European Research & Innovation (R&I) funding programmes, in particular Horizon Europe, offer great opportunities for start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to leverage external knowledge through collaboration. There is a multitude of reasons why small businesses participate in...

Digital transformation (DT) is a complex, revolutionary, and continuous process of strategic renewal. It requires firms to invest resources, but these firms often fail in pursuing DT. Drawing on the dynamic capability perspective, the complementary assets view, and contingency theory, this study...

Empirical evidence shows that both offshoring and backshoring decisions positively impact firm innovation. Other studies also indicate that both offshoring and backshoring decisions can inhibit firm innovation outcomes. These are paradoxical statements; they describe an offshoring-backshoring...

Companies need practical customer integration processes to enable them to exploit their customers’ valuable knowledge as a key resource during product and service development. However, existing customer integration processes do not capture complex production environments with heterogeneous...

This study organically integrates the safety, quality, cost, delivery, and people (SQCDP) management mode and lean management to create the SQCDP + lean safety management (SLSM) mode, which addresses certain problems faced by China’s small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), such as...

This article investigates patterns of collaboration in innovation between foreign firms and local partners in eight Latin American countries and Spain. Using microdata from the harmonized Latin American Innovation Surveys dataset (LAIS) and the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC), it...

Firms involved in the widespread practice of (delegated) innovation scouting face a crucial challenge: How to motivate innovation scouts to engage in extensive search for innovative projects given that search success oftentimes eludes them? Motivated by common scouting practice, we build a...

Management research has increasingly explored the domains of ecosystems, platforms, and open/user/distributed innovation - governance structures focused on engaging with external communities. While these research areas include substantial empirical and theoretical work and share notable...

Online innovation communities allow for a search for novel solutions within a design space bounded by constraints. Past research has focused on the effect of creative constraints on individual projects, but less is known about how constraints affect learning from repeated design submissions and...