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Performance-based contracting (PBC) has been gaining popularity over the years. However, empirical studies investigating the impact of PBC features have been limited. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of PBC features leading to quality investment that fosters financial benefits.

After examining the validity and reliability of scale items through confirmatory factor analysis, this study tested hypotheses using covariance-based structural equation modeling of survey data from 381 supply, logistics and operations managers.

The findings reveal the impact of PBC features (joint knowledge generation, goal congruence and incentive alignment) on financial benefits and the mediation impact of quality investment between these features and financial benefits. The upfront investment for quality enhancement was found facilitator of PBC features to achieve financial benefits. The findings also reveal the importance of collaborative communication and information sharing for knowledge generation that leads financial benefits through quality investment. This study shows that PBC governance strengthens the theory of relational view by empowering collaborative efforts and aligning goals and incentives within downstream suppliers for knowledge generation and quality enhancement.

An analysis of PBC features by industry would be very beneficial in differentiating between and more thoroughly understanding the commonalities and differences across various sectors. Investigating how these change across industries would also help identify any bias in PBC implementation.

This study illustrates that it will be practical and beneficial for suppliers to understand the major drivers of quality investment and the relationship between quality investment and the financial benefits of selecting PBC.

Unlike most previous studies, this research contributes to the literature in that it is one of the relatively few examples of empirical research on PBC features. Overall, the findings of this study will improve our understanding of how PBC features enhance upfront investment in quality and improve financial benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to show how science-industry R&D cooperation (SIRC) generates effects on the strategy developed by firms to appropriate the benefits of innovations. Given the plurality of cooperation patterns between firms and public R&D institutions and the variety of appropriation mechanisms used by firms to protect generated knowledge or to strengthen their market position, this paper investigates to what extent different forms of cooperation are associated with different effects on appropriation strategy.

As evidence of this, the authors carry out a multiple case study, covering nine biopharmaceutical Argentine firms whose innovation projects are developed in cooperation with public R&D institutions. Using critical dimensions identified by public-private R&D cooperation literature, the paper analyzes the characteristics of cooperation in the cases studied, looking for different patterns. Given the existence of various appropriation mechanisms identified by appropriability literature, the paper analyzes how firms use (or not) those mechanisms within the specific context of jointly generated innovation.

The paper shows that SIRC generates opposing effects on the various appropriation mechanisms used by firms, both challenging and strengthening them. Likewise, the identification of three cooperation patterns in Argentine biopharmaceutical sector, namely, contract R&D, internalization and coordination, allows appreciating how each pattern affects differently the appropriation mechanisms used by firms, being the coordination one, the most functional to the appropriation strategy of firms analyzed.

The arguments presented here are necessarily limited to the biopharmaceutical Argentine sector, which is strategic to the country, for accumulated capabilities in scientific and business aspects. The analysis could be enriched by extending it to other industries with similar innovation characteristics and to other countries, where patents have a similar weight (emerging countries) or a different one (developed countries).

Innovation and public-private collaboration policies may benefit from the analysis presented here, which helps to assess advantages and challenges of different SIRC logics on firms’ appropriation issues and to considerate which aspects allow cooperation and appropriation combining in a more virtuous form.

There is no paper that explicitly examines the effects generated by different SIRC patterns on the appropriation strategy of firms, conceived as a combination of different mechanisms which may include patents but is not limited to them.

This paper aims to present an impact analysis in the educational dimension of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and specifically on its “knowledge and innovation community” (KIC), focused on the information and communications technology sector named “EIT Digital” in the university field.

After reviewing the current situation on education in ICT-related engineering and the need to address new professional profiles and/or complement the current ones to increase the value of the new professionals in a globalised society, the principles behind the EIT model are analysed, taking the experience accumulated in EIT Digital as a basis for discussion at master level.

The conceptual framework on “what” and “how” of the EIT described from the educational perspective constituted sound bases for ensuring the value of the EIT KICs as drivers for institutional innovation and structural reform. As the practical experience of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) shows, the policy experimentation space provided by EIT Digital has acted as an internal transformation driver for European universities. It has played a key role to accelerate structural reforms once partner universities assumed the need of modifying or reinterpreting “any internal regulation to participate better in the EIT”.

This analysis is used as a basis for the design of an institutional agenda of education transformation in the rest of the UPM where the innovation and entrepreneurship vision is inserted into the technical education to give future professionals the tools and capacities to serve as catalyser agents of the innovation system.

This paper aims to explore the role and meaning of openness for the purpose of enhancing the understanding of collaborative innovation from an industrial network perspective.

The theoretical framework is based on the Industrial Network Approach, and the concepts of activity links, resource ties and actor bonds are used as a starting point for capturing the content and dynamics of the interaction. The empirical part consists of five case studies: two historical and three contemporary cases dealing with collaborative innovation projects. The cases are analyzed with regard to openness in business relationships and their connections in the network.

The main contribution is a conceptualization of openness in business relationships and relationship connections. The paper describes various forms and contents of openness – and closeness. It is postulated that the concept of openness can be used as an analytical tool for digging deeper into relationship and network-related issues of relevance to firms’ behavior in the context of collaborative innovation. Openness, as it is defined in this paper, is also put forward as an explanation of why (or why not) collaborative innovation projects become successful.

The conceptualization of openness differs from openness as it is commonly described in the open innovation literature. There, openness is the opposite of closeness, that is, a pattern where the innovation activities take place internally within the company. In this paper, openness, instead, has to do with how firms interact with other network actors in the context of collaborative innovation.

This paper aims to examine how the different dimensions of project members’ intra-organizational social capital – cognitive, affective and relational – facilitate knowledge integration in project-based organizations, and how knowledge integration, in turn, impacts explorative and exploitative learning.

Based on an analysis of 129 R&D Spanish organizations, the study analyzes the interconnections between the different dimensions of social capital and how they affect to knowledge integration as antecedent of explorative and exploitative learning in project-based organizations.

Results confirm that knowledge integration is beneficial for both exploratory and exploitive learning and thus that R&D organizations may be thus ambidextrous in their knowledge management. Related to the three dimensions of social capital, only the cognitive dimension (shared vision) has a significant impact on knowledge integration. However, the analysis confirms the interconnections between the three dimensions of social capital: the relational dimension (social interaction ties) and the cognitive dimension (shared vision) have significant effect on the relational one (trust), and the relational dimension also has an influence on the cognitive dimension. The model proposed in this study thus shows an acceptable capacity to discern the different influence of the dimensions of internal social capital on knowledge integration and, subsequently, ambidextrous learning.

This paper examines the importance of intra-organizational social capital, in terms of their cognitive (shared vision), relational (trust) and structural (social interaction ties) dimensions, for explorative and exploitative learning in project-based organizations. The analysis takes the baton of previous literature where is suggested that the three dimensions of social capital are interlocked and not just need to be considered simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between innovative culture, innovation efforts, and their performance among knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Innovation intensity is evaluated in the technical and administrative domains. Performance indicators include customer-related outcomes and market and financial results relative to competition. To provide insight into how innovativeness contributes to sustaining a KIBS' competitiveness, the mediating role of its predisposition to involve customers and front-line employees in new service development is also considered.

In accordance with the objectives of the research, and from an extensive review of the literature, the authors develop a conceptual model and test it on a sample of 154 Spanish KIBS using structural equation modelling.

The results show that KIBS' appraisal of customers' and front-line employees' participation in new service co-creation is strongly determined by the firm's innovative culture. Organizations with a greater predisposition to new service co-creation achieve higher innovation rates which lead to sustained performance.

As dynamism of the KIBS sector has an impact on the whole economy it is also necessary to understand the most advisable management practices in KIBS to foster innovation and improved performance, although relatively few studies have approached this issue. The importance of customers and front-line employees as co-creators in new service development (NSD) is generally appreciated, although the literature is not conclusive with respect to the feasibility of co-creation and its influence on a firm's performance. The present research introduces an organizational perspective to approach co-creation by analyzing how various organizational cultural types (innovativeness, and the appraisal of front-line employees and customers as co-creators in NSD) interact and contribute to KIBS' competitiveness.

We investigate the impact of Absorptive Capacity (ACAP) for SMEs embedded in Collaborative Networks (CNs) on innovation performance, considering the network stages and the influence of partnership quality.

We use a mixed methodology consisting of a qualitative than a quantitative phase. The first stage relies on an in-depth literature review and 22 interviews with 17 manufacturing SMEs having operated in collaborative innovation projects to characterize the potential and realized ACAP of such SMEs in the creation and operation stages of a CN. The second phase aims at testing four hypotheses through a hierarchical regression based on 74 responses to a survey involving SMEs with prior CN experience.

Our results explain how an SME’s ACAP in the creation stage affects its ACAP in the operation stage. We also demonstrate that this latter capability contributes positively to innovation performance in the CN. Furthermore, partnership quality was found to have counterproductive effects regarding potential ACAP.

We provide manufacturing SMEs with guidance to deploy ACAP throughout their collaborative experience and overcome the potential pitfalls of good partnership quality.

We operationalize ACAP of manufacturing SMEs to contribute to mutual innovation goals in CNs and uncover its properties. We explain how this dynamic capability accumulates over the CN stages to result in higher innovation performance and show how it helps in striking a balance between the “dark” and “virtuous” sides of partnership quality.

In the year 2000, the Agricultural Research Business Unit (ARBU) of the Swiss Federal Office of Agriculture (FOA) decided to carry out a foresight process. Foresight means taking a systematic look at the future in order to be able to draw conclusions about actions taken or not taken in the present. Foresight is now best practise and is applied internationally by a growing number of countries and organisations, particularly in the areas of research and development, regional planning and business planning. The scenario technique seemed to us to be a suitable way of tackling the assignment. Over recent months we held a total of four scenario workshops, each of several days. Participants included people from a wide area connected with agricultural research together with representatives of related social fields. The result was two very different, but internally consistent scenarios (alternative ideas of the future). Based on the two scenarios developed, we drew up a master guideline with concrete measures fit to face the future. The results show that as far as organisational measures are concerned, staff motivation and training are key factors. With regard to technical measures, much attention is focused on the topic of food safety and health. It is now up to decision makers to determine the extent to which they accept and implement the recommendations of foresight in strategic business planning.

The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art in empirical research on constructive controversy in the context of business organizations and to outline strategic implications both for research and practical application.

Literature search on constructive controversy in relevant databases identified 33 empirical publications from 1980 to 2009. The paper analyzes and summarizes characteristics of the studies, methodological approaches, and empirical findings.

The literature review reveals that most studies are conducted in the industrial and service sector. Authors mostly apply a quantitative approach using interviews, experiments, and surveys. Empirical findings show that constructive controversy supports decision making, learning, interpersonal relationships, and productivity. In most cases goal interdependence is taken as independent variable.

There is a need for further consolidating the findings either by experimental verification or by field studies. A processual and longitudinal approach should be emphasized and the methodical repertory should be expanded by applying qualitative methods like observation. There is a need for expanding the scope of constructs and analyzing post-modern collaboration forms. Linking controversy to organizational processes like organizational learning would lead to a deeper understanding of innovation processes in organizations.

The implementation of the controversy procedure can support organizational processes like decision making, problem solving, learning, and innovation. This offers opportunities to expand the research field.

This article provides a systematic review on constructive controversy in the business context for the first time.