BTECH research seminar: Professor Mehmet Demirbag and Assistant Professor Kamran Rashidi

Speaker: Professor Mehmet Demirbag, Essex Business School, University of Essex, UK

Title: Exploring Technology Sourcing: Impact on New Product Development Rates

Acquiring valuable technological assets plays a crucial role in enhancing innovation performance and the successful introduction of new products. Traditionally, existing research has predominantly focused on the influence of individual technology acquisition modes on innovation performance. It has also explored whether two modes, external acquisition, and internal development, are complementary or substitutes for each other. While calls for a more detailed analysis, going beyond the conventional "make or buy" paradigm and examining the interplay between various modes of technology acquisition, have been made, these calls have received limited attention. This study addresses this gap by conducting a comprehensive examination and comparison of different individual modes of technology acquisition and their combinations, as practiced by companies in thirteen emerging economies. As the primary aim of this research is to examine how the technology acquisition modes affect the rate of new product development, the most suitable approach is the utilization of the fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) methodology. Approaching technology choice decisions from a configurational perspective allows us to perceive these decisions as a complex network of interconnected elements. Our study delves into how configurations of technology choice modes influence new product development rates in a large sample of manufacturing sector firms in emerging economies. In this paper, we uncovered distinct routes of technology selection that enable manufacturing firms in emerging economies to attain enhanced rates of new product development.

Speaker: Assistant Professor Kamran Rashidi, Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Sweden

Title: Dyadic Relationships for Collaborative Innovation: Lessons from the Danish Wind Industry

Firms need to innovate either to gain or maintain a competitive advantage. Collaborative innovation, which involves customers, suppliers, and knowledge-intensive institutions could enable the development of cheaper products, better services, and faster market launch. Despite these benefits questions about the selective revealing of valuable knowledge remain unanswered. That is why our study examines different dyadic relationships in the Danish wind industry supply network for two main purposes: 1) to better understand the knowledge-revealing mechanisms within the key dyadic partnerships; 2) to identify the main barriers in knowledge sharing aimed at collaborative innovation and 3) to develop a theoretical framework for managing knowledge flows within and across organizational boundaries. This inductive, exploratory study of the wind industry revealed that during the past two decades, high vertical integration of the industry has limited the suppliers’ R&D competencies. Additionally, more vertical complexity in upstream supply is required for involving suppliers in tiers other than the first one in innovation projects. Low order volume is another barrier to taking advantage of suppliers’ R&D competencies as they prefer to allocate more resources to innovation projects in other industries with higher order volumes, such as the automotive industry. Other barriers to establishing collaborative innovations in the industry are information leakage, IPRs, intra-organizational communication, and lack of commitment. Despite intensive innovations and the flourishing of the industry in recent decades, our data also showed that knowledge sharing through collaborative innovation projects rarely happens in the industry due to such barriers. The proposed knowledge-sharing framework could be applied to other industries that are in the early stage of the industry life cycle. Lastly, the role of the state needs to be revisited to facilitate further university-industry collaborations.