Inbound open innovation-the deliberate sourcing of external knowledge to advance a firm's innovation activities-has been widely adopted, yet the factors that determine its effectiveness remain incompletely understood. This study examines how product market strategy moderates the effectiveness of inbound open innovation. Drawing on the generic strategy framework, we argue that cost leadership and differentiation impose fundamentally different knowledge requirements, which in turn shape the returns of different modes of inbound open innovation. Cost leadership rests on process-oriented knowledge that is largely codified and widely distributed across suppliers, competitors, and firms in other industries, and that is therefore accessible through external search. Differentiation rests on tacit, context-specific knowledge that is more difficult to acquire externally and that competes for the same managerial attention as in-house research and development. We test the resulting hypotheses using archival financial data combined with survey responses from 242 chief technology officers and research and development directors in Japanese publicly listed industrial firms, operationalizing inbound open innovation as external search breadth and depth and estimating hierarchical ordinary least squares regressions. The results show that both breadth and intensive depth improve innovation performance for firms that adopt a cost leadership strategy, whereas neither mode benefits firms pursuing differentiation, even though differentiation itself is consistently and positively associated with innovation performance. These findings establish product market strategy as a theoretically grounded moderator of the effectiveness of inbound open innovation, extend the generic strategy framework to encompass external knowledge sourcing, and provide a theoretical bridge between the product market strategy and open innovation literatures.
Aesthetics and tradition are considered as organisational catalysts for innovation, yet scholarly literature remains fragmented and separated from practitioners' discourse. This body of work seeks to systematise aesthetics and tradition as catalysts for innovation development while integrating both academic and practitioners perspectives. A combined content and thematic analysis is employed to evaluate scholarly publications retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science whereas Nexis Uni is employed to gather publications from the practitioners side. Various inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied when constructing both academics and practitioners samples. The obtained findings detail a convergence across the two corpora in portraying aesthetics as a driver for experiential differentiation, symbolic meaning and market attention. Conversely, tradition is generally linked with legitimacy, authenticity and identity coherence. However, scholarly literature offers a more granular and theoretically grounded understanding of the learning, recombination and capacity building mechanisms that explain how firms renew capabilities across changing competitive environments, while practitioners underscore the tangible strategies and organisational structures that foster and sustain innovation capability. Additionally, both corpora indicate a variety of contingencies that shape the relationship between aesthetics, tradition and innovation. This manuscript advances our understanding of aesthetics and tradition as organisational catalysts for innovation development while providing valuable insight into their effectiveness.
Digital ventures that build a second product have to divide the work of two products and also continuously negotiate a shared sense of what the venture is. The mirroring hypothesis explains the first problem, that an organisation's structure comes to correspond to the architecture of its product, but it does not extend to the second, the identity of the venture. I study how coordination and cohesion co-evolve as the underlying digital artefacts change, through a multiple case study of five fully digital ventures developing a second product. I combine interviews with dated archival web records to reconstruct each venture's move. I distinguish three coordination structures, integration, project-based arrangement and separation, and three modes of cohesion, extended, derivative and new identity. The ventures move through a repeating cycle of equilibrium, breakdown and reconstitution. A venture's position on both dimensions shifts as it passes through the cycle. In four of the five cases the venture's identity led the breakdown or moved together with the coordination breakdown, which challenges the structural focus of the mirroring account and marks identity as a co-primary dimension of alignment. The balance of exploration and exploitation, which ambidexterity research has treated as a structural choice, here works as a recurring process. I contribute a process account of how the correspondence between organisation and artefact breaks and re-forms over a venture's life, and I identify identity as an alignment dimension the mirroring hypothesis has limited account of.
While innovation is often considered a strategic response to competitive pressures, this may not hold true for small firms. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of the liability of smallness and the theory of knowledge spillovers, we construct a framework to explore how small firms' geographic proximity to competitors influences their innovation intensity. Our study also explores the moderating roles of product competitiveness and performance feedback in shaping the above relationship, addressing the unique dynamics of small firms in competitive environments. Using data from a representative sample of small firms from the China Micro and Small Enterprise Survey (CMES), our findings reveal a negative impact of geographic proximity with a competitor on a small firm's innovation intensity. Furthermore, we observe that this relationship is negatively moderated by product competitiveness and positively moderated by performance feedback. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom that competition drives innovation, revealing that small firms' innovation responses are highly contingent on their internal capabilities and performance signals. By integrating the liability of smallness with knowledge-spillover arguments, our study provides a more nuanced understanding of when geographic proximity with competitors constrains or facilitates small firms' innovation and highlights the importance of firms' competitive positions in shaping their innovation responses.
