مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Firms rarely innovate by themselves and increasingly rely on external sources to strengthen and accelerate their internal innovation (Fritsch & Franke, 2004; Zeng, Xie, & Tam, 2010). Within this more complex realm, intermediaries have emerged and performed diverse tasks within the innovation process (Lichtenthaler, 2013). These intermediaries gather, develop, control, and disseminate knowledge in addition to collecting and dispensing financial, technical, and institutional resources (Colombo, Dell’Era, & Frattini, 2015). They are key players in the knowledge transfer among organizations and provide opportunities for mutual learning that may stimulate the creation of new knowledge while simultaneously contributing to an organization’s innovation capability (Gassmann, Daiber, & Enkel, 2011). However, despite the potentially critical role of intermediaries in innovation as well as information or technology marketing, the mechanisms about how and when they become effective drivers of corporate innovation remain unclear.

This study aims to develop a better understanding of these mechanisms and the conditions under which the intermediaries could efficiently and effectively influence corporate innovation performance. Specifically, this study answers three questions. First, do stronger ties with intermediaries actually lead to better innovation performance? Second, how can a firm convert its ties with intermediaries into a real improvement in innovation performance? Third, how does environmental heterogeneity influence the path from intermediaries to corporate innovation?

Next, Section 2 describes the theory and hypotheses development. Section 3 indicates the methodology and Section 4 provides the results. Sections 5 and 6 discuss the conclusions and limitations of the study, respectively.promote innovation by adapting the existing ideas, principles, and concepts from other industrial ambits (Tran, Hsuan, & Mahnke, 2011).