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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how specialised capabilities including absorptive capacity and marketing capabilities influence innovation commercialisation in manufacturing and service firms in Nigeria. The authors hypothesise that absorptive capacity measures including openness and formal training for innovation, and marketing capabilities encompassing new product marketing and marketing innovation are positively associated with innovation performance.

The authors examine commercialisation of innovation within the profiting from innovation (PFI) and dynamic capabilities (DC) framework and use data from the 2012 Nigeria Innovation Survey to test the hypothesis by means of a Heckman sample selection model.

The authors find that absorptive capacity measures comprising openness and formal training are positively associated with innovation performance. The authors also find that marketing capabilities as indicated by new product marketing and marketing innovation are positively associated with innovation performance.

The authors acknowledge that firms undergo continuous changes and that there may be the presence of unobserved or unmeasured heterogeneity. Taking into cognisance that Nigeria is a federal state, cultural diversity and economic factors are likely to differ widely between geographical regions. Also, while the proposed conceptual framework offers a deeper understanding of innovation performance, examining how integrating activities of the R&D department, human resource department and marketing department affect innovation commercialisation is likely to provide more meaningful insights.

The role that inter-organisational learning and intra-organisational learning play in driving innovation performance provide managers with a basis for incorporating absorptive capacity building programs that boost employees’ ability to recognise and apply valuable external knowledge to commercial ends. Similarly, firms may benefit from offering marketing capabilities development programs. Furthermore, innovation policies in Nigeria are generally designed to focus on fostering innovation activities aimed at developing innovative output. Accordingly, government support explicitly targeting new product marketing and marketing innovation is likely to play a vital role in the successful commercialisation of innovation in Nigeria.

This study fuses the PFI and DC framework to examine why innovating firms may not necessarily succeed. This area of study has received scant attention in sub-Saharan Africa given that extant literature focusses on value creation as opposed to value capture.

Successful commercialization is crucial to innovative firms, but further investigation is needed on how diverse stakeholders can contribute to the commercialization of a radical innovation that requires particular market creation support. This paper aims to, therefore, analyze the key stakeholders and their contributive activities in commercialization and market creation, particularly in the case of radical innovations.

This study relies on qualitative research design including interviews with key stakeholders, such as regulators, scientists, experts, licensing partners, core company representatives and extensive secondary data. This single-case study concerns a functional food product, which is a radical innovation requiring the development of a novel product category positioned between the food and medicine categories in global market settings. Since its market launch in 1995, the involvement of multiple stakeholders was needed for its successful commercialization in over 30 countries.

Results uncover the contributions of diverse stakeholders to commercialization and market creation, particularly of radical innovation. Stakeholders performed market creation activities such as regulating the marketing and labeling of food products, conducting safety assessments, revealing and validating the positive health effects of the novelty and raising awareness of healthy living and cardiovascular health. The commercialization activities included distributing the products overseas, applying the ingredient to different food products and making the products available for users.

This single-case study provides an overview of the positive stakeholder activities with contributions to market creation and commercialization of functional food innovations. Although the user perspective was not included in the empirical part of this study because of our focus on B2B actors, users of the innovation can contribute to R&D activities to a great extent.

The developed framework of stakeholders’ contributive activities in radical innovation commercialization and market creation contributes to literature discussing market creation as well as commercialization within the marketing and innovation management research fields. This work also generates practical advice for managers who commercialize (radical) innovations.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between innovation capabilities (INVC) and export performance (EXPERF) of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Moreover, the paper aims to investigate the moderating effect of risk-taking propensity (RSTP) in the relationship between INVC and the SMEs’ EXPERF.

A cross-sectional survey design was used and data were collected through structured questionnaires from 250 manufacturing exporting SMEs in Tanzania. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the measurement model. The hypotheses were empirically tested using PROCESS macro test.

The findings affirm that INVC is a significant predictor of EXPERF. Additionally, RSTP was found to be a significant moderator of the relationship between INVC and EXPERF.

Although the study was able to accomplish its overall objective, it is limited in terms of the context under which the study was conducted. This study covered only manufacturing SMEs in a single country, Tanzania. Hence, the findings should be interpreted with caution since each country has specific institutional environments that support innovation.

The findings of this study expand the application of the resource-based view (RBV) theory in exporting context. The study revealed how INVC as an intangible resource can lead to successful performance. Hence, the findings of this study broaden the applicability of RBV theory. Also, this study contributes to the debate about the innovation-export performance relationship by revealing a moderating role of RSTP in the relationship between INVC and EXPERF.

This study aims to identify context-specific antecedents to schools’ absorptive capacity (AC) and to show how those can enact “a virtuous learning circle.”

The study uses a mixed method: an exploration based on semi-structured interviews with educational experts; the development of a measurement scale and a partial least squares structural equation modelling to test the impact of the antecedents.

The results yielded four empirically-grounded antecedents and their measurement scales, namely, prior knowledge, employees’ skills, educational projects and interactions with the environment (Studies one and two). All antecedents are significantly and positively related to AC processes (study three). Using the organizational learning theory perspective, the results have been interpreted as an AC “virtuous learning circle.”

With increasing pressures to adapt, a case of which was the COVID-19 pandemic, schools can greatly benefit from absorbing knowledge flows. This suggests the construction a favourable environment for AC. To this end, the individual (employees’ prior knowledge and skills), organizational (educational projects) and institutional level of managerial action (interactions with the environment) can be effective when create a recursive organizational learning circle. In addition, this study offers an expert-validated measurement scale for self-assessment of a school’s specific contingencies, and thus, for planning of punctual interventions to develop AC.

This study advances the existing body of knowledge management in the educational context by rigorously identifying and validating a scale for measuring the antecedents of AC and developing an interpretive approach to the AC “virtuous circle.”

Previous studies have found that a proactive market orientation (PMO) has a positive effect on product differentiation and innovation and that the effect is contingent on various factors. However, the influence of logistics on the positive relationship between PMO and product differentiation has received scant attention in marketing research. To fill this research gap, this paper aims to introduce the concept of postponement as a basic logistics strategy, currently used by many firms, and examine the interaction effect of PMO and postponement on new product differentiation.

Drawing on the exploration–exploitation literature, the authors considered PMO and postponement as types of exploration and exploitation, respectively. The authors hypothesized that postponement hampers the positive effect of PMO on product differentiation. The authors tested the hypotheses empirically by applying ordinary least squares regression to a sample of 187 brand managers in the Japanese apparel industry.

PMO is positively related to product differentiation, although the relationship is weakened when design and production systems are postponed, that is, when postponement hinders product differentiation.

Previous studies have examined market orientation and postponement (logistics) separately. However, referring to the exploration–exploitation literature, the authors built a conceptual and empirical bridge between market orientation and logistics management and proposed that this configuration is important for product differentiation.

The food industry is a well-established and complex industry. New entrants attempting to penetrate it via the commercialization of a new technological innovation could face high uncertainty and constraints. The capability to innovate through collaboration and to identify suitable strategies and innovative business models (BMs) can be particularly important for bringing a technological innovation to this market. However, although the potential for these capabilities has been advocated, we still lack a complete understanding of how new ventures could support the technology commercialization process via the development of BMs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To address this gap, this paper builds a conceptual framework that knits together the different bodies of extant literature (i.e. entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation) to analyze the BM innovation processes associated with the exploitation of emerging technologies; determines the suitability of the framework using data from the exploratory case study of IT IS 3D – a firm which has started to exploit 3D printing in the food industry; and improves the initial conceptual framework with the findings that emerged in the case study.

From this analysis it emerged that: companies could use more than one BM at a time; hence, BM innovation processes could co-exist and be run in parallel; the facing of high uncertainty might lead firms to choose a closed and/or a familiar BM, while explorative strategies could be pursued with open BMs; significant changes in strategies during the technology commercialization process are not necessarily reflected in a radical change in the BM; and firms could deliberately adopt interim strategies and BMs as means to identify the more suitable ones to reach the market.

This case study illustrates how firms could innovate the processes of their BM development to face the uncertainties linked with the entry into a mature and highly conservative industry (food).

Consistent with the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, the purpose of this paper is to recognise the complementary entrepreneurial role of knowledge transfer intermediary organisations in the context of two Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: Poland and the Czech Republic.

The aim was achieved through empirical studies relying on multiple-case study methodology and cross-case analysis covering 21 cases of commercialisation intermediary institutions. It was assumed that institutional and geographical conditions can impact the knowledge-based opportunity exploitation between different national economies.

Research confirmed that scientists in Poland and the Czech Republic are the central figures of the commercialisation process in terms of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition; however, they need support from intermediary organisations in many other entrepreneurial activities. The history of knowledge commercialisation and its intermediating entities in these countries is relatively young and spin-off company creation is not a common practice. Expertise knowledge, creativity and self-confidence admitted, by the respondents in both countries, can be an optimistic sign for the future efforts in fostering innovativeness of CEE countries. Stronger support of formal institutional framework and policies in those countries is expected.

Science commercialisation has lately attracted much attention, but only a few studies have tried to develop conceptual frameworks considering knowledge-based entrepreneurship and knowledge commercialisation in their relations and subsequential roles. Also, over the past couple of years literature in this area has expanded mainly relying on observations in the USA and Western European countries. Hence, this study allowed to collect findings from CEE countries for which data are still insufficient but can significantly contribute to the theory development. Also, some recommendations for policymakers arise from this study. Further research could validate the results in an extensive quantitative study.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the determinants of the performance of regional industrial technology development programs among the regional strategic industrial development program that the central government and Daegu metropolitan city jointly promoted between 2004 and 2012. Specifically, in this research, the authors are trying to identify the effects of R&D capabilities and technical development tasks on technological and managerial performance.

The dependent variables of this study are technical and economic performance. Technical performance, product and process innovation, economic performance, sales and export increases were measured using five-point Likert scales. The authors added the contribution of sales through technology development to economic performance. The independent variable is the company’s R&D capability, measured by the number of R&D staff compared to the average total number of employees from 2004 to 2012. The characteristics of the technology development tasks were measured by technical characteristics, market characteristics and collaborative research types. The technological characteristics were measured by seven factors, including technological change, technical difficulty, potential in commercialization, competition between domestic and foreign competitors, difficulty in introducing overseas technology and the technological gap. Market characteristics were largely divided into complexity, dynamics and competitiveness. The types of collaborative research were divided into whether or not there were collaborative research with the participation of large corporations. The control variables are firm size (number of employees) and firm age. Regression analysis was used to analyze the determinants of performance, and a difference analysis was conducted to determine the effect of collaborative research on performance.

The main determinants of the regional industrial technology development program performance are the characteristics of the technology development task rather than the internal R&D capability; moreover, the technical characteristics, complexity of the developed product market and participation of large corporations had significant effects on R&D capability. The R&D capacity of firms in internal R&D capacity had a significant effect only on the improvement of technology development ability. Therefore, R&D capacity, which is the main determinant of technology innovation, did not have a significant effect on the performance of short-term technology development tasks. Technological change, technological difficulty, competition between domestic and foreign competitors and the technological gap had positive effects on performance, excluding sales contributions. In addition, the complexity of the developed product market such as the diversification of demand, competitive product and sales distribution channels had positive influences on the performance of technology development programs, unlike dynamics and competitiveness. In this study, the authors cannot confirm the effect of collaborative research on the performance of the technology development programs, but they confirmed that collaborative research involving large corporations had a positive influence on performance.

The results of the analysis of the determinants of regional industrial technology development programs suggest some implications in the future evaluation of these regional industrial technology development programs. It is necessary to review the application qualification and merit, advance review of the business plans and confirmation, an examination of the research results and performance of the applicants and a review of the technology and market situation of the project. For this, the authors suggest that the written review from the relevant technical experts be submitted to the evaluation committees. Also, when establishing regional industrial development programs, they should be evaluated thoroughly, including detailed information and contents about the technical and market characteristics of the local industry.

This research is one of the first to investigate the achievements of R&D support programs among regional industrial development programs in Korea. The results of this study can substantially contribute to the development and implementation of the R&D support policies of the central and local governments. Furthermore, the findings suggest guidelines for improving the performance of R&D support programs in the future. A theoretical model for enhancing the efficiency of government R&D support programs may be established, and an empirical analysis may be conducted to provide practical and academic implications for further research.

Prior research has reported the indirect implications of firm's dynamic capabilities on their competitive firm performance. Our attention now turns to open innovation since it has been confirmed to be an influential factor contributing to the superior performance of technological firms. So far there has been little research on assessing the relationship between a firm's dynamic capabilities as an antecedent of the competitive performance of the firm or investigations into the mediating role of open innovation in this relationship.

Drawing on the theory of dynamic capabilities, we developed a framework as a way to better understand the role of open innovation, which could then help to better explain the relationship between firms' dynamics capabilities and their competitive firm performance. Based on the empirical data of 465 firms operating in innovative and non-innovative industries, we employed structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine the research hypotheses and the path relationships in the proposed model.

The SEM analysis revealed that a firm's dynamic capabilities significantly impact its open innovation performance and that open innovation, consequently, impacts the competitive performance of the firm. Moreover, the results show that the path between dynamic capabilities and competitive firm performance is partially mediated through open innovation.

The findings provide practical implications and draw managerial attention to the importance of: (1) investing in innovation, (2) engaging customers in the innovation process and (3) maintaining innovation management excellence as significant antecedent factors in increasing competitive firm performance.

Considering the lack of empirical research in the literature on the links between dynamic capabilities and open innovation, this paper contributes to the dynamic capabilities and open innovation literature by confirming that open innovation not only mediates the relationship between these two aspects but also strengthens the effect the dynamic capabilities have on competitive firm performance. Besides, due to the significant impact of dynamic capabilities on open innovation, dynamic capabilities might be regarded as an antecedent of open innovation.

Focusing on the specific context of two European old industrial regions – South Yorkshire (UK) and North Region of Portugal – this paper aims to identify and conceptualise a set of relational capabilities that business leaders perceive to play a key role in industrial rejuvenation.

A qualitative research design operationalised via case studies was followed for the empirical analysis. Data collection was developed through in-depth interviews with managing directors in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) belonging to the metal and engineering industry and the textile and footwear sectors in the two old industrial regions. Data analysis followed the techniques of data categorisation, within case-analysis and cross-case analysis.

The study identifies relational capabilities that firms use to identify, access and leverage new knowledge: frequent meetings with customers; frequent meetings with suppliers; dialogue with government to influence policy that encourages research and technology transfer; partnership actions for the commercialisation of products and services; active membership with sector associations; immersion in science and technological parks; intentionally establishing links with entrepreneurship-supporting entities; human resources development by technical training institutions; and systematic links with the University. The relational capabilities identified require structured communication processes and alliance management practices to enable and support absorptive capacity and learning in inter-organisational networks.

The relational capabilities identified can help position regions in specific markets and value chains, contribute to improving regions’ internal and external connections and assist in combining regions’ strengths to create industrial capability in high-growth-potential areas.

This paper highlights the role of relational capabilities as a way to secure access to knowledge and competencies needed for firms’ innovation and avoidance of competency traps. This is particularly relevant in the context of European smart specialisation policy, where key regional stakeholders collectively engage in the identification of areas of competitive strength, enhanced coordination and strategic alignment of resources. The study is not without limitations, as findings are based on case studies of SMEs operating in the manufacturing industry and the analysis of relational capabilities is focused on knowledge novelty.