Maximilian von Zedtwitz

Emerging digital technologies (EDTs) are increasingly used in new product development (NPD) and widely expected to add to product offerings and improve innovation performance. However, the empirical evidence for EDTs leading to performance advantages through NPD is scant. We develop a theoretical lens of concurrent in-use and in-performance complementarity to understand the relationship between process innovation and product innovation and how their combination relates to performance in a digital context. Using a two-step complementarity approach on 326 responses from PDMA’s global NPD survey, we find that while firms tend to pursue both types of innovation, these two types tend to cannibalise each other’s performance effects: companies are therefore not good at doing both. Our research also shows that the individual effect of process innovation enabled by a bundle of EDTs is positive with accelerating returns, although firms that adopt a bundle of EDTs in their processes have above average market performance. Finally, we demonstrate that stand-alone AI (as opposed to AI bundled up with the other three EDTs) has a negative effect on realised market performance. These results provide empirical basis for in-use and in-performance complementarities, extend wider innovation management theories in the digital context and add to the emerging research on artificial intelligence.

Geopolitical uncertainties and the resurgence of security and defence needs present both opportunities and challenges for creativity and innovation management. At both the organizational and the individual levels, we are confronted with multiple ethically challenging choices. Given the changing global security and defence realities, we outline the ethical dilemma for creativity and innovation management scholars and propose an emerging agenda for our field. Our position is that, as citizens of open and democratic societies, we must not withdraw from defending the very values and institutions that have allowed us to pursue our profession freely. With this article, we contribute to an emerging discourse in creativity and innovation management research by making a call for ethical and societal frameworks to guide our profession and by proposing directions for future research on innovation in the defence and security realm.

The international business literature has highlighted the role of subsidiaries in the generation of new knowledge, but we still lack an understanding of the individual‐level initiatives that enable the processes of local knowledge acquisition, subsidiary capability development, and reverse knowledge transfer. Thus, including a microfoundation perspective, this research investigates whether the manager's individual absorptive capacity benefits local knowledge acquisition, whether the manager's bricolage behavior influences subsidiary capability development, and whether the local manager's knowledge influence can contribute to the reverse knowledge transfer of the capability developed by the subsidiary. Following a quantitative approach, a model with five hypotheses was tested using the structural equation modeling technique with data collected from 127 subsidiary managers. As a theoretical contribution, this study fills a gap in the literature by focusing on individual‐level initiatives that subsidiary managers can have to promote knowledge management in terms of local knowledge acquisition, subsidiary organizational capability development, and reverse knowledge transfer of subsidiary capabilities. As a managerial contribution, a framework is provided to better guide managers regarding their individual roles in the development and knowledge management of organizational capabilities, according to the roles played by the subsidiary for the multinational corporation.