New Knowledge Impacts on Designing Implementable Innovative Realities

This special issue covers two key research methods: qualitative case studies and quantitative studies.

First, the special issue presents qualitative papers consisting of case studies on pressure in intercultural negotiation, tourism clusters, New Zealand firms, Swedish universities, and value-creating firms. The qualitative case study method is valuable when building and developing theory, constructing theoretical frameworks, formulating hypotheses, and analyzing, exploring, and describing dynamic or long-term phenomena (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). Case studies also offer a close-up of the key actors, and they provide a rich information output that enhances the analysis of these actors’ interpretations of the firms’ situation. Because case studies stem from actual experience and practice, they can lead to action and contribute to changes in practice. Therefore, findings from case studies have a major impact on both academic research and society. Findings from specific case studies can lead to generalizations, which can then be tested empirically (Voss, Tsikriktsis, & Frohlich, 2002).

Second, this special issue contains articles on innovation and the constant changes that firms must overcome to survive in today's globalized world. Innovation refers to something new, molded to adapt to changes in the environment (Nocke & Yeaple, 2014). The phenomenon of innovation continues to attract attention from researchers outside the bounds of technology and product innovation (Mol & Birkinshaw, 2009). This interest owes to a series of subdisciplines that have emerged within the field of innovation. These include innovation in business models and service innovation (Berends, Jelinek, Reymen, & Stultiëns, 2014), a result of the customer's growing importance in firms’ business activities. Thus, this special issue addresses topics such as the changes forced upon entrepreneurs in the wake of the financial crisis, innovation in the search for solutions to open-ended problems, and the new ways that consumers relate to products to mitigate climate change.

The first article titled “Do financial crises moderate entrepreneurial recipes? A comparative fuzzy analysis” by Andreea Apetrei, Jordi Paniagua, and Juan Sapena focuses on analyzing the effect the 2007 financial crisis has had on the way Spanish entrepreneurs do business and contributes to a new perspective in the crisis-entrepreneurship link. To accomplish this, the study performs a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The data used in this study spans from year 1999 to 2014; therefore, it is assured a representative sample. The results show clearly how the crises changed entrepreneurial recipes.

The following article titled “Improving team activities in the concept development stages: Addressing radical development and open-ended problems” by Johan Wenngren, Åsa Ericso, and Vinit Parida has its aim in analyzing open-ended problems to find out a solutions for based on those problems. The empirical data in the present study originates from two types of empirical sources, mainly focusing on qualitative input. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how engineering teams understand open-ended problems and developing radical solutions during the concept development stage.

The third article entitled “Influence of time pressure on the outcome of intercultural commercial negotiations” by M. Carmen Saorín-Iborra and Gustavo Cubillo with a sample of 21 customer/supplier focuses on to find out whether pressure must be applied in intercultural negotiations or not. They have evidenced that an adequate time pressure, at low levels, produced outcomes that tend to be positive. They conclude among other conclusions that in cross-cultural commercial negotiations, time pressure and the country's culture influence the dynamics.

The next paper titled “Knowledge sources, agglomeration and tourist districts” by B. Marco-Lajara, P. C. Zaragoza-Saéz, E. Claver-Cortés, and M. Úbeda-García, which analyzes the tourism firms agglomeration is higher or lower amongst Spanish coastline tourist districts. This study uses all tourist districts along the Mediterranean coastline, up to 113 districts; in this sense, the paper highlights the importance of knowledge as a source of competitive advantage, and the ease of access to that resource inside clusters and/or tourist districts. Finally, the study obtains results such as the presence of hotels with certain characteristics in a particular tourist districts exercises a significant power of attraction over other hotels as well as other restaurants and cafes.

The fifth paper entitled “From crisp to fuzzy-sets QCA in exploring causal configurations: examples from the New Zealand context” by Simon J. Lambert and Branka Krivokapic-Skoko focuses on the establishment of ethnic business networks, new land-based ventures as well as the failure or success of end-user innovation. The study provides insights into ideas, assembly business support and development, dissemination of designs, prototypes, and products. The authors use the methodology QCA and its fuzzy-set variant in three examples of business promotion in New Zealand to develop their study.

The following article is titled “Moderating factors and effects: Different perceptions of university researchers in Sweden” by Dafnis N. Coudounaris. This study has as an aim to find out the moderating factors between university innovation philosophy and industry innovation adoption. Furthermore, the comparison was among eight different Swedish universities during the periods October 2008—August 2009 and June 2014—November 2014. The paper reveals that among the moderating factors, the mission statement and some other characteristics positively increase the impact of the university innovation philosophy on industry innovation adoption.

The next to last paper entitled “Smart grids and consumer attitude toward sustainable development” by Simona Bigerna, Carlo Andrea Bollino, and Silvia Micheli focuses on the new ways of interplay between consumers and producers because of the need for new methods of obtaining electricity to deal with the climate change, and provides additional analysis of the most relevant barriers perceived by consumers as obstacles to the development of smart grids. The aim of this paper is to identify the most relevant socio-economic factors limiting the use of SGT by consumers. To realize the paper, the authors made a systematic literature search to find papers investigating consumers’ perceptions toward SGT from different webpages specialized from January 2015 to March 2015. The findings reveal that four relevant barriers exist: costs, privacy, cyber security, and regulatory aspects.

The last article titled “A disclosure of the set of intangible resources: A value-based snapshot of the strategic capital” by Franco Maria Battagello, Michele Grimaldi, and Livio Cricelli introduce and test, on a comparative case-study, a flexible qualitative/quantitative procedure to return an analytic picture of its composing drivers. This goal is achieved via the audit of the building factors composing the strategic resources involved in the firm-specific dynamics of value-creation. To accomplish this, the overall company-system is audited in the first place and, once the value drivers are detected and identified, they are rated altogether on a percentage basis using a quantitative methodology.