Product innovation : the influence of leadership and buyer-supplier collaboration in marketing channel

產品創新 : 領導的影響和營銷管道製造商與供應商的合作

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

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Author(s)

  • In Ngan CHANG

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Detail(s)

Awarding Institution
Supervisors/Advisors
Award date2 Oct 2015

Abstract

This dissertation investigates product innovation from two perspectives. The first essay looks at product innovation from within firms and the second essay focuses on external collaboration. Specifically, the first essay investigates how internal firm leadership influences product innovation. The second essay looks at the influence of two different kinds of inter-firm integration mechanisms have on knowledge acquisition and product innovation. First essay. Building on upper echelon theory and a dynamic capability perspective, this study investigates the relative effectiveness of two types of leadership on product and process innovations in emerging economies. We found that in China transformational-charismatic (TC) leadership has a stronger effect on product innovation, while transactional leadership has a stronger effect on process innovation. We further study the boundary conditions of leadership and empirically examine the contingent effects of organizational level capability on the relationships between leadership and innovation. The moderating effects are intriguing: knowledge acquisition capability strengthens the effect of TC leadership on process innovation and that of transactional leadership on product innovation. However, knowledge acquisition capability attenuates the positive relationship between TC leadership and product innovation as well as the positive relationship between transactional leadership and process innovation. Second essay. In this study, we integrate three theoretical views – knowledge-based view, agency theory and integration mechanisms – to investigate collaboration among channel members. Specifically, we investigate the effects of two channel integration mechanisms on two kinds of knowledge acquisition and examine how these two kinds of knowledge acquisition can help buyers with new product innovation. We found that both supplier task involvement (a cooperation mechanism) and joint-planning (a coordination mechanism) positively influence buyers’ product knowledge acquisition and customer knowledge acquisition. Supplier task involvement has a stronger effect on product knowledge acquisition than that of joint-planning. On the other hand, supplier task involvement has a significant positive effect on buyers’ customer knowledge acquisition while joint-planning has no effect. The relationships between integration mechanisms and knowledge acquisition are contingent upon supplier incentives. Furthermore, both product and customer knowledge lead to product innovation, but customer knowledge has a stronger effect than product knowledge on product innovation. We provide theoretical and managerial implications for our findings. Keywords: Transformational-charismatic leadership, transactional leadership, product innovation, process innovation, knowledge acquisition capability, channel cooperation and coordination, supplier task involvement, joint- planning, product Knowledge, customer Knowledge, supplier incentives.

    Research areas

  • Leadership, New products, Industrial marketing.