Many firms rely on their suppliers as a major source of innovation, and they harness the innovation potential of their supplier base by organizing procurement (or innovation) contests. Extant research on contests has mostly assumed that suppliers compete on even grounds in a procurement contest....

Problem Definition. Most industrial innovations consist of multiple interacting components that must be combined into a final product to form an integrated system. When procuring such complex innovations from their suppliers, buyers face a substantial challenge: Should they tender the integrated...

Products combine function and form. This paper focuses on product form. The authors combine state-of-the-art clustering techniques with experimental validation to identify styles (groupings of new product designs of similar form) among the more than 350,000 US design patents granted from 1977...