Silke Lennerts

Scholars have argued that the exploitation-–exploration interaction provides a source of com-petitive advantage beyond that provided by each individually. However, we know little about the mutual effects of exploitation and exploration on either incremental or radical innovation per-formance. To address this gap, we examine data from 171 manufacturing firms. We find incre-mental innovation performance is highest when exploitation interacts with an intermediary lev-el of exploration. Radical innovation performance, however, is solely driven by exploration. A coupling with exploitation is not effective. We contribute to the extant literature, first, by disentangling the interaction effects of exploitation and exploration on radical and incremental innovation performance, respectively. Second, we extend extant literature that agrees that main-taining an appropriate balance of exploitation and exploration is critical for innovation performance and that has conceptualized this balance as symmetrical presence and magnitude of exploitation and exploration. In particular, we provide evidence in support of an asymmetric relationship.

While a considerable body of research examines the strategic orientation-innovation relationship, findings in that literature have been mixed. This article calls attention to an under-investigated problem: the composite, multi-dimensional conceptualization and measurement of most strategic orientations, which likely contribute to the mixed findings in the literature. To address this issue, the researchers explore a decompositional approach to the strategic orientation-product innovation relationship. The authors utilize the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to select, decompose, and recast a set of strategic orientation components previously identified to be essential to product innovation. To produce more nuanced insights, the authors also decompose product innovation outcomes into breakthrough vs. incremental. Furthermore, the sample is decomposed by product type to assess the generalizability of the conceptual model across manufactured goods vs. services firms. The authors test the conceptual model with a sample of 222 executives of services and manufacturing firms in Germany and Switzerland using Partial Least Squares (PLS). By decomposing the strategic orientation effects into direct, indirect, total, and specific components, the detailed empirical analysis yields several new insights. Overall, the results suggest that the relationship between strategic orientation and product innovation is more complex than previously identified in the literature. For example, the results demonstrate that technology orientation works to augment innovation differently in services vs. manufacturing firms. More specifically, technology orientation boosts only breakthrough innovation in manufacturing firms, and only indirectly by enhancing an organization's openmindedness. In contrast, services firms extract additional benefits from a focus on technology directly (and for both incremental and breakthrough innovation) as well as indirectly by increasing openmindedness. The authors also identify complementary as well as suppressing effects on product innovation outcomes from different strategic orientation components. Based on the findings in this study, future research avenues are identified, and managers are advised to consider each component of alternative strategic orientations individually and evaluate the capabilities aligned with components to assess their interdependencies.

This study forecasts the market potential of electric vehicles by looking at 14 categories of vehicle. It weighs the individual priorities against social preferences and a selection process is used to analyse priorities and barriers to allow individuals considered potential electric vehicle buyers to be identified.

Gaining and sustaining brand loyalty is a key challenge in increasingly competitive markets. Many marketing researchers as well as practitioners emphasize the critical role of the interpersonal interaction between the customer and the salesperson to influence customer satisfaction, generate favorable brand attitudes and to strengthen the bond between the customers and the brand. So far, empirical research that investigates how sales encounters impact brand loyalty by enhancing customer satisfaction with the sales encounter is missing. Using data from 154 dyads of customers and salespersons of a large automobile brand, this study shows that the perceptions of both the customer and the salesperson regarding the sales encounter per-formance impact encounter satisfaction. Sales encounter satisfaction, in turn, leads to brand loyalty by enhancing brand attitude and salesperson loyalty.