Innovating beyond Technology

Innovation is generally considered to be a cornerstone of organizational survival in many of today’s dynamic and competitive markets. This dissertation goes beyond the dominant focus on technological innovation in innovation studies by examining how and under which conditions several major non-technological types of innovation contribute to firm performance. The five studies presented in this dissertation reveal more about how management innovation, co-creation with customers and two basic types of business model innovation, i.e. replication and renewal, contribute to firm performance, either innovation performance or overall firm performance. Our findings indicate that management innovation contributes to a firm’s exploitative innovation performance at an accelerating rate, and that it trans- forms an inverted U-shaped relationship between R&D and radical product innovations into a relationship that is J-shaped. Co-creation with customers has an inverted U-shaped effect on exploitative innovation, while its effect on exploratory innovation is positive. Additionally, we provide new insights how those performance effects are influenced by contextual factors like organizational size and environmental dynamism. For instance, our results suggest that environmental dynamism weakens the positive effect of business model replication on firm performance, while business model renewal contributes more strongly to firm performance in environments characterized by intermediate and high levels of dynamism than in relatively settings with low levels of dynamism. Overall, this dissertation provides new insights into how, and under which conditions, management innovation, co-creation with customers and business model innovation may act as important additional sources of competitive advantage.

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