Innovation capabilities in business networks: supply chains and Tourism Destinations as cases for theory building

The system of the organization's long-term business relationships is the organization's Business Network. This theory-building thesis focuses on how business networking influences the organization's performances, and more specifically its innovation capabilities. An important gap in theory is identified, since there is a lack of consistent research explaining why even Business Networks where all the traditional variables (such as Trust, Cooperation, Number of Ties, Strength of Ties, etc.) are ranking high, may perform poorly in terms of innovation capabilities. An inter-disciplinary effort may be a fruitful strategy for addressing such a gap in theory. Consistently, this thesis was structured as a collection of 8 papers submitted to and accepted by different international Conferences, whose disciplinary focus spanned from B2B marketing to organization studies, Information Systems, Operations research and eParticipation studies. These papers include qualitative researches for theory-building, and the considered cases belong to different industrial sectors such as Tourism and Manufacturing. The main novel outcomes of this work are: the identification of new Constructs (and related Scales) describing phenomena that influence, according to the qualitative researches conducted here, the innovation capabilities of Business Networks; and the in-depth analysis of how successful and sustainable innovation emerges from creative processes in collaborative settings. The identifed Constructs are: Motivations to Business Network, Attitude to Long-Term Business Relationships, Sustainability of Altruistic Cooperation. This work hypothesizes that if the main Motivation to Networking is the predictability of business interactions, this may result in a detrimental effect on Creativity/Innovation, and in a weakened resilience of the Altruistic Cooperation. On the other hand, if the main Motivation to Networking is to aggregate power, for example for lobbying activities, this tends to enhance only certain aspects of Altruistic Cooperation, whilst Creativity/Innovation at the network level is likely to be poorer. Finally, if the main Motivation to Networking is to aggregate capabilities, both Altruistic Cooperation and Creativity/Innovation are often positively impacted, especially when also certain levels of Predictability and of Power Aggregation are achieved.

Questo lavoro consiste in una collezione di 8 paper accettati da altrettante Conference internazionali di diverso indirizzo disciplinare, dal marketing B2B all'organizzazione aziendale ai sistemi informativi. In questi paper, si affronta da diversi punti di vista il tema dei business network e di come il business networking influenzi la capacità di innovazione delle imprese. Le ricerche presentate confermano su più fronti come le classiche variabili con cui si misurano i business network, quali la fiducia, la conoscenza reciproca, l'intensità dei flussi di risorse scambiate, eccetera, per quanto importanti, non siano sufficienti a spiegare l'influenza che il network ha sulle capacità di innovazione. Vengono quindi proposti 3 nuovi costrutti: Motivazioni al business network, Attitudine alle relazioni di business di lungo periodo, e Sostenibilità della collaborazione altruistica. Il lavoro ipotizza come diverse configurazioni di queste tre variabili possono influenzare le capacità di innovazione dell'organizzazione. Alcune ricerche qualitative, focalizzate sul settore turistico (sistema destinazione) e sul manifatturiero (supply chain) permettono di mettere a confronto il modello con contesti di business concreti.