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Previous research focused on open innovation (OI) suggests that enterprises benefit from adopting the journey; however, the relationship among OI, marketing journey and knowledge-intensive innovation marketing activities (KIIMA) remains unclear. The present study proposes a conceptual model of the marketing journey linking heterogeneous modes of marketing collaboration to knowledge-intensive activities.

The conceptual model was tested via ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression based on a sample of data drawn from the Eurostat database.

The results indicate that strategies are a robust proxy for evaluating KIIMA, and partnerships, heterogeneous sources of knowledge and different marketing modes for collaboration among European knowledge-intensive firms are core antecedents of KIIMA, such as new-product development and marketing innovation, as well as firms' sustainable competitive advantage.

This study fills the gap by tracking the role of the journey within marketing collaborations on KIIMA, and it intervenes in the debate about interactive marketing innovation mechanisms. The study contributes to OI, knowledge management and the marketing literature by identifying the heterogeneous modes for marketing collaborations under which the marketing journey enhances knowledge-intensive activities such as those for marketing innovation.

The chapter aims to conceptually explore how to govern public sector organizations in order to create public value. It focuses on the importance of knowledge-intensive processes in creating public value as well as the challenges in governing such fragile processes.

We use organizational theory and respective concepts in the field of organizational design focusing on cognitive and motivational aspects. These are explained by group theories and concepts of conditional cooperation.

We show the important role and the antecedents of self-governance in creating public value based on knowledge creation, sharing and use, whereas the classical method of hierarchical and bureaucratic procedural-based governance (via rules and direct supervision) as well as the more modern method of output-based governance (via so-called key performance indicators) fails to govern public value in this form.

The heuristic model differentiates between modes of governance. Their mutual interplay and empirical evidence are yet needed for substantiating the findings.

Self-organizing mechanisms require behavioural antecedents of the involved actors: on the one hand there is a need for a minimum of mutual understanding in the sense of ‘cognitive compatibility’ and on the other, a minimum of ‘willingness to cooperate’.

Participating public employees and citizens need to cultivate participatory and collaborative governance mechanisms in order to create public value. These can be understood as supplementing and enriching existing ones rather than replacing them.

This chapter contributes to research in public administration in that the concept of public value with a focus on knowledge-intensive collaboration is specified. A new path is taken, originating from organizational theory and motivational theory that are transferred into public administration in order to show how collaborative governance should be employed and how motivational and cognitive aspects should be considered.

Development of intellectual capital, in conjunction with collaborative capabilities, is particularly important to continuously generating innovation. In the literature to date, the link between collaborative and intellectual capital, although key assets in knowledge-intensive industries, has rarely been investigated. This chapter introduces a model illustrating the interaction between human, intellectual, and structural capital, and their interplay. Several propositions are also derived in view of the need for companies to harness these three types of capital which are integral to implicit knowledge generation and leveraging the dynamic capabilities of the organization. As a consequence, team-based organizational forms are considered to be the most appropriate collaborative pattern for knowledge-intensive industries. This suggests that companies must increasingly focus on building valuable collaborative capital using flexible forms of organization in order to perpetuate successful product innovations.

Firms are driven to ride on the digital wave in today’s open innovation ecosystem. This study aims to explore the effect of digital transformation (DT) on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms’ innovation ambidexterity, namely, radical versus incremental innovation, respectively. Meanwhile, the authors evaluated the moderating role of the complexity of R&D collaboration portfolio (i.e. organizational diversity and geographic diversity) in the above relationships.

Using a panel data set of 171 Chinese listed firms in the information and communications technology services industry from 2010 to 2018, the proposed hypotheses were empirically attested.

It is found that DT has a positive relationship with radical innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship with incremental innovation. In terms of the R&D collaboration portfolio, organizational diversity positively moderates the relationships between DT and innovation ambidexterity, respectively. The geographic diversity weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of DT on incremental innovation; however, its moderating role in the link between DT and radical innovation is not empirically verified.

Extant scholars mainly addressed the interplay between KIBS firms and their manufacturing clients, while this study reveals the different consequences of DT on KIBS firms’ innovation ambidexterity to highlight the role of KIBS firms is an independent and essential innovator in a knowledge-driven economy. Notably, the findings contribute to knowledge management (KM) and R&D literature by confirming the diversity of the R&D collaboration portfolio is a critical KM strategy for KIBS firms to develop and promote external knowledge resources.

This study aims to investigate the contribution of knowledge-intensive business services firms to small- and medium-sized manufacturers’ digital servitization journeys, addressing the standardization versus customization dichotomy of services and solutions provision.

To identify the challenges that small- and medium-sized firms must face in the digital servitization journey and the role that knowledge-intensive business services firms may play in the innovation processes, the authors conduct a review on two still unrelated literature streams and develop a longitudinal single-case study, with a particular focus on knowledge generation mechanisms.

Digital servitization is a particularly challenging transformational journey for minor firms. Knowledge-intensive business services firms can act as sources, facilitators, and carriers of knowledge, and they can orchestrate further contributions of other external partners and firms.

The paper contributes to theory describing the roadmap and the role of external service providers in digital servitization journeys of smaller firms’, that are frequently excluded from mainstream research although being the backbone of European economies.

Digital servitization in minor manufacturing firms requires a long-term orientation and a multi-stage roadmap. Mixing standardized technology-based solutions and complementary professional services, knowledge-intensive business services firms can significantly contribute to lowering the journey’s uncertainties, operational complexity, and costs.

The paper sheds lights on how the collaboration between knowledge-intensive business services firms and small manufacturers generates novel knowledge and capabilities that contribute to takle the challenges of the different stages of the digital servitization roadmap.

A paucity of studies has used a microfoundation lens to examine servitization processes in internationalized knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) companies. The research aims to bridge this gap by considering knowledge sharing as a form of both codified knowledge and informal feedback knowledge; it also assesses whether the adoption of knowledge transfer and translation practices in a servitization process positively moderates the effect of knowledge transformation on knowledge sharing for internationalized KIBS companies.

By adopting a microfoundation lens, the research offers an empirical analysis to identify the relations between codified and tacit knowledge in servitization processes within internationalized KIBS companies. The study is based on 326 respondents from 30 KIBS companies. A multiple regression analysis was used for hypotheses testing.

The authors found significant relations among the use of electronic documents in the servitization process (formal codified knowledge), personal advice in servitization (informal feedback knowledge) and knowledge sharing in internationalized KIBS companies. Findings also support the indirect effect assumed in the hypothesis between knowledge transformation and knowledge sharing in internationalized KIBS companies, which is positively moderated by the adoption of cross-cultural knowledge practices in the servitization process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research provides the first conceptual model of the use of a microfoundation lens to examine knowledge sharing in internationalized KIBS companies. The micro level features individual knowledge sharing in the servitization process, while the meso level focuses on knowledge transformation in KIBS companies and the adoption of knowledge transfer and translation practices in the servitization process.

Purpose – The main aim of this chapter is to analyse the implications of innovation and, directly and indirectly, of cooperation on the internationalisation of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Specifically, we analyse the potential impact of innovation capability on the propensity of KIBS to internationalise. We also look at whether cooperation has any influence on the international growth of these firms or on their innovation results.

Methodology/approach – This is an empirical research. Empirical analyses are based on information provided by the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel data for the period 2003–2005. Tobit and probit models are estimated to test our hypotheses.

Findings – The empirical findings support all our theoretical hypotheses. A positive relationship between cooperation, innovation and internationalisation of KIBS is also found. Thus, the results confirm the relevance of innovation for internationalisation. KIBS that establish collaborative relationships find access to international markets easier and improve their innovation capability. In these terms, cooperation is found to be directly and indirectly related with internationalisation in KIBS.

Originality/value of paper – The services sector is the most important sector in Spain and Europe nowadays, and it is the sector that has experienced the fastest growth in recent years. However, the research efforts it has received have not been commensurate with its size and role in international commerce. In general, the literature has paid scant attention to the relationships between innovation and internationalisation in services sectors, and more specifically, among KIBS. This chapter sheds light on this topic.

Building on the resource-based view of the firm and complex systems theory, we argue that the effective utilization of knowledge-intensive teamwork (KITwork) can be a source of sustained competitive advantage for firms that pursue a variety of strategies and compete in a variety of industries. KITwork is a multi-dimensional, multi-level social process that promotes knowledge flows within and between organizations. Through KITwork, the knowledge resources of individual employees are transformed into a capability that contributes to the effectiveness of knowledge-based organizations. After introducing and explaining the concept of KITwork, we explore the challenges that organizations must address in order to design HRM systems that support and facilitate KITwork.

Extant literature on design theory has little empirical evidence about how work characteristics affect team interaction processes. This paper examines the knowledge-sharing process in information systems development (ISD) projects.

Task interdependence from work design theory was used as an antecedent of knowledge sharing for collaboration for the empirical analysis. Data were collected from 203 ISD project teams in South Korea to examine team social capital and knowledge sharing among team members.

The results indicate that task interdependence has a statistically significant impact on the knowledge-sharing process. The mediating roles of social capital and knowledge sharing are critical. Additionally, the effects of social capital change over time as long-term projects have different mechanisms than short-term ones.

The paper introduces a novel perspective (i.e. the adoption of task interdependence from work design theory) and integrates it with the research constructs that play important roles in ISD projects: knowledge sharing and teams’ social capital. In an ISD project team, which represents knowledge-intensive collaboration and has heterogeneous team characteristics, task interdependence has a positive impact on the team as predicted by work design theory. It verifies the mediating effect of social capital, particularly the changing influence of social capital with time.

Especially at the regional level co‐operation is seen as a prerequisite for innovation and competitiveness. Hence, political interest in fostering knowledge intensive networks is high. New forms of governance and additional strategic intelligence for decision makers are requested. Thus potential of the social network analysis (SNA) is discussed as methodology providing the information needed for strategic management of innovation networks. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact as a regional governance tool.

First, benefits and risks of innovation networks are discussed based on literature review. Second, the potentials of the SNA for their systematic monitoring are examined. Herewith specific attention was paid to the manageability and reduction of complexity to demonstrate SNA applicability for network governance. Analysis was based on automated data retrieval of electronic documents available, e.g. at governmental institutions, research databases, and the internet. Results are exemplified by studying knowledge intensive networks in Styria.

The applied set of IT based tools and visualisation of regional co‐operations based on SNA provides a comprehensive view of the interdependencies and the embeddedness of different institutions as well as actors of the region. Based on this visualisation conclusions are drawn concerning network management by analysing specific attributes of interest, concerning partners, cooperative behaviour, balance of power, openness and embeddedness of the network.

Network benefits success may not be achieved automatically. Strategic management is crucial for success. The paper demonstrates how social network analysis may be applied on automatic retrieved data on involved organisations and key players to strengthening the strategic intelligence of (regional) decision makers and help them meet the governance challenges of the network economy.