The Impact of Internal Knowledge Sharing on Sales Department’s Innovativeness and New Product Commercialization

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Innovativeness and new product commercialization are highly important for companies. Therefore, a deep understanding of the impact of all potentially influential drivers of success is critical. The purpose of the paper is to explore the impact of internal knowledge sharing on new product selling and sales innovativeness as well as the impact of empowerment on internal knowledge sharing and, indirectly, on new product selling and sales innovativeness. Design/Methodology/Approach: The research encompassed 101 salespeople working at the top 1000 value added creators in Croatia. The questionnaire was developed and adapted using four scales, to assess internal knowledge sharing, new product selling, sales innovativeness, and empowerment. The data was analyzed by using the PLS-SEM method to examine the relationships between constructs. Results: As evidenced by the survey results, internal knowledge sharing positively impacts new product selling and sales department’s innovativeness, and empowerment is positively linked to internal knowledge sharing and, indirectly, to new product selling and sales department’s innovativeness. Conclusion: Managers should underpin different activities in order to enhance empowerment and internal knowledge sharing with the aim to affect companies’ performance in commercialization of a new product and sales department’s innovativeness. Future research could include moderator variables between the empowerment construct and the internal knowledge sharing construct and deepen the insight into the type of information shared, the dynamics of sharing and the barriers in the process, and other factors that positively affect knowledge sharing.

Critical success factors for the innovativeness of the electronic industry: An analysis in developed and developing countries

“…The results found in the study initially allowed us to conclude that the model is adequate to investigate the phenomenon because in addition to meeting the validity and reliability criteria required for the use of SEM, a relatively high value was obtained to explain innovativeness (R 2 = 0.716) in the electronics industry. Another result that supports this statement is that a positive and significant relationship was found between innovativeness and innovation performance in this industry (H3), which is well understood in the literature (Anning-Dorson & Nyamekye, 2020;Baierle et al, 2018;Brettel et al, 2015;Oliveira et al, 2018;Ruži c & Benazi c, 2021;Santos-Vijande et al, 2021), and the positive relationship was also confirmed empirically in this study.…”

“…According to Baierle et al (2018), one innovation variable may influence more than one construct of competitiveness. Other studies have corroborated this argument, such as Kyrgidou and Spyropoulou (2013), Oliveira et al (2018), Zhang et al (2020) and Ružić and Benazić (2021), and have emphasized that innovativeness in organizations has attracted considerable attention in the literature and that existing knowledge is limited in relation to its drivers and their simultaneous effects as well as the impacts on innovation performance.…”

“…There is disagreement about which CSFs are most relevant for increasing innovativeness, with CSF being mentioned separately or slightly grouped in different publications. This work addresses the gap identified in the literature (Oliveira et al, 2018;Ruži c & Benazi c, 2021;Santos et al, 2018) of a lack of robust analysis of CSFs for innovativeness. Although other partial studies on CSF have been published (Chen et al, 2016;Moon, 2013;Peng et al, 2019), no previous work involving the study of a group of 16 CSFs as analyzed in this paper has been identified.…”

“…An important aspect to be highlighted is that the conceptual model presented in Figure 1 summarizes the research proposal made in this work. Although there are similar works in the scientific literature that seek to analyze the influence of CSF on innovativeness or the innovation performance of organizations, such as Brettel et al (2015), Baierle et al (2018), Oliveira et al (2018), Zhang et al (2020), Ružić and Benazić (2021) and Santos‐Vijande et al (2021), our model presents some important differences: (1) a broader set of CSF is investigated, (2) the proposed model investigates both the individual effect of the constructs related to CSF as well as their joint action (with a second‐order construct), (3) the relationship between innovativeness (which is the central object of the study) and the innovation performance of organizations in the electronics sector is investigated and (4) the composition of the sample allows a comparison between three different innovation systems, bringing more robustness to the findings and allowing a different dimension of analysis from previous studies.…”

In the Context of Digital Finance, Can Knowledge Enable Manufacturing Companies to Be More Courageous and Move towards Sustainable Innovation?

“…Firstly, enterprises need to attach importance to enterprise knowledge acquisition, not only because knowledge acquisition is conducive to integrating the existing knowledge of enterprises and improving sustainable innovation performance, but also because enterprise knowledge helps to build organizational resilience of enterprises and promote enterprise innovation. Based on this, on the one hand, enterprises should not only attach importance to internal knowledge sharing activities [85], increase resource investment, and reduce process-oriented blockage to form efficient knowledge flow, but also improve internal R&D investment [86], make full use of existing internal innovation knowledge, and convert innovation resources into output as soon as possible. On the other hand, enterprises should communicate with external stakeholders or industry-academia-research institutions to acquire external knowledge, consider high-frequency and in-depth interaction with external knowledge acquisition channels on the basis of measuring their own capabilities and costs, and establish deep relationships to obtain more valuable knowledge resources.…”