Acceptance of service innovation by frontline employees is a challenging issue, especially if such innovations have the potential to disrupt existing value creation models and individual competencies. Disruptive service innovations are often (1) characterized by a high degree of innovativeness related to significant changes in technology and in the market and (2) may be introduced by technology manufacturers as new service market entrants that cause a competitive threat to the existing service provision. We argue that such innovations challenge frontline employees' focus on routines and standardized service operating procedures. The perceived threat and resulting high levels of uncertainty may inhibit innovation acceptance. Our study follows a collective sensemaking perspective, paying special attention to investigating the moderating role of (1) the exchange of operational information within a workgroup and (2) a firm's entrepreneurial orientation. Whereas the former may increase frontline employees' preference for incremental improvements, the latter may help to increase the acceptance level of potentially more disruptive innovations. We test our theoretically derived hypotheses with an experimental vignette study of 671 frontline employees in the field of audiology, a health care market particularly affected by both more radical and market entrant innovations. Results show that a high degree of innovativeness has a negative effect on innovation acceptance. Frontline employees accept radical innovations less readily than incremental innovations. A competitive threat from new technology manufacturers in the supply chain does not lead to a lower innovation acceptance level. The moderation results indicate significant effects of both information exchange and entrepreneurial orientation. Intensive information exchange within the workgroup strengthens the negative relationship between the degree of innovativeness and innovation acceptance. In contrast, a high degree of entrepreneurial orientation weakens the negative relationship between a competitive threat and innovation acceptance.

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Creativity and Innovation Management has grown substantially over the last couple of years, both quantitatively and qualitatively. From 2016 to 2021, the number of submissions has grown from 287 to 395. Most of the growth was realized in Asia: The number of submissions from that continent increased from 72 in 2016 to 193 in 2021. The rest of the world remained (close to) stable: 215 in 2016 and 203 in 2021. Equally important, the Thomson ISI Impact Factor increased from 1.423 in 2015 to 3.051 in 2021 and further to 3.644 in 2022. This is not where our ambitions end, though. We want to be the ever‐better outlet for authors researching, and practitioners working in, the fields we cover. Editing a journal with the ambition to continuously increase its quality while dealing with a substantial growth requires teamwork—teamwork among the editors and the editorial office, teamwork between the editors and their reviewers and, as surprising as this may sound, teamwork between the authors and their reviewers in a top‐quality reviewing process. The purpose of this piece is to present and discuss some reviewing standards. In particular, we aim to share with our reviewers what we think is an excellent reviewing process. Furthermore, we formulate our ideas about what it is that makes a review an excellent one. The title of this piece is deliberately ambiguous. It denotes that Creativity and Innovation Management strives for reviewing excellence—as in an excellent reviewing process. It also denotes that we reach for the stars and hope to one day receive and, hence, review only excellent submissions.

Despite the dominant discourses on the important role of entrepreneurial leadership in firms' development, related theoretical and empirical studies are still lacking in the environmental management area. Adopting upper echelons theory, this study develops a moderated mediation model that examines how entrepreneurial leadership affects the adoption of green innovation (GI) through organizational learning culture and how environmental dynamism moderates the mediating effect. This theoretical model is tested using a sample of 248 Chinese firms. Findings support the positive impact of entrepreneurial leadership on GI and the mediating role of organizational learning culture. The moderated mediation path analysis shows that environmental dynamism moderates the indirect effect of entrepreneurial leadership on GI via organizational learning culture. Overall, this study adds to entrepreneurship and environmental management scholarship by providing novel insights into the key role of entrepreneurial leadership in embracing GI.

Although innovation is highly valued in organizations, early‐career professionals face a paradox of bringing in novel ideas, yet having varied latitude and support to see these new ideas through. Building on 35 critical‐incident‐based interviews with early‐career engineers in the United States, this study illuminates the socially situated dynamics of their innovation efforts, examining the process of such promotive proactive behaviour. We find that all participants reported some engagement in creating, championing and implementing new ideas, typically in the form of self‐initiated improvements to the tools and processes participants used in their jobs. Encouragement from direct supervisors, supportive organizational cultures and practices, job scope, time afforded and one's perceived status were key considerations in determining whether to take such initiative. Carrying out innovative work behaviours, in turn, was largely dependent on continued employee initiative and ad hoc, informal cooperation, with individual effort punctuated by influential interactions with others that often determined the perceived valence of efforts. The study adds to understanding the social interactions and perceptions of voice required for innovative work behaviour, revealing when and to whom these prerequisites are afforded. Implications for organizations' innovation capacity and new hires' participation in innovation are discussed.

No abstract is available for this article.

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Managers of manufacturing firms have important tasks in choosing novel technology solutions for the firm's production process. The emergence of ideas for radical manufacturing technology innovations and managers' proactive search for radical ideas and concepts for developing production processes have not been well understood. This study concentrates on managers' search practices at the front end of radical manufacturing technology innovations. We analyzed managers' practices in the early phase of nine radical manufacturing technology innovation projects across three firms. Radical manufacturing technology innovations require acknowledging both process innovations for the manufacturer and product innovations for the equipment supplier. The findings of this study revealed alternative patterns regarding the use of directed and autonomous search processes, internal and external information sources and open and closed supplier searches. This study offers new knowledge on the nature of the information processing task that managers face and on the search practices that managers use at the front end of radical manufacturing technology innovations. The study contributes by differentiating the managers' search practices based on the specific innovation scope in terms of the technology, equipment and production concept. Propositions are offered concerning the drivers and use of managers' search practices at the front end of radical manufacturing technology innovations.