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The paper aimed to summarize innovative rules of Chinese manufacturing enterprises, and put forward some insights in optimal allocation of innovation resources and enhancing the capability of indigenous innovation, so as to overcome the innovation dilemma.

Having diagnosed the current research of innovation flows, the authors defined the concept and stated characteristics of mainstream and new‐stream innovation. Innovation life cycle theory and technology trajectory theory were used to map two evolution patterns of mainstream and new‐stream innovation. It took weeks to stay in firms to obtain original data and interview managers, engineers, and mechanists. From the case study the authors proposed the improvement projects and opportunities for firms to overcome the “innovation dilemma”.

In the indigenous innovation process, enterprises should breed new‐stream innovation as they strengthen the mainstream innovation, view the new‐stream technology as the innovation direction, and fulfill the constant innovation in the convergent innovation and replace evolution process. Meanwhile, enterprises should take precautions both to expand and develop, and fulfill technology transition and innovation upgrade through convergent innovation. Furthermore, firms' convergent innovation, which will finally achieve the “projects‐talents‐products‐markets” collaborative innovation, should be clear about target market and project‐oriented, take the product as the carrier, and be committed to cultivate creative talents and innovative teams.

This paper enriches the existing theory on indigenous innovation by introducing the new concept of mainstream and new‐stream innovation. The findings would help firms to jump out from the innovation morass.

Innovation dynamics have been the object of study of several researchers, focusing in particular on technological innovation and the emergence of a dominant design. However, these models have been challenged by how the pervasiveness of digital technologies is speeding up the pace at which innovation evolves. On the other hand, a growing body of literature in innovation management has started underlining the relevance of new product and service meanings as a source of innovation.

This research aims to study the different innovation dynamics within an industry, investigating not only how companies react to fast-changing functional advancements but rather how their behavior changes as shifts in meaning occur. To properly assess the phenomenon, this longitudinal study analyzes the social media industry, strongly subjected to continuous functional advancements, through a deep dive in the 160 innovations introduced between 2003 and 2017 by the eight leading players in the industry.

Our results illustrate the co-existence of different approaches to innovation within an industry and hint that consequent and fast cycles of innovation in both functionalities and meanings discourage the emergence of a dominant design.

Our results help managers and innovators acknowledge the possibility to leverage not just on the technological dimension of innovation but also the reason why people use a given product or service, innovating its meaning. Furthermore, our results recognize the co-existence of different innovation streams upon which innovators can act.

This research contributes to the extant literature in innovation management, extending the classical models of innovation dynamics by including the evolution of innovations of meaning in relation to technological innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize and classify extant research and to better understand the past, present, and future state of the theory of value co-creation. Its main objectives are: to identify the different theoretical perspectives and research streams that characterize and define the co-creation literature, and to highlight the connections between them; to look for emerging trends and gaps in the literature by comparing the most recent papers with those representing the field's core.

The paper relies on bibliometric data: co-citation techniques were employed to select, analyze, and interpret citation patterns within the co-creation literature.

The paper identified two main clusters, as well as specific research streams and common themes, representing scholarly journals’ publications on co-creation over the past years. These research streams and themes apply three different theoretical perspectives: service science, innovation and technology management, and marketing and consumer research. Data from the most recent publications has been used to verify if and how the original streams and themes are reflected in the contemporary debate.

Inevitably, the findings of the analysis have limitations related to the research design, the databases, and the applied bibliometric methods.

From a practical perspective, the research impacts on theory building, management decision making, and teaching.

This study depicts the remarkable development of the literature on co-creation and shows the latent structure underlying its different research streams. To the best knowledge, this study is the first to determine co-citation frequencies from both the SSCI and Scopus databases.

The ecosystem perspective on innovation and business has emerged as the secret sauce of innovative organizations. While its theoretical foundations are premised on innovation system literature, the broad adoption of the ecosystem concept has resulted in conceptual ambiguity. The purpose of this paper is to tackle the ambiguous use of innovation ecosystem terminology and structure a conceptual frame for the field, identifying definitions of an innovation ecosystem and how the concept has been established in previous literature.

This paper examines the ambiguous use of terminology by reviewing the literature with bibliometric coupling and co-citation analysis by which thematic differences in ecosystem literature were identified. The study gathered the scientific publications from Thomson Reuters Web of Sciences Core Collection (n=4,681) from 1990 to 2015.

Six major bibliometrically coupled clusters were identified, of which the three largest clusters are innovation system studies, regional innovation studies and technological innovation studies. In addition, further analysis shows an emerging cluster that is focused on ecosystems, having its roots in eight seminal papers. This ecosystem research cluster includes seven sub-clusters, such as innovation ecosystem studies, business ecosystem studies and studies focusing on ecosystem development.

The authors’ approach highlights how a lot of recent ecosystem studies actually belong to previous, well-developed research streams. However, there is also a separate, emergent research stream that includes the innovation and ecosystem studies. As a research implication, the paper concludes by suggesting the research agenda for further studies.

Even though literature on innovation systems and ecosystems is extensive literature, no studies have captured the emergence of the ecosystems approach and its relation with the systems of innovation literature.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a sound basis to facilitate further research on innovation management at logistics service providers (LSPs).

Content analysis of extant literature was undertaken and supplemented by conceptual deliberations.

Future LSP‐specific innovation research should be undertaken. While comparatively much knowledge on innovation management by LSPs does already exist, it is hardly integrated. More comprehensive studies of LSPs' innovation processes and systems are required.

The review is limited to articles written in English and published in academic journals from 1999 to mid‐2009. This research should be supplemented by empirical research, in particular case studies.

LSPs can compare their own innovation management concepts to the body of scientific knowledge presented here. As long as research does not take their specific context into account, LSPs are required to adapt more general concepts to their needs.

This paper outlines theoretical features of a research stream on innovation management at LSPs. It integrates previous findings on LSPs' innovation management in a suitable framework, and it proposes an agenda for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the question: to what extent does the process of establishing radical innovation proposals identify new potential for improved performance? The goal is to determine the types of early stage concepts that are developed, their potential performance impact on the existing business and their potential value to the organization ex ante decision making with respect to choice of projects to pursue.

The authors apply a participatory case study approach combined with a content analysis of data from an idea management system that was utilized by the case organization. The authors build new empirically based theory on the direct and indirect value that emerges by creating new potential concepts to the innovation stream of an existing company.

The authors conclude that three types of performance-improving activities are developed to be exploited during opportunity recognition and concept development, through a disciplined approach to uncovering potential RI projects. These concern existing products and production, as well as the conceptualization of new products to the organization, market and world.

Approaching high uncertainty projects in a disciplined manner can be beneficial to an organization, since knowledge that is directly exploitable to improve performance is identified during the exploration process.

The paper is original since the authors treat the study of innovation as an independent variable. The authors apply a theory-building approach based on empirical evidence that was collected in a real life setting and not in a business school setup. The findings are novel because the authors examine the potential value of radical innovation processes ex ante realization and decision making. Hence, the authors examine what happens before the archetypical performance measurements of realized innovation projects can be utilized to verdict the success or failure.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model that explains how learning processes at the team level connect with individual and organizational levels of learning in technology-based ventures, thereby influencing the evolution of innovation capabilities in the entrepreneurial process.

The 4I organizational learning framework is used as an overarching theoretical structure to acknowledge entrepreneurial learning as a dynamic process that operate on multiple levels in technology-based ventures. Embedded in this logic, research on team learning is integrated into this theorizing to examine how learning processes at the team level bridge and connect with learning processes operating at individual and organizational levels.

The conceptual model identifies different sets of team learning processes critical for the routinization and evolution of innovation capabilities in technology-based ventures. In this respect, the conceptual model advances the scholarly understanding of entrepreneurial learning as a dynamic process operating across multiple levels in technology-based ventures.

By conceptualizing how individual streams of experiences over time become institutionalized via interaction, conversation and dialogue, the paper provides novel insights into the critical role of team learning for bridging individual and organizational levels of learning in the entrepreneurial learning process.

Research in institutional openness and collaboration-based innovation has advanced considerably in the last decade. The complexity and heterogeneity of innovation, however, turn the one-fits-all approach questionable and unveil the need to address several and different settings and industries. The purpose of this paper is to address this demand by mapping the themes covered in the research under the collaborative innovation umbrella having specifically the food and drink sector as a context.

The paper is based on secondary data sources, namely, a literature review of open innovation in the food and beverage (F&B) sector.

This paper builds upon a framework to classify the extant research in open innovation in the food industry and position the advancements in comparison to the general literature in the field. The categorization of the publications shows that topics like the role of networks, innovation systems, user-innovation and research and development alliances have attracted mostly attention so far, but there is still a demand for deeper and more comprehensive investigations. The field would also profit from inquiries that deal with mindset and managerial capabilities, cross-industry partnerships, converging value chains and globalization of innovation, among others.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first papers to map research topics and research designs that have been covered to date on the field of open and collaborative innovation in the F&B industry.

The purpose of this paper is, firstly, to review existing schools of thought and to identify present research fields in new service development (NSD) and service innovation research, and, secondly, to discuss future research opportunities.

The literature review is based on a search for “service innovation” and “NSD” in titles, abstracts and keywords of articles. As a result of looking at the references, as well as through analysis of papers which cite the articles identified, additional publications are included in this study.

Four schools of thought and five distinct research fields are presented. Herein, the authors show that there is a lack of studies of organisational innovations, and that differences in the drivers for radical or incremental innovations may be of degree rather than of kind. Further, contradictory results in the research field on differences versus similarities of new product and NSD are identified. In addition, the authors propose possible pathways for future research for each research field and school of thought.

The scope of publications included in this review may be subject to criticism as book‐publications may be under‐represented in this review. Also, the keywords used for the initial search could include additional words.

The paper groups previously scattered research activities from various backgrounds such as marketing and operations into distinct research fields, and presents both the status quo and a discussion of possible directions for future research.

The purpose of this study is to conceptualize the paradigm of meaningful innovation (MI) by exploring the theoretical basis, identifying its core concepts and key processes, and supporting it with evidence from leading world-class enterprises.

Based on a systemic literature review on the evolution of innovation paradigms, this study builds a conceptual framework to explicate the core concepts and process of MI. Moreover, a horizontal embedded case study of GREE electric appliances is conducted to further enrich, refine and support the proposed framework.

The main finding of this study is that MI could be regarded as a process of integrating innovation elements (resources, capabilities, systems, etc.) with internal and external innovation meaning to obtain outcomes with both economic value and social significance. As a “long-termism” paradigm with meaning identification and conversion as its core, MI is driven by the collaboration of “deductive mechanism” and “reflective mechanism.”

Based on the previous studies concerning innovation paradigms on the internal and external meaning, this paper proposes an integrated framework of MI. In this framework, enterprises can consider internal and external meanings through deductive and reflective mechanisms, to better coordinate resources, capabilities, institutions, markets and other factors to achieve higher innovation performance.