Marketing Activities to Support ‘Moderately Novel’ Product Innovation: Insights from the Chemical Industry

Abstract

Scholars often follow a contingency approach to study which marketing activities are suitable for a particular type of product innovation project, thereby making a distinction between incremental and radical innovation only. 'Moderately novel' projects, which have intermediate levels of newness, have therefore not been given due attention. This paper focuses on market intelligence generation and the creation of cross-functional linkages as marketing activities that are important in the context of moderately novel product innovation. In addition, the organizational position of the marketers involved in these activities is dealt with. Based on the analysis of four successful projects in the chemical industry, we argue, firstly, that moderately novel innovation projects have their own particular sets of marketing practices and, secondly, that differences exist between projects aiming at a new market segment and projects in which novelty is not related to market segment but to other market dimensions. These differences are especially salient in early project phases. These findings are pertinent to research on the role of marketers in product innovation, and to the study of organizational ambidexterity.

Transformational leadership and supply chain ambidexterity: Mediating role of supply chain organizational learning and moderating role of uncertainty

“…Other researchers identified antecedents of organizational ambidexterity by studying factors such as alignment of knowledge assets (Lin, et al, 2017), top management diversity (Li, 2013), and strategic orientations in decision-making (Kortmann, 2015). Still, other studies, that are conceptual in nature, use organizational ambidexterity as a framework to study organizational dynamism (Ricciardi et al, 2016), relative ambidexterity (D'Souza et al, 2017) and innovation (Zhang et al, 2017;O'Reilly III and Tushman, 2013;Parikh, 2016;Xu et al, 2013;Smits et al, 2015). Research on supply chain ambidexterity, specifically, is limited; the only paper addressing the issue is by Lee and Rha (2016) who explore the role of supply chain ambidexterity on supply chain resilience.…”

Marketing involvement in product platform creation: The role of personal and structural coordination mechanisms

“…Consistent with other studies, we find that marketing involvement positively affects product platform outcomes. Whereas prior research focused on marketing's contribution to the success of NPD projects (Smits et al, 2015), we extended these results to PPC. How marketing units and their individual staff members' product platform knowledge impacts financial performance is, however, fully mediated by marketing's involvement in the process.…”

“…Consistent with other studies, we find that marketing involvement positively affects product platform outcomes. Whereas prior research focused on marketing's contribution to the success of NPD projects (Smits et al, 2015), we extended these results to PPC.…”

Implementing digitally enabled collaborative innovation: A case study of online and offline interaction in the German automotive industry

“…Thus, appropriate knowledge filtering mechanisms must ensure that distant knowledge is not too easily discarded by the scouting organization, while preventing the organisation from overloading of irrelevant information, particularly those individuals tasked with the appraisal of multiple ideas (Whelan et al, 2011). Work on idea scouting that crosses organizational boundaries, for instance, shows that complex boundary spanning opportunities require supplementing structural social capital with a strong relational component and suggest that offline interaction, such as personal feedback, complements online idea initiation (Monteiro & Birkinshaw, 2016; Smits et al, 2015). Prior work on knowledge networks suggest that diverse knowledge can be most effectively assessed by actors that are part of open‐specialized networks (Aalbers, 2020; Burt, 2004; Gargiulo & Benassi, 2000; Hansen & Haas, 2001).…”