Contributions published at Technology and Innovation Management (Anja Schulze)

null

null

Je nach Entwicklung des Abgas-Skandals bei Dieselautos könnten dem Volkswagen-Konzern Absatzeinbrüche drohen. Ostschweizer Autozulieferer sind dennoch kaum beunruhigt, dank breiter Kundenbasis und zukunftsfähiger Produkte.

null

null

This introduction to this special section establishes the context within which automotive firms cope with turbulence caused by globalization, new governmental regulations, and advances in electronics, communication, and drive train technologies. While exploring change, the papers in the special section also report on stability, e.g. in the central role of Original Equipment Manufacturers in systemintegration and their resulting dominance over product architecture and supply chain dynamics. We apply the lens of change and stability to two stages of the innovation lifecycle: (i) knowledge generation; and (ii) the diffusion of innovations. The papers, organized along these dimensions, help us understand how and why automotive firms are changing their ways of innovating, but also why past patterns of innovative behavior persist. Weclose with an outlook on future research topics to complement this special section.

Organisational learning (OL) that enhances efficiency and the continuous improvement of processes is a key objective of lean product development and has become an important principle of new product development (NPD). Therefore, it is critical for an organisation to capture individuals’ and groups’ knowledge and learning about processes, institutionalise it, and deploy it organisation-wide. Since OL is more likely to occur if it is supported systematically, NPD scholars and practitioners recognise the importance of investigating facilitators’ effect on OL. However, there is no shared understanding of OL among existing studies. This disparity makes it hard to assess, compare, and integrate prior findings into studies. Our article addresses this gap. We investigate how value stream mapping (VSM) and its implementation in NPD affect OL in development processes. Therefore, we operationalise OL on the basis of Crossan et al .'s 4I framework, which is comprehensive and widely recognised (Crossan, M., Lane, H. and White, R., 1999. An organizational learning framework: from intuition to institution. The Academy of Management Review, 24(3), 522–537). We analysed the approach to VSM and its implementation in four longitudinal, comparative case studies in the German-speaking car supplier industry. Using the 4I framework, we captured VSM's effects on the various OL dimensions. We provide valuable insights for R&D managers who seek to improve their processes and want to implement VSM.

null

Lean development is a promising approach in new product development (NPD). However, despite the successful application of lean thinking and its principles to manufacturing, the adoption of the lean approach to product development is a quite novel undertaking. In this paper, we develop and test hypotheses pertaining to the elimination of waste, which is one of the major objectives of lean management. In particular, our study focuses on the question: What management factors are enablers for the elimination of waste in the context of NPD? We identified: 1) employee training; 2) coaching; 3) constructive failure treatment as effective means. Furthermore, implications for management practice are considered. Testing our hypotheses, we refer to data from 108 firms in the automotive supplier industry in German-speaking countries, i.e., Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

The alliance literature has recognized distance between partners' knowledge as important for innovation. However, theoretical reasoning as well as empirical results differ concerning the relationship of partners' knowledge base distance and innovation performance. We assume that the mixed results are caused by neglecting the role of relevant knowledge types. In this study, we examine the effect of technological and managerial knowledge distance on collaborative innovation performance. We examined 53 collaborative development projects and we find an inverse U-shaped relationship between technological knowledge distance and innovation performance, explained by the knowledge-based view and absorptive capacity. Our results also reveal that a short managerial knowledge distance is beneficial for innovation, which can be explained by transaction cost theory. Overall, our research helps to better explain knowledge distance's effect on collaborative innovation performance.