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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.

Continuous understanding of the best practices associated with new product development is a constant research opportunity to advance knowledge in the field, as far as changes in the business environment and the increasing turbulence level in different market segments create and reposition the importance of practices over time.

Based on a systematic review, the study aimed to analyze the 100 most relevant articles published in international journals on new product development (NDP), identifying new patterns on the best practices for new product development and the types of relationship involved in NPD.

Among the several practices observed in the literature, the analysis point to a larger group of studies that converge on the identification of a positive and significant relationship in integration – simultaneously – between supplier, company, customers and strategic alliances and the performance of NPD.

These results support integration as a cross-cutting and structural best practice for NPD, as long as it is constituted as a capacity, mainly applied in highly turbulent environments. This approach supported the proposition of a new framework.

Organizations will be able to implement the proposed framework to NPD strategy in order to prioritize resources in best practices, aiming to increase the performance of new product development.

The adoption of integration and co-creation practices for the development of new products expands the possibilities of economic and social development, based on the involvement of the actors in this network.

This model had not yet been proposed in the literature, filling a gap in the agenda for future studies.

This study aims to focus on a key unanswered question about how digitalization and the knowledge processes it enables affect firms’ strategies in the international arena.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies covering over 20 years of research (from 2000 to 2023) and including 73 journal papers.

This review allows us to highlight a relationship between firms’ international strategies and the knowledge processes enabled by applying digital technologies. Specifically, the authors discuss the characteristics of patterns of knowledge flows and knowledge processes (their origin, the type of knowledge they carry on and their directionality) as determinants for the emergence of diverse international strategies embraced by single firms or by populations of firms within ecosystems, networks, global value chains or alliances.

Despite digital technologies constituting important antecedents and critical factors for the internationalization process, and international businesses in general, and operating cross borders implies the enactment of highly knowledge-intensive processes, current literature still fails to provide a holistic picture of how firms strategically use what they know and seek out what they do not know in the international environment, using the affordances of digital technologies.

This paper aims to explore how customer involvement unfolds in the development of a smart product. Smart product development poses new challenges to firms. In particular, the buyers’ and users’ involvement has shown novel dynamics in smart product development. These peculiarities are linked with the specific characteristics of the digital technology embedded into the smart products. This study’s rationale is to analyse the frictions arising from potential divergent objectives between the focal firm and its customers when digital technologies are embedded in traditional products.

This study adopted an explorative and qualitative approach to investigate new emerging dynamics of customer involvement during technological development. A coffee machine producer is selected as a case study to uncover new insights and a novel perspective on the phenomenon of customer involvement in smart product development. Data analysis followed an abductive approach that allowed to identify the dimensions of friction emerging during the technological development process.

The case study analysis depicts that smart product development presents novel customer involvement dynamics. In particular, this study abductively identifies dimensions of friction emerging between the focal firm and buyers/users. Friction arises in the technological interface between the actors involved. These dimensions of friction address the complexities of developing technology in terms of smart products with customer involvement. This study suggests that embedding of technology into an existing product might change how customers are involved.

Even though customer involvement in product innovation has been extensively studied in management literature, this paper focused on a new type of innovation, smart products. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies have yet empirically explored customers’ involvement while embedding digital technologies into existing products to create smart products. In particular, this study sheds light on the dimensions of friction emerging between the focal firm and the actors of the business network. This study unfolds novel contributions to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing literature on technological development.

This paper aims to identify critical factors that influence small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) suppliers’ involvement in their customers’ product development and contrast these with the factors identified from the customer perspective.

A multiple case study approach was used, including four companies. Data were collected through 32 semi-structured interviews, six workshops and documents.

A model is presented that merges this study’s nine identified critical factors with seven critical factors from the customer perspective. The model provides a dual perspective of supplier involvement in product development, wherein the supplier and customer perspectives are concurrently addressed. Some factors are unique for the supplier, but several mirror those on the customer side.

The study is based on data from SME suppliers in Northern Europe. As it is expected that SME companies are more constrained by limited resources, future studies could study critical factors at larger suppliers.

Customers and suppliers having insights about the critical factors can provide better conditions for product development for the other actor; for example, when evaluating customer–supplier integration.

The presented model of critical factors provides a more nuanced picture of supplier involvement in product development as prior research has been biased toward the customer perspective. This study emphasizes the importance of contextual information that has been unnoticed in the literature.

This study aims to develop a systematic method called servitization maturity model to support companies in developing distinctive capabilities for successful servitization.

The concept of maturity models is adopted to support companies in developing distinctive capabilities for servitization. A systematic literature review and case study approach are employed to develop the maturity model.

The findings highlight 46 capabilities classified into seven categories: strategy and leadership, performance, offerings, customers, organization, network and digital technology. Furthermore, the evolutionary path is defined by combining two types of levels, i.e. capability and maturity levels, to develop these capabilities.

The evolutionary path was partially validated through the application, while further investigation is required to validate the evolutionary path. Therefore, future research should investigate the further validation of the evolutionary path by conducting multiple case studies.

The proposed maturity model enables companies to not only capture the bigger picture of the required capabilities without oversight, but also determine a process for improving the requisite capabilities with feasible efforts.

Existing maturity models focused on the transition from less to more advanced services. However, recent studies emphasized that companies need to determine strategies that reflect their capabilities rather than simply move toward more advanced services. Based on this assumption, this study provides successive stages that enable companies to improve their capabilities through feasible efforts.

This study aims to conduct a thorough literature review to map current studies on international marketing capabilities (IMCs) applying dynamic capabilities view (DCV). The aim of this study is to increase the chances for more conceptual and terminological rigor in future research in this particular research area.

This is a systematic literature review following the established review process of reviews in leading (international) marketing journals. A multilevel analytical approach was adopted, combining inductive coding with deductive coding and following the logic of antecedents-phenomena-consequences.

Synthesis of 20 rigorously selected previous empirical studies on IMCs applying DCV reveals that academic interest in these capabilities is well justified and growing and there are some well researched antecedents to focal capabilities (e.g. inter-organizational capabilities, outside-in market orientation) as well as their prevalent consequences (e.g. export and innovation performance). There is little knowledge of moderators to these links, especially with regard to consequences. This review illustrates that the current research lacks consistency in how key constructs are defined and measured, provides the guide to future conceptualization and measurement of so-called International Dynamic Marketing Capabilities (IDMCs) and proposes some concrete research directions.

The authors extend prior research in the investigated topic by critically evaluating prior works, providing improved conceptualization of IDMCs as well as concrete research agenda for IDMCs structured along recommendations for Theory, Context and Methods (TCM framework).

In recent decades many emerging markets (EMFs) have undertaken entrepreneurial transformations to adapt to institutional transition and industrial change. Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) provided EMFs viable ways to revitalize, reconfigure, and transform successfully with the dynamic environment. Although previous research examined government roles on EMFs' CE activities, little is known about the mechanisms of how government exerts influence on CE activities. To fully understand CE of EMFs, we propose a stage model to explore specific roles governments play that affect CE activities over time. In particular, we investigate how governments' grabbing hand, helping hand, and invisible hand roles affected Chinese auto firms' CE activities at different stages from 1980 to 2016. Government involvement is summarized and the advantages and disadvantages of these roles are analyzed.

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.

In the development processes of a product’s market life cycle, there are three phases of an enterprise’s innovation: new product development, production processes, and product management. In this article, the analyses of benefit and costs, value, and profit to companies are discussed in different stages. New logistics features that appear in an enterprise’s supply chain based on innovative modeling are discussed. Then a logistics model and its technical system based on the classified logistics center are established, which are appropriate for innovative modeling within an agile supply chain. Using the basic theory and techniques of ‘extenics’, the formal conception of innovative modeling-based manufacture in logistics is presented, and the matter-element models are established. Finally, a case study demonstrates the results.