Does product innovativeness affect new product success? The current research proposes that the ambiguity in findings may be due to an overly holistic conceptualization of product innovativeness that has erroneously included the concepts of product advantage and customer familiarity. This article illustrates how the same measures have often been used to assess product advantage with product innovativeness and product innovativeness with customer familiarity. These paired overlaps in measurement use are clarified in this research, which decomposes dimensions of product innovativeness along conceptual lines into distinct product innovativeness, product advantage, and customer familiarity constructs. To further support this decomposition, structural equation modeling is used to empirically test the distinctions. The measurement model supports the conceptual separation, and the path model reveals contingent effects of product innovativeness. Although product innovativeness enhances product advantage, a high level of innovativeness reduces customer familiarity, indicating that product innovativeness can be detrimental to new product success if customers are not sufficiently familiar with the nature of the new product and if innovativeness fails to improve product advantage. This exercise in metric development also reveals that after controlling for product advantage and customer familiarity, product innovativeness has no direct effect on new product profitability. This finding has strong implications for firms that mistakenly pursue innovation for its own sake. Consideration of both distribution and technical synergy as driving antecedents demonstrates how firms can still enhance new product success even if an inappropriate level of innovativeness is present. This leads to a simple but powerful two-step approach to bringing highly innovative products to market. First, firms should only emphasize product innovativeness when it relates to the market relevant concepts of product advantage and customer familiarity. Second, existing technical and distribution abilities can be used to enhance product quality and customer understanding. Distribution channels in particular should be exploited to counter customer uncertainty toward newly introduced products.

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Accessing and exploiting organizational resources are essential capabilities for competitive sport organizations, particularly those engaged in motorsports, where teams lacking resources frequently dissolve. Corporate sponsorship represents a common method for resource acquisition, yet not all sponsorships equally benefit the sponsored organization. Sponsorship utility can be dependent on institutional dynamics such as league governance that produces competitive disparities. Through this study we extend the resource-based view to assert that sponsorships vary in their propensity to contribute to team survival, warranting prioritization in sponsorship strategy based on access to different sponsor resources. To empirically investigate the influence of a variety of sponsorships, survival analysis modeling was used to examine 40 years of corporate sponsorship of Formula One racing teams. One finding from the longitudinal analysis was that sponsorships offering financial or performance-based resources enhance team survival to a greater degree than operational sponsorships. However, such prioritization is subject to team experience, changes in institutional monetary allocation, and diminishing returns.

Changes in the global economy have made pricing strategy increasingly important for exporting manufacturers. However, relatively little empirical work exists on export pricing strategies to guide marketing managers. The authors use a firm's strategic orientations in export pricing to create firm typologies. They find that four clusters of firms differ across organizational, venture-related, export market, and performance variables. The findings suggest that managerial orientations in export pricing can be successfully used to group firms in how they approach pricing decisions.

New information is the fuel that allows organizations to innovate. Yet the generation of new information may yield little benefit if existing practices prevent the firm from integrating new insights effectively. This study provides evidence that existing knowledge has both an enhancement effect that improves the firm's ability to benefit from new information, and an inhibition effect that lowers its motivation to learn. Firms that utilize a moderate level of existing knowledge benefit from new information more than firms that rely too little or too much upon existing knowledge. We call this optimal circumstance the "learning zone". Furthermore, we find that the moderating effects of existing knowledge are stronger for new products of lower novelty that provide a similar learning context. In addition, as novelty increases, the prominence of the enhancement effect increases, whereas the inhibition effect becomes less prevalent. Highly novel products that are able to utilize existing knowledge are therefore most likely to benefit from new information. Existing technical knowledge is also found to inhibit the use of new information to a greater degree than market knowledge. The findings suggest that organizations should evaluate their reliance on existing knowledge and create a learning zone that provides the best condition for innovation.