By applying formalized innovation portfolio management systems, firms seek to ensure an alignment of their goals and strategy with their employees' different abilities, actions, and outcomes. However, research indicates that nonrational, political behavior also determines formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. Research on political behavior in respect of innovation portfolio management usually conceptualizes political behavior as a set of self‐serving activities, such as negotiation, bargaining, coalition building, and acquiring power, aimed at protecting, maintaining, or promoting an actor's self‐interest and power. Consequently, extant research tends to focus on political behavior's dysfunctional impacts on decision‐making processes and their subsequent outcomes. This paper challenges this negativity bias by exploring a novel, neutral specification of political behavior and its relation to innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes. By conducting an automotive industry case study focusing on the innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes, the paper analyzed the data from 43 interviewees. The conceptual model shows that managers' political capabilities determine their ability to behave politically. According to the results, political behavior comprises the activities that prepare the stage and orchestrate others in order to form a political coalition. Furthermore, results show that political behavior functions as a sensegiving and a sensebreaking process, with managers seeking to shape an innovation project's understanding according to their interests and to influence portfolio decisions. The resulting novel specification of political behavior extends the construct's scope and validity by investigating their functional and dysfunctional aspects, and by indicating that a political sensemaking process complements formalized innovation portfolio management decision‐making processes.

The practice of innovation management is developing fast. As new concepts emerge, exploratory studies are needed and case study research is often appropriate. To investigate the usage and quality of case study research in innovation management, all of the articles published in five top journals over 20 years (1997–2016) were reviewed. Case study research accounted for 818 of the published articles in this period (12%) and an evaluation template (termed case study evaluation template: CASET) was developed to objectively assess these articles against 10 quality criteria. It was found that the quality of case study research has often been low, although it has improved over time. Similarly, quality was found to fluctuate both within and between the different innovation journals. This indicates that the peer review process for case study research is not as robust as it should be. The assessment of individual articles using the evaluation template found significant deficiencies. Many articles: did not justify why case study research was appropriate; did not apply theoretical sampling criteria; were not transparent on how conclusions were drawn from the data; did not consider validity and reliability adequately; and did not go beyond description in their interpretation. However, the evaluation template also identified 23 “exemplary studies,” which clearly addressed nearly every criterion. Such exemplary studies provide innovation management researchers with “benchmark” reading, which can help shape their own research. This article makes four contributions to the innovation management discipline. First, the evaluation template and exemplary studies can help innovation researchers improve the quality of their case study research. Second, clear recommendations are given for how reviewers can use the template to make the peer review process more consistent and robust. Third, journal editors are encouraged to consider the implications of the findings for their particular journal. Fourth, the article should stimulate a long overdue debate on methodology in innovation management research, including the use of case study research.

High‐tech manufacturers increasingly rely on the knowledge contributions of external technology experts (ETEs), who contribute to collaborative R&D projects on behalf of suppliers. Many scholars have considered knowledge sharing in R&D collaborations from a firm‐level or project‐level perspective and focused on formalization as a potential remedy. While individual supplier employees at the operative level make the decision to share critical knowledge, the individual‐level perspective in literature on knowledge sharing in collaborative R&D projects is virtually nonexistent. Because knowledge sharing in collaborative R&D is a largely discretionary act on behalf of the supplier employee, personal motivations rather than inter‐firm relationship elements (e.g., network position or dependency) become the primary determinant of one’s sharing behavior. Abstracting from or ignoring these motivations of supplier employees in studies on collaborative R&D may obscure important insights for R&D managers. This study is an important first step in providing the empirical evidence needed to uncover the motivational and behavioral foundations for ETEs’ knowledge sharing in a collaborative R&D setting. Building on theories of gift and social exchange, this article identifies customer stewardship and distributive fairness as two important personal motivations of ETEs to share knowledge. Project formalization is considered as a key contingency condition. Analyzing survey responses of 186 ETEs, a multilevel regression‐based moderated‐mediation analysis of direct and indirect effects shows that customer stewardship predicts an ETE’s knowledge sharing behavior under (very) low levels of project formalization, and distributive fairness predicts knowledge sharing behavior under medium to high levels of formalization. Together, the results provide R&D project managers who aim to leverage external knowledge contributions with valuable insights that have been obscured in past firm‐level collaborative R&D studies.

Social media technologies that enable interactive feedback during idea generation can complement existing modes of knowledge exchange in innovation management. Especially large, multinational companies use internal online idea competitions to promote intraorganizational knowledge exchange. Although current studies mainly focus on idea generation through crowdsourcing, little attention has been paid to the effect of online interaction between contributors on idea quality. Building on the organizational knowledge networks theory, this study examines online feedback activities, their contribution to knowledge exchange, and hence, how they increase idea quality. The authors identify three feedback characteristics of online idea generation presumed to affect idea quality: (1) the diversity of commentators (feedback diversity), (2) the extent to which feedback is elaborate and constructive (feedback constructiveness), and (3) the degree of facilitator interaction during idea discussion (feedback integration). This study also investigates how the idea authors' own feedback behavior moderates the relationships between feedback characteristics and idea quality. The results show that all three feedback characteristics relate independently and positively to idea quality. Author feedback shows a positive interaction effect with feedback diversity and a negative interaction effect with feedback constructiveness. The findings suggest that online feedback in idea competitions constitutes an important knowledge exchange process for idea generation. Companies that want to profit from firm‐internal idea competitions should actively support online collaboration—e.g., through facilitators.

This research considers the dynamic positioning of an enterprise in an interfirm network and its propensity for new product development. Specifically, we explore how firms reconcile the dichotomy between central and structural holes network positions, by dynamically shifting from a central to a structural holes position (and vice versa) over time. By grounding this research in network dynamics theory, we argue how prior strong central (structural holes) network positions in the interfirm network increase the likelihood the firm will benefit from structural holes (central) positions in the following time period. We also propose that these positions can be modeled by an inverted U‐shaped relationship, which determines the firm's ability to develop new products. Indeed, by balancing central and structural holes positions, firms derive product development advantages from both network positions while reducing the relative drawbacks. However, a risk of such dynamic behavior is that when applied too often, it may prevent firms from assimilating the advantages brought by the two network positions. We test our theoretical framework with a sample of firms from the biopharmaceutical industry over a period of 10 years (2001 until 2010) using two approaches. First, we test the presence of dynamic behaviors using a panel data sample consisting of a network of 3121 firms observed for 10 years (2001–2010). Second, we explore the effect of dynamic behavior on each firm's ability to develop new products using a cross‐sectional data sample of 544 public firms belonging to the network of the 3121 firms. Our results suggest that a dynamic perspective employed in reconciling the dichotomy between central and structural holes network positions increases the ability of a firm to develop new products. However, findings also suggest that if firms shift too often from one network position to another, benefits of the dynamic network strategy are diminished.