The path of innovation: purchasing and supplier involvement into new product development

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper aims to investigate the effects of supplier collaboration on the firm innovation performance as well as the enabling characteristics of the purchasing function. This is an original contribution as few papers empirically test the effect of supplier collaboration (meant as supplier involvement, development, and integration) on innovation performance and — simultaneously — the contribution of strategic sourcing activities and purchasing knowledge. Also, we explore the technological uncertainty of the purchase as an important contingent factor that might influence the firm's innovation strategy and the emphasis on supplier collaboration or strategic sourcing. Towards this end, we develop a theoretical framework and test it through a survey conducted on a sample of 498 companies worldwide. Results show that innovation, as a category priority, does lead to emphasize supplier collaboration and strategic sourcing which, in turn, ensure better innovation performance. Empirical evidence also shows that, on the one hand, adequate purchasing (managers) knowledge enables greater supplier collaboration and strategic sourcing; on the other hand, technological uncertainty put greater emphasis on innovation strategy as well as on strategic sourcing. 1. Introduction " [C]ompanies rarely innovate by themselves " (Edquist, 1997): innovation is the product of a network rather than of a single person or firm. As a matter of fact, the open and collaborative innovation paradigm represents a way to support the innovation effort by accessing external resources (e.g., knowledge, technology, human workforce) that the focal firm might lack (Chesbrough & Crowther, 2006; Pisano & Verganti, 2008). This study focuses on new product development (NPD) capabilities , which is one of the facets of innovation. 5 In this context, supplier and —later — purchasing department involvement into innovation processes has been recognized as a potential source of sustainable competitive advantage, even though the literature is not fully consistent. Among external sources of innovation, suppliers have a crucial role in improving firms' innovation performance: they know their customers' business and mechanisms for knowledge transfer from supplier to customer are typically in place (Yu, 2008). Suppliers' contribution assumes various forms, such as supply of innovative components and product/process technologies (Walter, 2003), or joint product development projects (Bonaccorsi & Lipparini, 1994). Earlier and more extensive supplier involvement emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve NPD process performance (Clark, 1989; Ragatz, Handfield, & Petersen, 2002). However, engaging suppliers into collab-orative innovation is …