Innovation and Sustainability – serie

"Because of the growing societal concerns regarding industrial environmental pollution, it is essential to get a deeper understanding of the factors influencing firms to reduce their environmental impact. This book considers these concerns by evaluating the importance of these factors in reference to environmental management in the Dutch food and beverage industry. It develops an integrated research framework building on the inside-out and outside-in perspectives on environmental management. Empirical data were gathered in 2002 and 2005. This book provides interesting insights into the developments in this period showing that the impact of the business environment has extended from the traditionally important stakeholders, such as government and societal groups, to include commercial chain and network actors as well, including buyers and suppliers, but also bank and insurance firms. Furthermore, the analyses demonstrate that public-private voluntary agreements can be an effective policy instrument. Firms with a proactive business strategy appear to pay more attention to environmentally friendly product (re)design, which is crucial to reduce environmental impact from a cradle-to-cradle perspective.This book is of interest to environmental and general management in firms that want to reach environmental excellence. Policy implications are drawn for environmental policy-makers, environmental agencies and environmental interest groups that aim for stimulating firms to clean up."

"This book addresses the crucial question for innovative prospector companies of how to bridge the gap between exploration and exploitation. Whereas exploration deals with the search for new ideas and opportunities, exploitation is about incrementally moving the performance bar a little bit higher. Finding the right balance between exploration and exploitation is essential for the long term survival in today’s highly dynamic business environments.In a cross-industry study of ten large, multinational prospector companies, which are world leaders in their respective industries, it was discovered that the 'industry clockspeed', the length between the subsequent product generations, plays an essential role in bridging this gap. The product generation life cycle (PGLC) typically ranged from just several months in short life cycle industries (SLCIs), such as electronics and the mobile phone industry, to (more than) 10 years in long life cycle industries (LLCIs), such as aerospace and pharmaceutics. Our data indicate that companies operating in SLCIs face major problems in maintaining the long term knowledge base of their firms, whereas companies in LLCIs tend to have problems in aligning their innovation strategy to the short term business needs. To investigate the dynamics of strategic alignment, in one of the LLCI companies, a multinational supplier of industrial components, a six-year longitudinal study was conducted. Here our data indicate that finding a funding structure that effectively balances exploration and exploitation, combined with regular structured feedback between the exploration and exploitation function is needed to maintain long term strategic alignment.CTOs and innovation managers can use this book by first establishing the industry clockspeed(s) in their respective industries or product range(s) and then benchmark their innovation processes to those of the first class (SLCI or LLCI) prospector companies included in this book."

Innovation managers and innovation scholars increasingly emphasize the open innovation model, introduced by Henry Chesbrough in 2003. This model postulates that the innovation process should be flexible and cross organizational boundaries, which enables the transfer of knowledge and capabilities between organizations. However, until now, it remained unclear which types of firms apply open innovation, whether it realy raises their performance, and how this can be managed in the best way. This book addresses the important issue how innovative firms profit from external knowledge to improve their innovation performance.Using large scale empirical evidence from the Dutch industry, this book shows that especially Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) and firms from low-tech sectors have increasingly adopted open innovation strategies over the period 1994-2004, and are clearly catching up large and high-tech firms. The results indicate that firms pursuing an open innovation strategy perform better with regard to innovation than firms that innovate exclusively in-house. In contrast to the common opinion that large Mergers & Acquisitions (M&As) are bad for innovation, it turns out that M&As have a positive impact on long-term innovation performance. In times of economic cricis this can be an extra argument for governments to back large scale M&As.Large (medium) high-tech M&As in the life sciences industry were analysed in-depth, to investigate the dynamics of post M&A integration. This book shows the different types of innovation synergies that can be expected from M&As and how they can be realized by systematic post M&A integration. Finally, this book studies how innovation brokers fulfill essential roles in innovation networks of SMEs in the agri-food sector. It provides guidelines for managers in innovation networks to improve the performance of these networks.