Digitalization and industry 4.0 technologies promise to provide many novel opportunities and benefits to industrial firms, such as increased product quality, process reliability, and improved flexibility and productivity. Although digitalization shows great potential from a technological perspective, many process industry firms still face challenges in utilizing it for process innovations. Hence, this study aims to understand how process industry firms develop and implement new process innovations today and identify improvement opportunities through the better adoption and implementation of digitalization. The study adopted a multiple case study design in two steel manufacturing firms and developed a framework for building digitally-enabled process innovation using dynamic capabilities. The framework consists of 19 dynamic capabilities in total: 8 related to traditional process innovation and 11 related to digitally enabled process innovation. The study found four key challenges in process innovation (i.e., poor data strategy and readiness, lack of standardisation practices for change, competence and culture gaps, and ad-hoc problem solving) and four key enablers for digitally-enabled process innovation (i.e., infrastructure and methodological definition, preparation for predictive and analytical readiness, proactive management practices, and plan for a digital matureness for each function and department). The study's detailed empirical insights provide new understandings regarding required dynamic capabilities for the smoother transformation of a firm from the traditional process innovation to the digitally enabled process innovation. The dynamic capabilities are limitedly explored in the research of the process industries in the context of process innovation and digitalization. Thus, this study makes essential contributions to the theory of process innovation in process industries and strategic management by providing rich empirical insights from the steel sector.
In this study, the use of platform-based product family design of assembled products has been reconceptualised into a framework of platform-based design of non-assembled products for the process industries. As a point of departure, platform-based design is defined as shared logic in a company's activities, and a "function-based" leveraging strategy is employed to identify non-assembled products with similar characteristics and commonalities among product families, related production processes and raw materials. It is proposed that a production platform philosophy and platform-based design of non-assembled products should rely on Product platforms, Process platforms and Raw-material platforms that are well-integrated into common Production platforms, in an end-to-end perspective. However, platform-based design of non-assembled products may differ depending on whether company production relies solely on a captive raw material base or on purchased raw materials on the open market, or on both. The congruence of the development of Production platforms with the QFD methodology and House of Quality was noted in this study, as well as the simplicity of using the methodology on homogeneous products compared to multi-level hierarchical assembled products. It is argued that the proposed conceptual framework can be used in internal company discussions and reviews whether and how such an approach in product innovation can be a fruitful avenue to explore and adapt.
This paper explores company design of a formal work process for non-assembled products, using a survey mode of inquiry with a follow-up questionnaire in an interactive dialogue with selected case-companies. The preliminary findings suggest that in the development or reconfiguration of company product innovation work processes in the process industries, it is advisable to design a work process that is adapted to inherent and contextual process-industrial conditions. It is further indicated that such a product innovation work process requires greater product and process integration from ideation to product launch and increased focus on the industrialization phase. The proposed novel five-phase structural model presented in a Stage-Gate format, can be deployed as a guiding template in company development or reconfiguration of an enhanced product innovation work process for the development of non-assembled products.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use of business networks has grown significantly during the last decades, partly due to increasingly complex innovation processes. This article investigates how different kinds of networks, depending on location, contextualize innovation in specific foreign market business relationships. Building on internationalization, network, and innovation research we develop a model that views opportunity connectedness in specific host-markets, home-markets, and other international markets as prerequisites to innovative collaboration and innovation outcomes in foreign business relationships. The resultsof ourlinear structural relations (LISREL) analysis of Swedish SMEs provide empirical evidence that the effect of opportunity connectedness on innovation outcomes in foreign business relationships is mediated by the level of innovative collaboration. These results indicate that SMEs need a relatively higher level of innovative collaboration in their partnerships with foreign market customers to convert opportunities conceived in home- and international- market networks into innovative outcomes in comparison to opportunities conceived in host-market networks. This finding implies that as opportunities become increasingly contextually remote, the importance of collaborative business relationships increases. By showing these results, the study contributes to research in the international small-business domain that seeks to identify important prerequisites of SME innovation.
Concurrent increase in the degree of competition and access to information makes it both a challenge and necessity for firms to develop their ability to sense, seize and exploit knowledge-based advantages. Since absorptive capacity reflects an organization's ability to extract innovative ideas from its environment, it plays a critical role in fostering intrapreneurship and innovative performance within existing firms. In this paper, we adopt micro-foundations perspective and study how goal orientations of employees affect their individual-level absorptive capacity, which would in turn shape collective innovative performance. Furthermore, we examine conditions under which individuals' absorptive capacities can efficiently aggregate and leads to increased collective innovation performance. We tested our theoretical model using an original dataset collected from 648 knowledge workers from 126 functional areas. Our analysis show that individuals' learning and prove orientation are important predictors of their absorptive capacity, and that individuals' aggregate absorptive capacity would lead to positive innovation outcomes especially when their activities are highly coordinated.
While extant literature conceptually recognizes individuals as an integral part of the process with which organizations absorb new knowledge, past research has paid limited attention to the antecedents of individual -level absorptive capacity. In this paper, we address this research gap. We build on the interactionist perspective and propose that individual -level absorptive capacity is shaped by the joint effects of individual employees' dispositions (i.e., need for cognition and proactive personality) and their work context (i.e., time pressure and autonomy). Significantly, we also recognize the multidimensional nature of absorptive capacity, which suggests that individuals need different capabilities to learn and utilize new knowledge in their organizations. We test our predictions using a unique dataset from 646 employees working on knowledge -intensive tasks. Our results show that the joint effects of dispositional and contextual antecedents are not uniform across different dimensions of individual -level absorptive capacity.