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Because firms today operate in increasingly turbulent and complex environments, they need to be more proactive and innovative. Networks are gaining in importance, especially for small and medium enterprises with limited resources as R&D cooperations or cooperations along the value chain seem to be the only way to succeed with technologically challenging and promising but also expensive and risky product innovations. One of the key problems of these networks, however, is the question of how to plan, organize and control the innovation processes that are distributed over several partners. Theoretically derived and empirically proven success factors could help as much here as in the traditional success/failure discussion of new product development within firms. This paper discusses the effects of such factors, which partly derive from the traditional success/failure discussion within firms (e.g. market potential, product advantage, technological synergy, proficiency of technological or marketing activities) but also factors derived from recent network research (e.g. trust or dependence on partners). Their effect on new product performance is discussed on the basis of a comprehensive survey with 271 participating networks. The results confirm the traditional success factors, especially the product advantage and proficiency factors. But they also show that network-related success factors (especially network cohesion and organization) are of similar major importance.R&D Management 41, 2,

Key persons can play an important role in the development and diffusion of new products, processes or technologies. Their functions, contributions and interactions within companies have been subject to numerous investigations. From a theoretical point of view, promotor theory focuses on several specialists to overcome different barriers to innovation, while champion theory concentrates on generalists playing multiple roles. Empirical results point to generalists being better suited for highly innovative projects, but on the other hand different roles should preferably be played by different key persons. A central gap in the literature is that this issue has not been investigated sufficiently so far in an inter-organizational context. The questions are: Is role accumulation beneficial for innovation project performance with respect to the key persons? Is role accumulation even more advantageous with increasing degrees of innovativeness? A sample of 107 innovation projects where small and medium-sized enterprises take part is used as a unit of analysis. The network manager served as the respondent. A measurement approach based on an extended Rasch scale was introduced for this purpose. The results show that indeed 'too many cooks spoil the broth': Instead of many single-role players in each organization, we need a few multiple role players in an interorganizational context.

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Personal welcomings, individual assistance, as well as recommendations to inform and buy are becoming an integral part in online retailing. These new so-called personalization elements are assumed to increase the retailer’s share of wallet and the customer’s satisfaction. However, up to now only little is known about which external factors influence the customer’s acceptance of such personalization elements. This chapter discusses the forms of recommendations to buy and how their acceptance can be measured using the well-known Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) approach. An experiment is used, where volunteers are offered an online shopping experience with individually generated recommendations to buy. The experiment shows how high the acceptance of the generated recommendations is and how close this acceptance is connected to the quality and shopping relevance of the recommendations. Even though the results are limited to the specific recommendation types used, they give important implications for an adequate design of modern online shops.