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The study analyses how Industry 4.0 and underlying digital technologies influence the design of ecosystems in global value chains (GVCs).

A qualitative-exploratory research design is used. It deploys a multiple case study based on semi-structured interviews with 73 German managers of multinational enterprises. Applying a qualitative content analysis, the expert interviews are inductively analyzed and triangulated with secondary data to develop a synthesized data structure.

The analysis reveals a general tendency towards decentralization of value chain activities. Depending on the nature of each activity and several contextual factors, however, hybrids between centralization and decentralization of processes can be observed in Industry 4.0 environments. Consequences for global ecosystems are altered cooperation with business partners, new organizational forms and novel market environments.

Given inherent limitations in scope and methodology, the study calls for cross-industry and cross-country analyses. Further studies should research implications of Industry 4.0 changes in ecosystems and GVCs, and the role digital platforms can play in this context.

The results help companies to analyze and adapt their role in ecosystems and associated GVC activities to Industry 4.0 environments, thus staying competitive in changing market conditions.

This study is among the first to empirically investigate the influence of Industry 4.0 on ecosystems embedded in GVCs. Reflecting existing company environments, it adds an international and company-external perspective to Industry 4.0 research.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether activity-based workspaces (ABWs) are able to solve the privacy-communication trade-off known from fixed-desk offices. In fixed-desk offices, employees work in private or open-plan offices (or in combi-offices) with fixed workstations, which support either privacy or communication, respectively. However, both dimensions are essential to effective employee performance, which creates the dilemma known as the privacy-communication trade-off. In activity-based workspaces, flexible workstations and the availability of different spaces may solve this dilemma, but clear empirical evidence on the matter is unavailable.

To address this knowledge gap, the authors surveyed knowledge workers (N = 363) at a medium-sized German company at three time points (T1–T3) over a one-year period during the company’s move from a fixed-desk combi-office (a combination of private and open-plan offices with fixed workplaces) to an ABW. Using a quantitative survey, the authors evaluated the employees’ perceived privacy and perceived communication in the old (T1) and the new work environments (T2 and T3).

The longitudinal study revealed a significant increase in employees’ perceived privacy and perceived communication in the ABW. These increases remained stable in the long term, which implies that ABWs have a lasting positive impact on employees.

As the privacy and communication dimensions were previously considered mutually exclusive in a single workplace, the results confirm that ABWs can balance privacy and communication, providing optimal conditions for enhanced employee performance.

Consumers’ perceptions of new technologies are vital for the adoption of innovations. However, due to the complexity of technological innovations and associated consumer concerns, marketing communications play a crucial role in shaping attitudes. In this context, the level of technical complexity presented in advertisements can be a critical determinant of communication effectiveness. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

By conducting an experiment in the context of plug-in hybrid electric cars, this study examines the impact of technical complexity on communication effectiveness. The authors also include consumers’ product involvement as a potential moderator of this relationship.

This paper reveals that individuals with low product involvement respond more favourably to technically simple ads. However, medium-involved consumers show the best responses towards ads with a high level of technical complexity. Interestingly, the authors could not find significant attitude differences for high-involvement individuals in terms of the level of technical complexity.

The results support the notion that the advice “keep it short and simple” is not always appropriate. In particular, when marketers want to communicate technological innovations, a more complex presentation can provoke positive reactions, when the audience has at least a medium level of product involvement.

There is little evidence concerning how technical complexity within marketing communications affects consumer attitudes. This study significantly contributes to the understanding of how advertisements of technological innovations are perceived by consumers.

Autonomous technologies represent an increasingly important, but at the same time controversial technological field with enormous potential. From a consumer perspective, however, the growing autonomy of technologies might result in a perceived loss of control, which can lead to consumer resistance. Given the practical and theoretical relevance, this research examines antecedents to consumer adoption of autonomous technologies in the context of self-driving cars.

This article looks through the lens of the technology acceptance model and conducts structural equation modeling.

The study validates the positive effect of perceived usefulness on behavioral intention to adopt self-driving cars. The results further suggest that individuals with a generally negative attitude toward technologies are afraid that they might not be capable of handling the new technology. Moreover, further mediation analyses reveal that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness help us to explain the indirect effects of novelty seeking and technology anxiety on adoption intention.

The results imply that users' perceptions of an autonomous technology's usefulness are an important determinant of technology adoption. Adoption barriers could be overcome by emphasizing the usability of the new technology. On the other hand, individuals who enjoy using the old technology may be persuaded by arguments that focus on the usefulness of the new technology rather than its ease of use.

Self-driving automobiles will change our perception of mobility. It is important to understand the mechanisms that drive the adoption of such innovations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the first empirical evidence on how consumption-supportive packaging functionality influences consumers’ purchase intentions. Consumption-supportive packaging functionality implies that the packaging itself serves a function that actively helps users achieve their consumption goals and that supports the objectives consumers have in mind when using it.

To achieve the research goal, this study presents four between-participant experimental studies. In the studies, this paper tests for the direct effect of consumption-supportive packaging functionality on consumers’ purchase intentions across different product categories. Moreover, this study tests for the mediating effect of perceived product meaningfulness to explain the underlying mechanism (Studies 2 and 3) and for the moderating effect of product complexity (Study 4).

This paper shows that consumption-supportive packaging functionality leads to higher purchase intentions. The findings also reveal that perceived product meaningfulness is one underlying mechanism that helps us to explain the positive effect of consumption-supportive packaging functionality on purchase intention. Moreover, findings reveal that the positive effect of consumption-supportive packaging functionality only works for low-complex products, but not for high-complex ones.

This research offers a new perspective on package design, and thus advances the understanding of how to package functionality can influence consumer responses. Moreover, this study contributes to the Gestalt theory because it applies a holistic design view on the packaging that influences product perception.

For low complex products, marketing managers should consider integrating packaging functionality into their communication strategy to focus on the overall Gestalt of the product. Product designers should integrate consumption-supportive packaging functionality in the product design to evoke positive consumer responses.

The research gives first empirical evidence on how and when consumption-supportive packaging functionality influences consumers’ product evaluations.

Industry 4.0 is assumed to yield extensive industry-spanning opportunities. However, exploiting these opportunities requires a targeted implementation of Industry 4.0. The purpose of this paper is to generate a deeper understanding of relevant implementation action. Existing recommendations are mostly general, highly aggregated and difficult to grasp. Yet, specific and concrete actions that need to be taken to accelerate the realization of Industry 4.0 are essential.

The article uses 13 semi-structured in-depth expert interviews as the source of empirical data. The interviews were conducted with managers from Industry 4.0-experienced German manufacturing companies. All interviews are analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The study reveals relevant and targeted aspects for Industry 4.0 implementation: the development of Industry 4.0-specific know-how, securing financial resources, integrating employees into the implementation process and establishing an open-minded and flexible corporate culture. Further aspects include comprehensive planning processes, cooperation with external partners, proper handling of data interfaces, interdisciplinary communication, an adaptable organizational structure and data security.

The paper is limited to German manufacturing enterprises and should be transferred to other industries and countries.

The study supports managers to effectively implement Industry 4.0 within their organizations and consequently benefit from Industry 4.0 and derives recommendations for future research.

The paper is among the first to give specific and concrete examples for lessons learned from Industry 4.0 implementation, directly obtained from industrial application.

Recent technological and social changes have challenged manufacturing firms to remain competitive in increasingly dynamic markets. A way of facing these challenges is to foster organizational structures that encourage creativity. Although the general importance of organizational creativity for market success is undeniable, few studies on manufacturing firms have provided a nuanced view of how this relationship is affected by firm-external factors (e.g. different levels of market dynamism) and whether and how this leads to greater market success.

This research uses survey data from 255 chief executive officers (CEOs) and top managers of manufacturing firms in Germany. The authors performed different regression analyses to test for direct, mediation, moderation and moderated mediation effects.

The findings show that, in highly dynamic markets, organizational support for creativity indeed helps manufacturing firms to remain competitive by positively influencing firms' innovation performance, which subsequently results in improved market performance. By contrast, in markets with low dynamism, organizational support for creativity has no impact on firms' innovation and market performance.

From a theoretical perspective, this study introduces market dynamism as a novel, so-far underexplored firm-external factor that moderates the relationship between organizational support for creativity and innovation and market performance. This research thus enhances the understanding of the dynamics of organizational creativity and its effects on innovation and market performance in an organizational context of manufacturing firms.

In general, this research emphasizes the importance of establishing a creativity-supporting environment to enhance innovation and market performance. Most importantly, this relationship depends on whether firms are active in highly dynamic or stable markets. Managers should thus consider the level of (future) market dynamism when making decisions about creativity-supporting work environments.

This research provides novel insights into how organizational support for creativity influences innovation and market performance in the manufacturing industry and introduces market dynamism as an important moderating factor.

This study analyzes how technological changes in the context of Industry 4.0 influence buyer-supplier relationships (BSRs).

The study is explorative in nature; hence, an empirical qualitative research design is applied. It bases on 45 expert interviews with managers from German and Austrian industrial companies as empirical data. A qualitative content analysis is conducted to inductively analyze the empirical material and to identify common patterns, themes and categories.

The paper finds that future transactions are mainly based on digitized, automated procedures, transferring various value creation processes to platforms. BSRs become more intense in nature. Companies consolidate their supplier base by focusing on important strategic suppliers.

As the paper is of exploratory nature, it can only present first qualitative insights. Further studies can extend the results by analyzing and contrasting BSRs in various industries or value chain stages and map differences and similarities, respectively.

The paper's results provide implications for management and corporate practice alike. These help companies to raise Industry 4.0's full potential as for BSRs creating and securing long-term and sustainable competitive advantages.

This paper is among the first to empirically investigate BSRs in the context of Industry 4.0. Providing implications for research and corporate practice, it contributes to tapping Industry 4.0's full potential complementing an extra-organizational perspective.

With the rise of social media, the practice of innovation management is changing rapidly as well. While the opening up of corporate innovation processes can be observed in literature as well as in practice (commonly known as “Open Innovation”), we draw the reader’s attention to the strategic potential of social media in innovation management. For this, a conceptual framework will be introduced.

In this chapter, we compare established concepts of knowledge management to potentials of social media in this field, which offer more efficient and promising ways to integrate external knowledge into innovation processes. This approach is discussed by considering the integration of customers and especially Lead-Users into corporate product development. Based on the concept of Open Innovation, we reflect the role of Lead-Users in the innovation process critically. Mounting on our reflections, we show the potentials of social media for integrating Lead-Users and develop a conceptual framework for the integration of Lead-Users using different social media applications.

In this paper, a conceptual framework for integrating Lead-Users by using different social media applications is developed and introduced.

The unique conceptual framework derived in this chapter is enriched with a discussion of the challenges resulting from the implementation of Lead-User integration along with social media in corporate innovation management. The chapter can help companies as well as researchers to implement a process for the integration of Lead-Users by using the potentials of social media applications.

This research aims to analyze the potential of revenue management in the German car industry. The concept offers the chance for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to be more customer‐oriented to reduce costs and increase earnings. To implement revenue management, criteria are required to segment the customers. The car configuration changes and the delivery time look suitable in this context and this paper aims to analyze these.

Survey analysis was conducted with 2974 German buyers of new cars. The respondents recently bought a car or were in the planning process of doing so. A total of 803 data sets could be evaluated statistically using SPSS software. Descriptive statistics and mean test were utilized to test several hypotheses and find out distinctions between the respondents.

The results show that German car buyers could be segmented in to different groups according to the criteria: delivery time and configuration changes. This enables manufacturers to introduce revenue management and realize benefits in better customer orientation and improved supply chain planning.

This research shows that German OEMs, especially the premium OEMs overestimate the value of change flexibility and short delivery times for their customers. The implementation of revenue management could help to reduce complexity and offer each customer the appropriate degree of change flexibility and the optimal delivery time combined with a process‐ and effort‐adequate pricing.