The transition from the old to the new generation of a product is important for various sectors. This type of innovation is often challenging due to the diminishing product lifecycles and rapid technological obsolescence. Despite the managerial relevance, little is known about what abilities of the firms allow them to achieve superior generational product innovativeness. To enrich our understanding, the present study reports on evidence from 201 UK firms conducting generational product innovations. The results reveal that intentional cannibalization significantly enhances decision-making agility. This agility is crucial for innovation, particularly under high technological turbulence, a context that requires rapid adaptation and change. Generally, the findings make a useful contribution to product innovation research (specifically in generational transitions) and add to the emerging research on the role of agility in organizations. Moreover, they suggest managerial propositions regarding how firms can achieve superior generational innovativeness. Finally, they point at future research propositions.@en

Although the topic of dynamic design capabilities is emerging in the literature and the design community, no research has yet offered an operationalization that considers the strategic integration of DDCs within the organization. This Research Design paper aims to address this gap by defining, conceptualizing, and measuring DDCs through multiple validation studies. Specifically, a scale development procedure grounded on measurement theory will operationalize DDCs through their operational and regenerative dimensions. Drawing on the theory of dynamic capabilities, this paper also presents a conceptual model that will be used to test and validate the newly developed construct of DDCs. This conceptualization explores the influence of DDCs on business model innovation and innovation performance under varying conditions, such as volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA).@en

Circularity-conscious management of information and communications technology (ICT) owned by organizations is important to achieving a circular economy. However, changes in organizational management toward circularity has been met with multiple challenges. This study uses 11 semi-structured interviews with on-the-ground ICT decision-makers in organizations to determine what barriers prevent the development and implementation of circularity-related changes in organizational ICT management. We identified 13 barriers relating to information and knowledge transfer, access to circular equipment, finances and contracts, and prioritization over circularity. Barrier-based interventions were further structured by Lewin's 3-step change management model – unfreeze, change, refreeze – highlighting the role of information access, relationships with contracted partners, and internal accountability and priority structures. These results bridge a currently underdeveloped link between circularity and management research as well as provide policy makers, researchers, and ICT managers insight on facilitating ICT's impactful role in society's transition to circularity.@en

In the 1960s, influential thinkers defined design as a rational problem-solving approach to deal with the challenges of sustainable human development. In 2009, a design consultant and a business academic selected some of these ideas and successfully branded them with the term “design thinking.” As a result, design thinking has developed into a stream of innovation management research discussing how to innovate faster and better in competitive markets. This article aims to foster a reconsideration of the purposes of design thinking moving forward, in view of the sustainable development challenges intertwined with accelerating innovation in a perpetual economic growth paradigm. To this end, we use a problematization method to challenge innovation management research on design thinking. As part of this method, we first systematically collect and critically analyze the articles in this research stream. We uncover a prominent focus on economic impact, while social and environmental impacts remain largely neglected. To overcome this critical limitation, we integrate design thinking with responsible innovation theorizing. We develop a framework for responsible design thinking, explaining how to apply this approach beyond a private interest and competitive advantage logic, to address sustainable development challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, poverty, and injustice. The framework contributes to strengthening the practical relevance of design thinking and its theoretical foundations. To catalyze this effort, we propose an agenda for future research.

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Inspiration is vital for designers. This study builds on findings on inspiration examples for problem-solving tasks and extends those to styling tasks by exploring the influence of examples on styling criteria. The generation of inspiration examples in this study is grounded in design literature and practice. This study identifies primary styling criteria (i.e., personality coherence, visual coherence, and originality) to evaluate the design outcome. The results indicate that designers who received near-field examples that communicated an intended meaning compared to designers who did not receive any examples generated concepts with a higher personality coherence yet with a similar level of originality. Also, near-field visual examples increased visual coherence. Thus, different design criteria need specific examples.@en

Business model innovation is increasingly seen as a key competitive factor in B2B settings. In this context, prototyping, experimentation, and piloting have gained prominence as agile and resourceful methods that can be employed in business model innovation pursuits. Yet, despite increasing interest in this area, and the growing number of large B2B companies who also started deploying these methods, there is a lack of clarity on the conceptual boundaries between the three concepts. This may impede the advancement of business model innovation research and practices based on the three concepts. We address this gap by conducting a structured literature review, using cross-reference searches and a key informant interview study of 43 executives in 13 B2B organisations. We offer three contributions: (1) definitions for each of these three concepts, (2) seven dominant similarities and (3) five key differences across them. Our research shows that the concepts serve distinct purposes at different stages of the business model innovation process, and we discuss these findings and their broader implications for the literature on business model innovation and for innovation management practices in B2B companies.

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Next to the redesign of industrial products and processes, sustainable business model innovation is a strategic approach to integrate environmental and social concerns into the objectives and operations of organizations. One of the major challenges of this approach is that many promising business model ideas fail to reach the market, which is needed to achieve impact. In the literature, the issue is referred to as a “design-implementation gap.” This paper explores how that critical gap may be bridged. In doing so, we contribute to sustainable business model innovation theory and practice. We contribute to theory by connecting sustainable business model innovation with business experimentation and strategic design, two innovation approaches that leverage prototyping as a way to iteratively implement business ideas early on. Using a design science research methodology, we combine theoretical insights from these three literatures into a tool for setting up small-scale pilots of sustainable business models. We apply, evaluate, and improve our tool through a rigorous process by working with nine startups and one multinational company. As a result, we provide normative theory in terms of the sustainable business model innovation process, explaining that piloting a prototype forces organizations to simultaneously consider the desirability (i.e., what users want), feasibility (i.e., what is technically achievable), viability (i.e., what is financially possible), and sustainability (i.e., what is economically, socially and environmentally acceptable) of a new business model. Doing so early on is functional to bridge the design-implementation gap of sustainable business models. We contribute to practice with the tool itself, which organizations can use to translate sustainable business model ideas defined “on paper” into small-scale pilots as a first implementation step. We encourage future research building on the limitations of this exploratory study by working with a larger sample of companies through longitudinal case studies, to further explain how these pilots can be executed successfully.

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How can a firm achieve ambidexterity? The present study proposes that the answer to this question lies in the distinction between ambidextrous culture and ambidextrous innovation. Drawing upon organizational learning theory and the source-position-performance framework, we propose that ambidexterity requires the adoption of two important organizational cultures, willingness to cannibalize (WTCA) and willingness to combine existing knowledge (WTCO), which allow firms to attain superior performance through the implementation of both radical and incremental (i.e., ambidextrous) innovations. Our major contribution lies in addressing the important debate in the literature on whether exploration and exploitation are complements or substitutes. Furthermore, competition intensity is a key condition that determines the degree to which the two types of organizational cultures and the two types of innovations are necessary for superior firm performance. The study uses data from multiple respondents from 199 Chinese firms. Our findings thus suggest that WTCA and WTCO, which are traditionally treated as opposites, are complements in generating radical innovations.

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The circular economy may help firms to maximize the value of their material resources and minimize the overall resource use, waste, pollution and emissions of their business activities. Implementing a circular economy program requires radical changes in product, business model and ecosystem innovation. Most research on circular oriented innovation takes a product or business model perspective. Few publications have explored how to innovate in ecosystems: how a group of loosely coupled organizations can change how they interact with each other to achieve a collective outcome. This study proposes the Circularity Deck: a card deck-based tool that can help firms to analyze, ideate and develop the circularity potential of their innovation ecosystems. The tool is based on a literature review of circular oriented innovation principles, and of practical examples that show how these principles have been applied. The principles are organized according to the intended circular strategy outcome that they pursue (i.e., narrow, slow, close, regenerate and inform material and energy flows), and the extent of the innovation perspective that is needed to operationalize a principle (i.e., product, business model, or ecosystem innovation). This review and categorization process first produced a novel analysis of the circular economy innovation landscape, using an ecosystem perspective. Second, these results served to develop the Circularity Deck, which was further developed and tested for ease of use and perceived usefulness in 12 workshops with 136 participants from 62 different organizations. The Circularity Deck provides an approach for future research and practice to integrate new principles and examples that can help firms to analyze, ideate and develop circular innovation ecosystems.

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A circular economy maximizes the value of material resources and minimizes greenhouse gas emissions, resource use, waste and pollution. We will posit that circularity needs to be understood as a property of a system (e.g., the mobility system of a city), rather than a property of an individual product or service (e.g., a car or a car-sharing service). Hence, there is a need for more knowledge on how to innovate towards ‘circular ecosystems’. This study proposes a set of principles for ‘circular ecosystem innovation’, based on: 1) a concise literature review to retrieve recommended principles on how to successfully innovate in ecosystems, 2) a mobility case of circular ecosystem innovation to investigate how relevant and useful these principles are for circular oriented innovation. The case data include 20 interviews, workshop data and internal background documents. The identified principles can be categorized in three groups: 1) collaboration (i.e., how firms can interact with other organizations in their ecosystem to innovate towards circularity), 2) experimentation (i.e., how firms can organize a structured trial-and-error process to implement greater circularity) and 3) platformization (i.e., how firms can organize social and economic interactions via online platforms to achieve greater circularity). Future research may focus on identifying opportunities and barriers to applying these principles in different contexts than in the one that is investigated in the present study.

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The food processing sector has a considerable environmental impact, due to large volumes of food and packaging waste. Eco-innovations present an important opportunity to reduce this impact. Yet, initial insights suggest that new technologies face considerable challenges to their adoption. The eco-innovation adoption literature has overlooked the food processing sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the barriers inhibiting the adoption of waste reducing eco-innovations in the food processing sector. We present four detailed case studies of new technologies at different stages of adoption in the UK and Netherlands. The findings reveal ten barriers to the adoption of waste reducing technologies in the food processing sector. The barriers identified include concerns over the influence of technologies on the product's characteristics, its retailing, and a perceived lack of consumer demand. These barriers arise from the powerful influence of retailers within the food supply chain, the influence of technologies on in-store point of sale displays, and the need for distribution trials. We conclude that the adoption of new technologies requires simultaneous acceptance by both food processor and retailers. The paper provides recommendations for policy makers and innovation managers to increase the adoption and diffusion of waste reducing technologies in the food processing sector, as well as implications for future research.

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Circular business model experiments may help firms transition towards a circular economy. Little is known about how the participants of experimentation – entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, innovation managers – develop and test their assumptions during the experimentation process to achieve more circular outcomes. Using a design-science approach, we investigate this process and develop principles to improve it. This is done during three workshops in different contexts: an innovation festival with 14 early-stage circular startups, a workshop with a health technology incumbent, and a workshop with six growth-oriented startups. We find that analyzing their available means – what they find important and prefer to happen (part of their identity), what they know (their skills and knowledge), and whom they know (their social network) – helps to understand how the participants develop and test their assumptions. We show how the mindset and awareness of the participants impact how much attention they pay to the circularity potential of their envisioned circular business models. Based on these insights, we propose a set of principles to prepare the innovation participants for experimentation, and to increase their ability to reflect on their circularity assumptions. Future research is needed to further grow our understanding of the types of principles that can guide meaningful experimentations towards a circular economy.

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Over the past few decades, the impact of customer integration on radical new product (RNP) innovation has been extensively investigated. To date, this important topic presents inconsistent empirical findings that must be converged. In this paper, our systematic literature review addresses these inconsistencies by taking a consolidated view of customer integration's effects on the development of RNPs. This extensive review of 153 empirical papers has two main objectives. First, we provide the primary reasons for inconsistent findings by scrutinizing the operationalizations of customer types (i.e., current customers, potential customers, ordinary users, or users with domain-specific skills) and RNPs (i.e., technological innovativeness, or both technological and market innovativeness) used in the studies, as well as the different perspectives on customer integration [i.e., customer-based idea evaluation, participation in direct and indirect idea generation, research and development (R&D) partnerships with customers, having a customer orientation, and disseminating customer knowledge via R&D-marketing collaborations]. Second, we present a synthesized view on factors in the sphere of the innovating company and the customer that influence customer integration's success along three phases of the radical innovation development process (i.e., discovery, incubation, and acceleration). Finally, we present avenues for future research and discuss managerial implications of our synthesized view.@en

Online platforms have a growing influence on how people interact with the physical world. They organise data streams, economic interactions and social exchanges of their users. Competitive dynamics in this emerging ‘platform society’ revolve around the ability to attract users to a platform, and to collect and analyse data from their interactions to achieve network effects. This chapter is about the roles of online platforms in enabling a more sustainable and circular economy. It identifies and describes three potential roles: they can enable people and organisations to (1) market, (2) operate and (3) co-create products, components and material. The identified roles provide a playground for firms to experiment with online platforms to advance their digital transition towards a circular economy.

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This paper brings together two streams of literature on trend research and shows how it relates to value creation as well as to dealing with changes in the environment over time in the process of design roadmapping. First, we identify distinct types of trend research. Our analysis of a wide range of empirical and theoretical studies, in the streams of literature on 1. design and innovation and 2. strategy and foresight suggests that there are two predominant types of trend research: trend scanning, and trend spotting. We define trend scanning as the systematic detection of changes already underway along its forecasting horizons of estimated impact. We define trend spotting as the observations and visual detection of early signals of a vogue, swing or drift in social interaction of people and products. Second, we used the inductive case study methodology on trend research practices by corporate organizations, design studios, management consultancies and independent entrepreneurs to illustrate the range of trend techniques, actions and interaction in the method and process of trend research. Third, we build a framework and summarize from the both literature and practice, four trend methods categorized on the dimensions of trend synthesis and trend logic. Finally, we identify practices associated with effective trend research and avenues for future research to deepen our understanding of this important activity in design roadmapping and what organizations can do to capture value from trends and manage innovations of value creation.@en

Different views exist in the literature regarding which adopter group to target with a go-to-market strategy: early market consumers or consumers in the majority market. Particularly when radical innovations are launched, the approach to the market becomes a critical success factor for firms seeking to recoup their significant investments in these innovation endeavors. Four experimental studies investigate whether and how to differentiate the design of go-to-market strategies, represented as bundles of marketing mix elements consisting of brand name, launch price, message content, and distribution intensity, for different consumer groups. Using the concept of consumer innovativeness, this study distinguishes between the early market of innovative consumers and the majority market populated by consumers low in innovativeness. Applying a signaling framework, the results indicate that the early market can be targeted with a go-to-market strategy signaling exclusive innovativeness; the majority market should be approached with a strategy signaling security. Further, at a signal vehicle level using specific marketing mix elements, the study demonstrates the relevance of adapting the go-to-market strategy for a radical innovation with regard to message content, distribution intensity, and launch price in line with consumer innovativeness. The results also indicate that the adaptation of the two signals and their signal vehicles to the targeted consumer markets is generally not necessary for incremental innovations. The authors discuss the implications of their study for future research and provide managers with recipes of go-to-market strategies for radical innovations when targeting consumers in the early versus majority market.

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