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In this study the authors seek to discuss and empirically analyze coordination mechanisms in innovation‐generating business networks. Their aim is to explore how these coordination mechanisms, as well as the roles of actors, evolve during the development of such networks.

The paper analyses an in‐depth single case study on the development of Finnish Mobile TV in an innovation‐generating business network comprising a heterogeneous range of actors.

The findings suggest that coordination of innovation‐generating business networks combines “management” and “orchestration”, both of which have their distinct roles throughout the development of the network. The latter is used throughout the case in question to communicate vision and build social capital, and the former to coordinate phases closer to commercialization.

The study provides novel evidence in explicating how network coordination mechanisms of management and orchestration change as the innovation‐generating business network evolves. However, there is a need to examine the issue further from different methodological standpoints in order to improve the generalizability of the results.

Managers will be able to use the lessons learned in designing different coordination mechanisms to ensure that the network evolves in the desired direction, and in considering the role of their companies in this development.

The paper enhances understanding of how coordination mechanisms evolve in different phases of innovation‐generating business networks.

Cooperation between competing firms (or coopetition) has been under increasing research interest during the last decade. It is generally proposed that coopetition can be a beneficial strategy that can enable gaining a competitive advantage. Current contributions linking coopetition with actual firm performance, however, are few. In order to address this issue, we conduct an empirical study in the global information and communication technology sector to examine the effect of strategic alliances between key competitors on the performance of a single firm. Our results indicate that a high relative number of strategic alliances among a group of firm’s key competitors contributes negatively to firm performance. This implies that firms should be aware of the risks that are included in cooperating with too many of their most direct competitors.

Firms operating in contemporary hypercompetitive environments have to seek series of temporary advantages, sometimes requiring them to move beyond their current knowledge domains. The existing knowledge‐ and capability‐based views have certain shortcomings in terms of explaining firm competitiveness in such situations. In order to narrow this gap, this study aims to put forward a “knowledge‐based perspective on non‐routine change” to explain how firms can generate innovative processes and outcomes that are disconnected from their current knowledge and capability base.

The study is a conceptual theory‐development paper, which is based on the recent knowledge‐based and capability approaches, and on other relevant literature related to non‐routine change in organizations.

Non‐routine change is defined here as a process and an outcome that is disconnected from the firm's current knowledge and capability base. The process involves the detachment from the firm's current knowledge and capability base, the identification of certain types of disconnected knowledge (slack, unrelated, unused, or unknown), and the leverage and combination of such knowledge in the search for novel, non‐routine change outcomes.

The novelty of this paper lies in its view on firm‐level competitiveness in situations in which the existing knowledge and capability bases are of little value. The study proposes a categorization that explains what types of disconnected knowledge assets are particularly useful in such a process, and identifies where they are likely to be located. Thus, the study provides new insights into the management of knowledge related to non‐routine change in organizations.

The concept of uncertainty is a relevant yet little understood area within supply chain risk management. Risk is often associated with uncertainty, but in reality uncertainty is a much more elaborate concept and deserves more in-depth scrutiny. To bridge this gap, the purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for assessing the levels and nature of uncertainty in this context.

The aim of the study is to link established theories of uncertainty to the management of risk in supply chains, to gain a holistic understanding of its levels and nature. The proposed conceptual model concerns the role of certainty and uncertainty in this context. Illustrative examples show the applicability of the model.

The study describes in detail a way of analysing the levels and nature of uncertainty in supply chains. Such analysis could provide crucial information enabling more efficient and effective implementation of supply chain risk management.

The study enhances understanding of the nature of the uncertainties faced in supply chains. Thus it should be possible to improve existing measures and analyses of risk, which could increase the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chain and logistics management.

The proposed conceptual framework of uncertainty types in the supply chain context is novel, and therefore could enhance understanding of uncertainty and risk in supply and logistics management and make it easier to categorise, as well as initiate further research in the field.

Today, as services and products are becoming increasingly intertwined and the competition increasingly global, delivering customer value is not as simple as it used to be. In this article, we suggest that in contemporary business environment customer value is often systemic by nature. This means that managers need to assess their firm's offering through systems‐thinking perspective in order to find out what are the most effective ways to create value for the customer.

Evidence of systemic customer value is provided in the form of illustrative examples from Apple's and Google's offerings. Furthermore, we utilize a quality function deployment (QFD) tool to provide an example of modeling of the systemic value attributes.

This paper illustrates how such systemic customer value in the firm's offering can be modeled. This enables the tracking down of the functions that produce the most value in terms of meeting various customer needs. A firm that understands the systemic nature of customer value is better able to concentrate on improving the core functions of its offering, thus gaining competitive advantage and value‐based differentiation over its rivals.

The paper identifies three key issues and best practices concerning systemic value that are helpful for practitioners in improving their firms' offerings, i.e. connectivity, the importance of platforms, and the emerging role of free functions.

The novelty of this paper lies in its analysis of systemic value. Value creation for the customer is often approached from a rather narrow perspective, without understanding the systemic viewpoint.

Firms need to reach out for external knowledge in order to keep up with the pace of the markets and to renew themselves. Although research on open innovation and open knowledge search strategies is continuously accumulating, there are as yet only few studies examining the antecedents of the decision to use various external knowledge sources for R&D and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to narrow this gap by examining the effects of firms' strategic orientations on the scope of their open knowledge search.

This study builds on a cross‐industrial survey of Finnish firms in exploring the effects of three types of strategic orientations (customer relationship orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, and technology orientation) on the use of open knowledge search strategies.

The results show that the customer relationship orientation is associated with the tendency of a firm to use a market‐driven knowledge search strategy. The technology orientation, on the other hand, is associated with science and generic knowledge‐driven strategies, whereas the entrepreneurial orientation is associated with the utilization of all the search strategies identified in the study.

The value of various sources of external knowledge depends on the firm's strategic goals and the nature of the industry. Practising managers utilizing the results of this study should be better able to align their organizations in the desired direction in terms of open knowledge search.

The results provide new evidence on firm‐specific heterogeneity in the use of external knowledge sources.

Organizational processes that create conditions to facilitate employee innovativeness have become topical due to the constant demand for organizations to renew themselves. Research shows that human resource management (HRM) practices can been used to create such conditions, but also the important complementary role of organizational trust has been highlighted in this context. In particular, earlier studies have mostly focused on the concept of interpersonal trust. However, impersonal trust (the individual employee’s expectations about the employer organization’s capability and fairness) has recently been suggested to be an equally or even more relevant facilitator supporting the effect of HRM practices on organizational innovativeness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The hypotheses were tested with two large-scale quantitative studies from the forestry and information and communication technology industries in Finland. Structural equation modelling (with LISREL) was used to test hypothesis.

This study shows that effective HRM practices indeed facilitate organizational innovativeness, and that this effect is partially mediated by impersonal trust in the organization. This result contributes to the existing literature and practice of HRM and the management of organizational innovativeness.

Future studies could include also interpersonal trust in order to study trust-innovativeness linkage. The study also examined this phenomenon only in Finnish context and this sets some limitations to the generalizability of the results. In addition, single respondents were used to assess all the variables used in the study. Further studies could improve on this by utilizing more objective measures of organizational innovativeness.

The results suggest that organizations should pay attention to designing HRM practices so that they facilitate the building of impersonal organizational trust. In order to improve innovativeness through organizational trust, it is crucial to develop an organization-wide HRM system, since practices that are inconsistently used can lead to unwanted or inefficient results. Strategic and managerial actions related to HRM could increase employees’ trust in the organization and subsequent conditions for providing continuously innovative solutions.

The authors add to the literature by identifying the connection of HRM practices to contributing to behavioural, process and strategic innovativeness through the mediation of impersonal trust. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is one of few studies and the first systematic large sample study that examines impersonal trust and its relationship between HRM practices and different types of organizational innovativeness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how different strategy theories complement each other with respect to understanding competitive advantage of a single firm that utilizes interfirm cooperation.

The paper provides an analytical review of three schools of strategy research in order to highlight their contributions, shortcomings, and interrelations with respect to sustainable competitive advantage and to clarify their explanations of competitive advantage in interfirm cooperation. On the basis of this analysis, an integrated perspective that captures industry, organization, and relationship attributes is proposed.

The paper suggests that old and new paradigms in strategic management (industrial organization economics, resource‐based theories, and the relational view) are applicable alongside each other when analyzing how a single firm gains competitive advantage by utilizing interfirm cooperation. It is argued here that no paradigm can be used to substitute others and thus an integrated perspective is needed. The paper provides a discussion and implications on how each paradigm complements others and illustrate this by sketching a refined strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis framework.

The paper gives a practical implication for managers who utilize traditional SWOT analysis in their decision making. By including relationship potential and limitations to the conceptual toolbox of thinking strategy through SWOT, managers can gain additional insight into internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats analysis.

The study increases understanding on how prevailing perspectives on competitive advantage can be used in analyzing interfirm cooperation.

Organizational performance is increasingly grounded on knowledge-related issues. The two key academic discussions addressing knowledge in organizations are the intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management (KM) literatures. However, there are very few earlier studies systematically combining these approaches and demonstrating how IC assets and their management mechanisms might interact in organizational value creation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and argue a theoretical model depicting the connections between IC, KM practices and organizational performance outcomes.

The paper draws on IC and KM literatures to build a theoretical model on how intellectual asset assets and their management practices interact in producing organizational performance. Several conceptual models and related discussion on the interaction of IC and KM practices are put forth.

Organizational value creation is based on both static (IC assets) and dynamic (KM practices) aspects of organizational knowledge, in various combinations. In this paper, potential interaction effects between IC assets and KM practices in terms of moderation and mediation were conceptually analysed, and four alternative models were proposed on how the knowledge-based issues affect organizational performance.

The paper is purely theoretical without empirical evidence.

The paper suggests that organizational value creation is a function of both possessing valuable intangible assets as well as being able to manage these assets systematically. The four models concerning the interaction of IC assets and KM practices in value creation presented in the paper provide managers with tools to reflect about their own thinking model concerning how knowledge produces value in their own firms.

By addressing both the “static” asset aspect of IC as well as the “dynamic” perspective of how leveraging IC assets can be enabled by systematic managerial activities, the paper combines the key issues in IC and KM literatures and demonstrates how intangible resources should be managed to produce value. The authors are not aware of any previous studies explicitly combining and distinguishing IC and KM fields to this extent. The paper therefore contributes to the literature on knowledge-based issues in organizations at large and potentially offers a theoretical grounding for many empirical and theoretical future studies.

This study aims to examine the effect of firm-specific customer relationship orientation, technology orientation and the marketing–R & D cooperation on market performance. Although the importance of customer focus in R & D has been widely recognized in the literature, less attention has been paid to customer relationship orientation and the simultaneous effect of the three constructs on market performance.

The hypotheses are tested on a multi-industry survey study of 209 R & D-intensive firms in Finland using hierarchical regression analyses, including both direct and interactional effects.

The findings show that customer relationship orientation has a direct positive effect on market performance and that technology orientation also has a positive, yet non-significant effect. In addition, the effect of both of these strategic orientations is accentuated when collaboration between marketing and R & D departments is high, providing evidence on the significant moderating effects of these types of processes.

The implications of the research can be interpreted as being generalizable at least to some extent due to the multi-industry nature of the sample. However, the research is bound to a certain type of firm (R & D-intensive) and to a certain national context (Finland), which poses limitations to the study.

The results suggest specific benefits for integrating specialist, complementary knowledge into a firm in terms of R & D and marketing knowledge. Practicing managers across departments should thus consider not only focusing on their specialist areas in markets (e.g. customers or technology) but also utilizing complementary insights within the firm to reap benefits in their fields.

The study focuses on the less-researched concept of customer relationship orientation in parallel with the more established technology orientation. It also provides novel evidence on how the effectiveness of these orientations benefits from firm-internal knowledge transfer between the marketing and R & D departments.