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This study assess how governments can nurture innovation activities by supporting the research of individual companies, establishing new networks for innovation activities, and by contributing to the general contextual factors supporting innovative behavior.

This chapter analyzes alternative possibilities for the governance of innovation support and develops a framework to evaluate the governance of innovation support activities provided by a national innovation agency.

The framework is developed by analyzing how the governance principles in various national innovation systems have emerged when the countries have pursued low-carbon innovation strategies.

This chapter empirically shows a need to broaden the perspective on what can be expected from an adaptive innovation system, as well as the new types of arrangements facing public-private innovation collaboration.

This chapter explores new opportunities for the research community to further the understanding of how to apply various governance mechanisms in different contexts of innovation support especially relating to multi-level governance and co-governing.

The research purpose is to analyse when and how innovation support programmes (ISPs) can affect collaboration between universities and established small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The paper specifically considers SME’s absorptive capacity.

A Swedish research centre is studied in the context of innovation support and two of its SME-ISPs are examined with regards to industry–university collaboration and impact on firm innovation capabilities. Data collection and analysis are performed, using interviews, survey answers, document search and reflectional analysis to evaluate processes and effects of the centre and the programmes.

A developed research centre, integrated into both academia and industry, can support translational collaboration and promote SME innovation absorptive capacity. The action learning elements and the organisational development approaches used when coaching in the ISPs contribute to the SMEs internal absorption capacity and collaborational skills. Organising collaboration into ISPs can provide a relational path to future collaboration with universities, which, for example start with student projects.

The study, though limited to one Swedish region, adds to empirical innovation research as it connects industry–university collaboration and absorptive capacity to organisational learning.

The empirical results indicate possible long-term gains for industry and universities in building collaborative innovation into SME-ISPs.

The contribution of this study pertains to the practice of innovation support for established SMEs with the inclusion of absorption capacity and collaborative innovation development.

This study aims to examine the role of team coaching in regard to team innovation by considering motivational and behavioral intervening mechanisms.

Based on a multisource approach, data was gathered from 97 work teams (341 members and 97 immediate supervisors) in a public safety organization.

Results of structural equation modeling analyses indicate that the relationship between team coaching and team innovation is mediated by team goal commitment and support for innovation. Specifically, team coaching has a direct effect on support for innovation and an indirect effect on this behavioral team process through team goal commitment. In turn, support for innovation may improve the implementation of successful team innovation.

In a global competitive context, innovation represents a key leverage to generate a competitive advantage. Team leaders who engage in coaching behaviors toward their subordinates are likely to foster innovation within their work team. Thus, organizations may benefit by designing and implementing interventions aimed at developing team leaders’ coaching skills and encouraging them to consider coaching as a core managerial responsibility.

On the whole, this study highlights the role of team coaching as a key leverage to stimulate successful innovation in work teams and the motivational and behavioral mechanisms that intervene in this relationship.

Scholars highlight the lack of research that explains the mechanisms leading to knowledge sharing, which appears complex and involves many variables. The primary aim of this study is to investigate the direct effect of organizational support for innovation on job crafting behaviors and knowledge sharing. The second objective is to assess the mediating role of job crafting in the relationship between organizational support for innovation and knowledge sharing. The third aim is to compare the direct effects of organizational support for innovation on job crafting behaviors and knowledge sharing between teleworkers and office workers.

Based on an empirical study involving 193 teleworkers and 191 office workers, the structural equation modeling method was employed to examine the direct and indirect effects of organizational support for innovation on knowledge sharing via job crafting behaviors. The comparison between teleworkers and office workers was investigated using a multigroup approach in AMOS software. This research is grounded in the conservation of resources theory and social exchange theory to elucidate these relationships.

The results indicate that organizational support for innovation has a positive influence on job crafting activities, manifested by the increase in structural and social resources, as well as the amplification of work-related challenges. The results also indicate that organizational support for innovation directly promotes knowledge sharing behavior and indirectly through job crafting. Furthermore, the findings reveal that these effects on job crafting and knowledge sharing are stronger among teleworkers compared to office workers.

The study has limitations. Its cross-sectional design does not establish causality, potentially leading to common method variance. However, after implementing many procedural and performing statistical tests, common method variance was not significant in this research. Replicating the study longitudinally would be valuable. Additionally, considering personality traits and technology characteristics in job crafting behaviors would be beneficial. Lastly, the study focuses only on accountants and predates COVID-19, which may impact its findings and generalizability.

The study’s findings underscore the practical significance of supporting innovation and fostering job crafting to enhance knowledge sharing, particularly for remote workers. It highlights that the extent of employees’ engagement in job crafting depends on the level of innovation support provided in their workplace. To mitigate potential negative outcomes such as increased absenteeism, reduced productivity and retention challenges, organizations could benefit from training supervisors to prioritize and encourage job crafting and knowledge sharing behaviors among employees, especially in telework settings. Ensuring alignment between organizational messaging and managerial attitudes is crucial. Without autonomy or flexibility for job crafting, the positive effects of organizational innovation support may be limited.

This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that job crafting behaviors serves as mechanisms between organizational support for innovation and knowledge sharing. The findings further advance the literature by revealing three psychological and motivational processes that may explain this relationship, particularly when comparing teleworkers to office workers. Our results reveal that the effect of organizational support for innovation on job crafting and knowledge sharing is stronger among workers who telework compared to office workers. This advances the theory of conservation of resources, especially the significance of resource gains, particularly in contexts where employees need resources, such as in telework.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of government support policies and research and development (R&D) activities on product innovation under market uncertainty.

This study applies logistic regression analysis to a sample of 4,000 South Korean manufacturing firms in order to investigate the impact of government policies and R&D activities of the firm on firm innovation performance, with particular interest in the moderating role of the firm's perceived market uncertainty (PMU).

Policies supporting industry/university/institute/local collaboration are found to have greater benefit under high PMU. Surprisingly, support for a consortium among different-sized firms has a negative effect on product innovation, although this negative effect disappears under high PMU. Both support for the protection of intellectual property (IP) and support for the resolution of manpower shortages have strong positive effects on the propensity to innovate products, but in both cases the moderating effects of uncertainty are negative. Finally, all types of R&D activities have positive effects on the propensity to innovate, more so for new product innovation than for improved product innovation.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine analytically the moderating effect of PMU in the effectiveness of government policies promoting innovation in the manufacturing sector. The study is potentially useful both for policymakers in deciding which policies to implement under prevailing market conditions; and for entrepreneurs choosing between different forms of government support, particularly given the abnormal levels of market uncertainty prevailing in the Covid-19 era.

While the value of human capital for technological innovation is well acknowledged, literature on the role of vocational training in corporate innovation is notably scarce. The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of government support for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) competencies on Korean firms’ innovation. The author investigates SMEs’ patent applications (supported by the government to varying degrees) while accounting for firms’ market position, ownership and management structure, as well as prior changes in firms’ technologies, products, processes and other characteristics. Alternative hypotheses about management motivation – the “lazy manager”, “career concerns” and “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses – are also evaluated.

Censored and count data analysis methods are used on a panel of 595 Korean firms covering 2005–2015 from the Korean Human Capital Corporate Survey, Intellectual Property Office and National Investment Commission. A regression discontinuity estimator accounts for potential endogeneity because of support for vocational training at firms.

Firms receiving training support are more innovative than firms without support, but latent effects may play a role. The regression-discontinuity model suggests that firms that succeeded only marginally in obtaining support had higher innovative output than non-recipients near the eligibility threshold.

The findings of this study establish that government support had the intended effect on SMEs’ technological capacity. This cannot be discounted as a simple crowding-out effect. The author also establishes that management–ownership separation within firms was conducive to innovation, that product competition had an inverse U-shaped effect and that management–ownership separation had a substitutable relationship with competition in overcoming managers’ effort avoidance. The findings support the “lazy manager” hypothesis over the “career concerns” and the “special East Asian institutional constraints” hypotheses.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of employee innovative behavior conceptualizing it as distinct from innovation outputs and as a multi-faceted behavior rather than a simple count of “innovative acts” by employees. It understands individual employee innovative behaviors as a micro-foundation of firm intrapreneurship that is embedded in and influenced by contextual factors such as managerial, organizational and cultural support for innovation. Building from a review of existing employee innovative behavior scales and theoretical considerations the authors develop and validate the Innovative Behavior Inventory (IBI) and the Innovation Support Inventory (ISI).

Two pilot studies, a third validation study in the Czech Republic and a fourth cross-cultural validation study using population representative samples from Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic (n=2,812 employees and 450 entrepreneurs) were conducted.

Both inventories were reliable and showed factorial, criterion, convergent and discriminant validity as well as cross-cultural equivalence. Employee innovative behavior was supported as comprising of idea generation, idea search, idea communication, implementation starting activities, involving others and overcoming obstacles. Managerial support was the most proximal contextual influence on innovative behavior and mediated the effect of organizational support and national culture.

The paper advances the understanding of employee innovative behavior as a multi-faceted phenomenon and the contextual factors influencing it. Where past research typically focuses on convenience samples within a particular country, the authors offer first robust evidence that the model of employee innovative behavior generalizes across cultures and types of samples. The model and the IBI and ISI inventories enable researchers to build a deeper understanding of the important micro-foundation underpinning intrapreneurial behavior in organizations and allow practitioners to identify their organizations’ strengths and weaknesses related to intrapreneurship.

The need for accelerating innovation is exacerbated as organizations struggle to either adapt or perish in this unforgiving condition due to the COVID-19 disruption. To address this issue, many organizations have embraced employee-driven participatory innovation to survive and thrive albeit the uncertainties. This study aims to investigate the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in supporting and facilitating these efforts.

This study first identified the underlying mechanisms that allow ESM use to foster and maintain participatory innovation and then reexamined how these mechanisms played out during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The data was collected through a questionnaire in two phases, before and during work-from-home mandates, and the results were analyzed and compared to capture similarities and differences.

The results revealed that innovation culture and management support mediated the effects of ESM use on three measures of innovation productivity in both conditions. Interestingly, the effect of ESM use was more prominent in driving innovation in the work-from-home condition. This effect was not limited to the direct effect of ESM use on innovation productivity but on innovation culture and management support as well.

The results suggest that ESM offer a potentially useful path to support and enable employees to participate in the innovation processes, especially when they work remotely or in a distributed team. More generally, this paper should be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, implementing and evaluating enterprise social software applications and encouraging employee-driven participatory innovation.

In this study, the authors integrate the concept of leader support with a process model of innovation including the generation, promotion and implementation of innovative ideas to obtain an in-depth understanding of how leaders may support employees’ innovative efforts. The purpose of this paper is to develop an organizing framework and validate a measure for assessing leader support for innovation.

The authors validated the Leader Support for Innovation Questionnaire (LSIQ) in German and English using samples from Germany (n=1,049) and South Africa (n=129).

Although confirmatory factor analyses supported a three-factor model of the 12-item LSIQ (leader support for idea generation, promotion and implementation), strong intercorrelations between the factors provide only weak evidence for the three-factor structure. Positive correlations with individual and organizational innovation demonstrate adequate construct validity. The LSIQ explains additional variance in innovation beyond that explained by measures of transformational leadership and leader–member exchange.

The findings suggest that linking leader support and innovation more directly to one another matches the complexity of innovation processes. The LSIQ is a theory based and valid tool that enables more rigorous research on the role of leadership in facilitating innovation.

Previous studies using well-established leadership approaches have produced a considerable heterogeneity of findings on the relationship between leadership and innovation. Therefore, the authors introduce an integrative framework for defining and organizing leadership behaviors specifically supporting employees’ innovative efforts and validate a measure of leader support for innovation that may guide both theoretical developments and empirical research on the relationship between leadership and innovation in organizations.

Notes that supporting small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in their process towards the adoption of business process re‐engineering (BPR) may be essential as the tools and methodologies of BPR were designed for larger companies. Presents a methodology for the design of support services, developed within the context of a European Union (EU) project. The methodology consists of four major steps. The first step consists of an analysis of users’ needs. Since BPR support needs are differentiated and often implicit, an “ad hoc” methodology was developed to make demand explicit and split the potential market into homogeneous segments. The second step identifies the proper services to meet the needs of SMEs. The third step explores current supply of services and the critical success factors of a BPR support centre. Finally, the fourth step defines guidelines for the design of both the support centre and the specific support services. The methodology was developed also on the basis of the case of the Lombard machinery industry. Finally, the paper discusses the transferability of the methodology to other regions and industries.