Drivers and Performance Outcomes of Supplier Innovation Generation in Customer-Supplier Relationships: The Role of Power-Dependence

While innovations generated by supply channel relationships, as opposed to individual partners, play an increasingly important role in the success of all supply chain partners, there has been a dearth of research in the literature on how supply chain relationships cultivate the process of such innovation generation. We explore supplier market knowledge acquisition, relationship learning, systems collaboration, and technological uncertainty as antecedents of supplier innovation generation, which is in turn hypothesized to positively affect the relationship performance of the supplier. Furthermore, supplier dependence on the buyer is investigated as a moderator of the effects of such antecedents on supplier innovation generation. Empirical tests, which used a sample of 236 Taiwanese executives, supported most of the hypotheses, and some implications of the results are discussed. [Submitted: April 28, 2011. Revised: September 19, 2011; March 1, 2012; April 15, 2012. Accepted: April 20, 2012.] Subject Areas: Dependence, Innovation, Power, Supplier, and Supply Chain. ∗We are grateful to the editor Asoo J. Vakharia and the associate editor for their thoughtful support of this manuscript in the review process. We also acknowledge constructive comments from three anonymous reviewers, and feedback from members of the Comparative and International Business Research Centre (CIBER) at Manchester Business School (http://www.mbs.ac.uk/ciber) who were instrumental in developing this article toward publication. †Corresponding author.