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PurposeThe purpose of this study is twofold. First, to examine the contingent role of the product life cycle on the efficacy of purchasing practices. Second, to use the results of the first investigation to explore the adequacy of the profit‐maximization framework for explaining purchasing decision making. This second investigation is motivated by growing evidence on the role of institutional factors in explaining supply chain management practices.Design/methodology/approachSurvey data from a sample of North American manufacturing firms, across four standard industry sectors, are analysed using ANOVA and linear regression, to examine the hypotheses.FindingsThe results indicate that product life cycle has a contingent effect on the efficacy of some purchasing practices but not on others. Interestingly, the results suggest that the profit‐maximization framework is capable of explaining only some purchasing decisions but not others; firms adopt certain purchasing practices in certain product life cycle stages, even when these practices have no apparent effect on purchasing performance. This raises a need for an alternative framework to profit‐maximization, to better understand purchasing decision making.Originality/valueThe paper pioneers an empirical examination of how product life cycle moderates the relationship between purchasing practices and purchasing performance. The paper presents novel insights on the inadequacy of the rational profit‐maximization framework to explain purchasing decision making. Furthermore, the paper presents testable propositions on the role of institutional factors that are potentially driving purchasing decision making in managing the product life cycle contingency.

Imitation and innovation are two primary R&D approaches that firms follow in technology development, especially in R&D‐intensive industries. That imitation and innovation share R&D resources and investments gives rise to what is coined in this article as the imitator's dilemma. The imitator's dilemma tells a story of why firms should break out of imitation‐oriented R&D and move toward innovation‐oriented R&D in order to sustain their innovation output and profit performance. This article contributes to the technology and innovation management literature by illuminating the imitator's dilemma both theoretically and empirically. To this end, this study develops and tests hypotheses to investigate the influence of a firm's imitation activity on its innovation output and profit performance, which represent a gap in the current literature. A longitudinal research design is followed on an unbalanced panel dataset between 1991 and 2010 from a sample of 227 firms in three R&D‐intensive manufacturing industries in the United States, including computer, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical. The results of this research reveal a dilemma for imitators. Imitation activity can generate positive returns in terms of a firm's innovation output and return on assets ROA (a measure of short‐term profits). However, these returns are unsustainable. Excessive levels of imitation activity within the firm results in negative returns in terms of its innovation output and ROA. Additionally, any level of imitation activity, low or high, negatively impacts a firm's Tobin's Q (a measure of long‐term corporate valuation). Accordingly, this article makes novel contributions to the technology and innovation management literature by explaining the imitator's dilemma and how firms may effectively manage it.

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Although imitation is more abundant and prevalent than innovation in firms’ product and process development activities, it has been understudied in research on innovation and R&D management. For example, a valid and reliable objective firm‐level measure of the intensity of imitation activity is lacking in the extant literature. This measure is necessary to understand the antecedents and consequences of firms’ imitation activity, which has implications for R&D management. In this paper, we present novel methods that employ patent infringement litigations data to improve on the validity and reliability of measuring firms’ imitation activity. We validate our proposed measure by presenting a first model and test of R&D as a multiple‐output production function with R&D expenditure as the primary input, and innovation and imitation as joint outputs. This is in contrast to current R&D models as a single‐output production function of either innovation or imitation. This study uses a sample of 227 public firms from the computer, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical industries in the United States during 1991–2010.

Whistleblowing systems serve as a vehicle for change, empowerment, and ethical/social responsibility. Organizational whistleblowing is a socially complex phenomenon that impacts people and organizations across various disciplines and sectors. Whistleblowing is a high-stakes act involving the dissemination of highly sensitive information about multiple actors with tangling stakes/interests. These features inherently make the task of designing effective whistleblowing systems (WS) a challenging one. To address this, our paper develops key design objectives (DO's) for effective WS. We do this by conducting a qualitative literature review of whistleblowing research and by availing elements from design science methods and stakeholder theory. We present four key DO's for effective WS, which we support with a whistleblowing news dataset. This paper serves as a first step in developing design principles (DP's) for effective WS. This research contributes to a growing discourse on organizational whistleblowing in the IS community.

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Effective clearance of unused service capacity is an issue of importance for managers and practitioners in consumer service industries. Taking a design science research approach, this research-in-progress paper proposes an innovative electronic clearance marketplace (clearance e-marketplace) based on novel design principles, namely, shared bundle purchasing and shared customer pooling, which arguably leads to more effective results than traditional clearance methods. We explain the design and implementation of this Information System (IS) artifact and develop hypotheses arguing that consumer service providers' use of this proposed clearance e-marketplace in clearing their unused service capacity would lead to improved performance gains on new customer acquisition and percentage sales compared to their traditional self-managed clearance campaigns. Furthermore, we explain the details of an empirical study to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed clearance e-marketplace in achieving the said performance gains.