Integrating lead users into the product development process is a promising source of innovations. While the lead user approach is clearly established in academia, the implementation into management practice is ambiguous. Conducting a literature review of 255 articles in business press we show...

Lead User führen Bedarfstrends an und liefern dabei nicht nur Informationen zur Frage, was benötigt wird, sondern auch wie Lösungen umgesetzt werden können. Diese Lösungsinformationen sind im Innovationprozess von sehr großem Wert für ein Unternehmen, insbesondere wenn sie Monate oder...

In this paper, we report the complete and unabridged results of an exploratory study of typical front-end activities in 28 innovation projects in German and Japanese companies. We further reveal differences in the practice of innovation management in both countries. Based on these, we develop...

In today's environment of rapid technological change companies can not rely on incremental innovations alone. To sustain long-term competitiveness companies need to develop radical innovations as well. Such innovations typically incorporate new and highly complex technologies, create new markets...

Access to lead markets is generally regarded as an important driver of the increasing globalization of innovation since these are considered to be early indicators for emerging customer needs. They are traditionally thought to exist in economies with high per capita income, sophisticated markets...

When organizing international market introductions multinational companies face coordination problems between the leading central organizational unit and local product management. Based on the assumption that international market introductions are initiated and managed by a central unit we...

There is an increasing number of researchers conducting empirical and theoretical investigations to better understand innovation and protection activities of service companies. In fact, previous analyses reveal that the protection topic is difficult to study, particularly when using traditional...

In this paper the focus is on the strategy formulation processes, specifically supportive methods and structures, which address various managerial issues concerning discontinuous technologies and radical innovation in the early phase of strategic decision-making. In three in-depth case studies...

Mit einem Umsatz von etwa 20 Mrd. € für das Geschäftsjahr 2000/2001 und mehr als 80.000 Mitarbeitern in 56 Ländern der Erde ist die Bertelsmann AG heute das internationalste Medienunternehmen der Welt. Vor allem in den vergangenen 15 Jahren ist das Unternehmen überproportional expandiert....

Manufacturers usually benefit by dividing their innovation processes into distinct phases in order to ensure that the development activities are performed efficiently in an appropriate sequence. Users usually do not apply such structured processes. They follow a more intuition-driven approach....