Linking Customer Interaction and Innovation: The Mediating Role of New Organizational Practices

By N. J. Foss, Keld Laursen, Torben Pedersen. Organ. Sci., 2011

615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The notion that firms can improve their innovativeness by tapping users and customers for knowledge has become prominent in innovation studies. Similar arguments have been made in the marketing literature. We argue that neither literatures take sufficient account of firm organization. Specifically, firms that attempt to leverage user and customer knowledge in the context of innovation must design an internal organization appropriate to support it. This can be achieved in particular through the use of new organizational practices, notably, intensive vertical and lateral communication, rewarding employees for sharing and acquiring knowledge, and high levels of delegation of decision rights. In this paper, six hypotheses were developed and tested on a data set of 169 Danish firms drawn from a 2001 survey of the 1,000 largest firms in Denmark. A key result is that the link from customer knowledge to innovation is completely mediated by organizational practices.

Subfields: Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de53106f8bcd939ab28fe520b80aebaa4c62412d

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Citations in the corpus

How does social software change knowledge management? Toward a strategic research agenda (2012, background): “As a recent study by Foss et al. (2011) shows, to absorb knowledge from the outside successfully and facilitate open innovation, firms also need to distribute and share that knowledge effectively among members of the organization.”
Smart Tourism Destinations Enhancing Tourism Experience Through Personalisation of Services (2015, background): “For instance, customers have been mentioned as an important knowledge source for innovation (Foss et al. 2011).”
Utilizing customer knowledge in innovation: antecedents and impact of customer involvement on new product performance (2015, positive): “have taken the firm’s perspective to look at the organizational mechanisms needed to facilitate customer involvement (Foss et al. 2011).”
Capturing value from alliance portfolio diversity: The mediating role of R&D human capital in high and low tech industries (2017, background): “However, too much diversity of external sources could Martinez), adversely impact firm innovation performance due to increased organisational and managerial complexity (Duysters and Lokshin, 2011; Bader and Enkel, 2014; Foss et al., 2011).”
Human Resource Management Practices and Innovation (2012, background): “Team vs. no-team production Team vs. individual piece rates Datta et al. (2005) Note: Adapted and extended from Foss, Laursen and Pedersen (2011).”
Depth and breadth of external knowledge search and performance: The mediating role of absorptive capacity (2015, background): “This practice increases trust between firms to share even sensitive information and has been positively related to the outward-looking aspect of a firm (Chen et al., 2011; Foss et al., 2011).”
The paradox of openness revisited: Collaborative innovation and patenting by UK innovators (2016, background): “For instance, Foss et al. (2011) show that in order to benefit from customer interactions, firms have to delegate responsibility and increase internal communication.”