Research Library

This paper studies the cognitive processes that enable decision makers to switch between exploitation and exploration. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a sample of expert decision makers to make two main contributions.

The contemporary literature concentrates on ‘make or buy’ decisions in design and production activities, assuming that decisions about the underlying fields of technological knowledge will automatically be the same. Building on previous research on multitechnology firms and products, this paper argues that firms know more about technology than they apply in their own production.

The benefits of Lean Thinking have been applied and proven in manufacturing. However the potential of its application in New Product Development (NPD) has not been fully attained. Due to their iterative and evolving functions, NPD processes are generally unstructured and complex compared to other business processes.

For more than a decade managers, academics, educators and politicians have indicated that innovation is the key to our future. As a result, we find a plethora of innovation initiatives around the world, from university curricula to the mission statements of banks.

Nowadays consumers are expecting the launch of new products with lower prices and shorter development times. One key strategy for companies to achieve this challenge is to implement a lean product development process. Aligned to the lean thinking implementation, many companies have defined a process architecture.

How can strategic decision makers overcome inertia when dealing with change? In this article we argue that cognitive flexibility (i.e., the ability to match the type of cognitive processing with the type of problem at hand) enables decision makers to achieve significantly higher decision-making performance.

Aiming at innovation leadership, large companies increasingly invest in ideation spaces for conducting ideation workshops allowing them to reduce their innovation lead time. On the contrary, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot afford to do the same due to limited resources.

Participating in a short-term ideation workshop – based on design thinking principles – may increase the innovation capability of companies. We show how the persona methodology can be successfully applied to promote user-centricity in such ideation workshops.

We show how the persona methodology can be successfully applied to promote user- centricity in short-term ideation workshops. For this research, we observed 20 teams of Swiss Small and Medium-sized Enterprises during 2.5-days standardized ideation workshops.

This paper addresses the challenge of striking a balance between, on one hand, mitigating uncertainty through the existence of systematic processes and structures and, on the other, stimulating creativity through allowable variation in work processes and structures.

Innovation auditing is a well-established practice used by managers to identify strengths and weak- nesses in innovation. Existing audit frameworks fall short, however, because they neglect three major trends that currently transform the innovation landscape.

Whereas extant research on trust in interorganizational relationships tends to focus on trust convergence – i.e. members of one focal firm developing similar trust perceptions toward a partner firm – we shift focus to trust divergence – i.e. members of one focal firm developing different trust perceptions toward a partner firm.