge and goal sets. The authors conclude with practical implications for practice and future research directions.

Global collaboration, or the ability to collaborate with people different from ourselves or even across species, becomes increasingly important in our interconnected world to engage constructively with and across difference. As we face more complex challenges, both locally and globally, the need for the creativity and innovation made possible by diverse perspectives is only amplified. Through five stories from our work as consultants and practitioners helping organizations to collaborate, we explore the role of global leadership in collaboration during times of crisis in various sectors. We began by asking ourselves a series of questions about global collaboration that could also serve as future research directions for scholars. We argue that new forms of leadership are required in the global context where both tasks and relationship domains are characterized by high complexity. We conclude by providing insights and recommendations for global leaders to address those complexities through collaboration and help their organizations learn from their experiences in crises and beyond.