Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology

As previously indicated, the author will also conduct qualitative expert interviews in the empirical research process of this master thesis. The interviews will be carried out in a second step, after the qualitative media analysis has been carried out. In addition to that, the interviews give the author the possibility to confront experts with the results of the qualitative media analysis and gain background information referring to the strategies of image developers in the United Arab Emirates in a cultural perspective.

The qualitative interviews

In this article, we study the antecedents of supplier innovativeness and supplier pricing. Based on an extensive literature review, we identify different types of antecedents: (1) 'technical' antecedents, which include the capabilities of suppliers to innovate (such as their level of R&D investment) and (2) 'behavioural' antecedents, which focus on the position of the buyer as a supplier's preferred customer. We hypothesise that the two antecedents influence supplier innovativeness in a positive way. Furthermore, we analyse supplier pricing behaviour. We assume that suppliers' awareness of their capabilities to innovate might provoke them to charge unfair prices, while preferred customer status may reverse this tendency and lead to more benevolent supplier pricing behaviour. We test the conceptual framework using a sample of 166 buyer-supplier relations. We find out that technical and behavioural antecedents can explain supplier innovativeness to a large extent, with the role of preferred customer status striking out. Remarkably, whereas we expected that suppliers who are involved in innovation would be found to charge higher prices for their contributions to newly developed products, our results show that this effect is not statistically significant. The missing link between supplier pricing and supplier innovativeness can encourage firms to engage in collaborative innovation, at all, because buyers do not need to fear being overcharged. Implementing a preferred customer policy can improve the conditions for innovating with suppliers.

Supplier Innovativeness and Supplier Pricing: The Role of Preferred Customer Status

Knowledge partitioning in the inter-firm division of labor : the case of automotive product development

Relational view argues that buying companies should integrate supplier resources in new product development (NPD) projects to realise competitive advantages. Due to decoupling of modules and the associated opportunity to allocate development activities to upstream suppliers, modular product architectures are considered to be a driving factor for the integration of supplier resources. Module developments are associated with substantial investments, long-term orientation and risks across product families for the buying firm. Therefore, supplier integration for module development is highly critical. Regardless of the relevance, research has not yet analysed, which supplier competence are considered as antecedents for successful module developments with suppliers. To close the identified gap, this paper analysed case companies from the automotive, agriculture equipment and rail vehicle industry. Technical, organisational and relationship aspects are identified as critical success factors. The results contribute to theory by adding to relational view the finding that competences for successful collaborations differ in accordance to the level of interaction between suppliers and buying firms. Moreover, this study provides a model and an evaluation scheme that helps practitioners to allocate the best suitable development role to suppliers within module developments.

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Identifying the 'right' supplier for module developments-a cross-industrial case analysis

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) increasingly integrate supplier resources in new product developments (NPD) to overcome bottlenecks of resource and to create competitive advantages. At the same time, OEMs react to the new market challenges by implementing modular product designs. Despite the significant relevance, the area of supplier integration in NPD has not received as much attention as the analysis of customer integration in the NPD process. In view of that, this dissertation looks at antecedents like supplier characteristics that facilitate the integration of suppliers in NPD with special emphasize on modular product designs. In detail, five research papers are presented which are connected by a strong scientific relation. Each paper takes a different angle on the topic supplier integration while relational view represent the main theoretical lense (Dyer & Singh, 1998). The first paper examines the positive relation between supplier integration in NPD and performance of the buying firm. The second paper investigates sub-supplier integration by first-tier suppliers and the resulting effects on supplier innovativeness in buyer-supplier collaborations with the help of dyadic data from suppliers and buyers. Third, a qualitative analysis detects supplier characteristics for module developments by looking at three cases from different four wheel vehicle industries. In the following, the identified supplier characteristics are tested empirically in regards to joint developments between buyers-suppliers (grey-box) and self-conducted supplier developments (black-box). The last paper of this dissertation sheds light on the interplay of product modularity and technical knowledge in relation to interfirm collaborations between suppliers and buyers. Over-all, this dissertation enhances current knowledge concerning successful supplier-buyer collaborations by providing insights about organizational aspects to facilitate supplier integration, the role of sub-suppliers for supplier innovativeness and essential supplier characteristics for module developments in accordance to different supplier integration approaches.

/pdf/supplier-integration-for-new-product-developments-4j8jqt8y7g.pdf

Supplier integration for new product developments: antecedents for supplier integration in modular product designs

In new product development (NPD) firms increasingly have to rely on external expertise from suppliers. However, results of early supplier integration have been found to be ambiguous. This research ...

Why and How to Involve Purchasing in New Product Development

Suppliers represent a substantial source of innovation for OEMs. However, scholars agree that antecedents of supplier innovativeness are still less intensively researched. Drawing on resource depen...

Justus Eggers

Papers

Identifying the 'right' supplier for module developments-a cross-industrial case analysis

Supplier integration for new product developments: antecedents for supplier integration in modular product designs

Why and How to Involve Purchasing in New Product Development

A supply chain perspective on innovativeness