Outside-in: Designing External Innovation Activities

Strategic initiatives are launched by ideas, pursued by teams and intended to extend existing or to develop new capabilities. They can take on numerous forms, such as new business development projects with customers, process improvement projects with suppliers, new product development projects with universities, and other kinds of developmental efforts. Within this research stream, scholars have primarily focused on internal factors influencing the performance of strategic initiatives. Strategic initiatives, however, often reach beyond boundaries of the firm. Such external initiatives are connected to groups outside the firm in order to access knowledge new to the organization, to complement its existing strategy, or to gain support, advice and technological discourse where the internal development of a knowledge domain remains scarce.

Understanding how factors associated with external initiatives influence their performance is an important step to complement research on internal factors, especially since inter-organizational initiatives are an increasing component of firms’ strategic renewal processes. This project examines how an externally oriented initiative, conceptualized as the relational embeddedness to external partners, influences the performance of strategic initiatives. Further, it identifies initiative motive and partner type as contingencies that influence the performance effects of external initiatives.