Background: Non-adherence to anti-hypertensive medications is prevalent, leading to increased hospital costs and preventable deaths and disabilities. Managing patient perceptions of adherence difficulties may be key to improving adherence. Objective: This study examined the potential negative effect of patients' perceived difficulties with anti-hypertensive medication taking on adherence, along with whether and how that effect could be reduced through patient knowledge of and commitment to adherence. Method: 10,867 adult U.S. residents diagnosed with essential hypertension and prescribed anti-hypertensive medications participated in a cross-sectional online survey using self-reported behaviors and perceptions. Stepwise regressions and mean difference analyses were performed. Results: Perceived adherence difficulty was negatively associated with adherence behaviors (b = -.443, p < .001). This association was reduced by the moderating effects of adherence knowledge (b = .035, p < .001) and commitment to adherence (b = .008, p = .037), and their direct effects on adherence behaviors (b = .075, p < .001; b = .095, p < .001, respectively). Some differences by patient race-ethnicity and income were observed. Conclusions: Perceived adherence difficulty inhibits medication adherence but is countered by adherence knowledge and commitment to adherence. To improve adherence, healthcare strategies should strengthen patient knowledge and commitment by developing medication routines, engaging in self-care and awareness, and receiving tailored counseling on disease management, among others.

This study examines customer co-production in a prolonged, complex, and negative service context—medication adherence in chronically ill individuals. We integrate services and medical perspectives to develop a novel theoretical framework of adherence as a nested system of co-production behaviors, characterized by temporal and scope dimensions. Utilizing a qualitative approach, our findings point to two key insights about co-production in the customer sphere. First, the enactment and form of regular-restricted, intermittent-intermediate, and irregular-expansive co-production behaviors are determined by the characteristics of the customer sphere—that is, co-production is contextualized. Second, the co-production system in the customer sphere is complex, and the different levels are interdependent. Our research contributes to the emerging literature on service co-production by elucidating the behaviors through which customers strive towards adherence. The identified co-production framework holds important implications for providers of prolonged and complex services and future research directions.

This study examines the antecedents and impact of three forms of customer involvement in innovation: customer involvement as an information source (CIS), customer involvement as co-developers (CIC), and customer involvement as innovators (CIN). We propose that the three forms of customer involvement employ different ways of utilizing customer knowledge and thus are influenced differently by the nature of customer knowledge, the firm’s knowledge management strategy, and organizational support for knowledge management implementation. Using primary data from multiple industries, we test a set of drivers along these three dimensions and find that the three forms of customer involvement are driven by different factors. Furthermore, the impact of customer involvement on product performance is contingent upon the firm’s technological capability, and the contingent effect also varies across different forms of customer involvement. These findings provide important theoretical implications as well as practical guidance for adopting and managing customer involvement in innovation.

This study examines customer coproduction in a prolonged, complex, and negative service context—medication adherence in chronically ill individuals. We integrate services and medical perspectives to develop a novel theoretical framework of adherence as a nested system of coproduction behaviors, characterized by temporal and scope dimensions. Utilizing a qualitative approach, our findings point to two key insights about coproduction in the customer sphere. First, the enactment and form of regular-restricted, intermittent-intermediate, and irregular-expansive coproduction behaviors are determined by the characteristics of the customer sphere—that is, coproduction is contextualized. Second, the coproduction system in the customer sphere is complex and the different levels are interdependent. Our research contributes to the emerging literature on service coproduction by elucidating the behaviors through which customers strive toward adherence. The identified coproduction framework holds important implications for providers of prolonged and complex services and future research directions.

This article takes a portfolio approach to examine how an alliance's propensity of termination is influenced by its resource relationships with other alliances of the firm. Whereas previous research has suggested that similar partner resources in a portfolio create redundancy and that dissimilar resources are beneficial, this study argues that redundancy may be necessary to ensure stable access to resources and that synergies from dissimilar resources may be difficult to realize. Thus, under some conditions, resource dissimilarity may be less supportive of, or even detrimental to, the continuity of an alliance. The author identifies several conditional factors that change the role of resource dissimilarity. While relational connectedness between the focal partner and other partners of the firm is found to strengthen the supporting effect of resource dissimilarity on alliance continuity, vertical connectedness of alliance activities, formation of substituting alliances by the focal partner, and market uncertainty weaken the supporting effect of resource dissimilarity. The findings reveal alliance termination factors beyond dyadic interactions and provide important implications for managing interdependencies within an alliance portfolio to enhance alliance stability.

Adherence to prescription medication regimens is one of the main problems that patients and doctors face when trying to manage chronic disease. This research-in-progress paper reports on the development of text messages to be used in a largescale mobile technology intervention to influence medication adherence. The messages will be developed based upon the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). ELM is a theory about individual processes responsible for making communication more or less persuasive. The model holds that there are two relatively distinct routes to persuasion: core processing and peripheral processing. The wording of the messages being developed in this study will be manipulated to focus on logical message content (for core processing) or emotional cues (for peripheral processing). A rigorous, multi-phase message development plan is currently underway and presented in this research-in-progress paper. The results of the research will be presented at the AMCIS 2013 conference.

As interfirm collaboration plays an increasingly important role in firm innovation, many firms are engaged in multiple partnerships, forming portfolios of alliances. Research in marketing has predominantly focused on dyadic relationships without considering the important interdependencies among different alliances. This study takes a portfolio approach to examine the resource diversity of multiple alliance partners and its contribution to firm innovation. The authors argue that resource diversity in an alliance portfolio can only benefit innovation when resources and information are shared across alliances. They examine factors that may facilitate or inhibit information and resource sharing across alliances and thus influence the realization of any benefit of portfolio resource diversity. The model identifies various factors along three dimensions, including the composition of an alliance portfolio, alliance management, and the market environment, that moderate the relationship between alliance portfolio resource diversity and firm innovation. This study not only demonstrates the conditions for a firm to benefit from diverse partners but also highlights the importance of coordination among different alliances, suggesting a portfolio approach for alliance research.

We respond to the comments raised by Nielsen (2012) in his commentary essay on Cui and Kumar (2012). While concurring with Nielsen’s (2012) observations regarding appropriate level of measurement and the importance of relational aspects of JVs, our response elaborates on how these issues play a role in a research program adopting a multilevel approach to alliances/JVs. We also identify some further avenues and research questions.

Does product innovativeness affect new product success? The current research proposes that the ambiguity in findings may be due to an overly holistic conceptualization of product innovativeness that has erroneously included the concepts of product advantage and customer familiarity. This article illustrates how the same measures have often been used to assess product advantage with product innovativeness and product innovativeness with customer familiarity. These paired overlaps in measurement use are clarified in this research, which decomposes dimensions of product innovativeness along conceptual lines into distinct product innovativeness, product advantage, and customer familiarity constructs. To further support this decomposition, structural equation modeling is used to empirically test the distinctions. The measurement model supports the conceptual separation, and the path model reveals contingent effects of product innovativeness. Although product innovativeness enhances product advantage, a high level of innovativeness reduces customer familiarity, indicating that product innovativeness can be detrimental to new product success if customers are not sufficiently familiar with the nature of the new product and if innovativeness fails to improve product advantage. This exercise in metric development also reveals that after controlling for product advantage and customer familiarity, product innovativeness has no direct effect on new product profitability. This finding has strong implications for firms that mistakenly pursue innovation for its own sake. Consideration of both distribution and technical synergy as driving antecedents demonstrates how firms can still enhance new product success even if an inappropriate level of innovativeness is present. This leads to a simple but powerful two-step approach to bringing highly innovative products to market. First, firms should only emphasize product innovativeness when it relates to the market relevant concepts of product advantage and customer familiarity. Second, existing technical and distribution abilities can be used to enhance product quality and customer understanding. Distribution channels in particular should be exploited to counter customer uncertainty toward newly introduced products.