صفات تامین کننده برای عملکرد بهتر نوآوری مشتری شرکت

Previous research on embedded ties with suppliers in an innovation context has ignored the need for customer firms to assess and select suppliers on the basis of market orientation strategies and relationship marketing attributes. To address this void, this study investigates the effects of suppliers' downstream customer orientation and supplier–customer homophily (i.e., similarity of the supplier and the customer) on the customers' innovation performance. Data pertaining to new product development projects with contributions from supplier firms was collected on both sides of the supplier–customer dyad. The analysis shows that downstream customer orientation and supplier–customer homophily have a significant impact on the customer firms' new product efficiency (i.e., project cost and project speed) and new product effectiveness (i.e., innovativeness), which in turn positively influence new product performance in terms of profitability, market share, and growth.

Firms in many industries are increasingly shifting to an ‘open innovation’ model and integrate company resources with the resources of external actors, with the aim of achieving and sustaining innovation. A large body of literature in the innovation, supply chain management, and business-to-business (B2B) marketing domain underscores the way in which customer and supplier firms should interact in order to achieve high innovation performance (Jap, 1999, Stump et al., 2002 and Ulrich and Ellison, 2005). Behaviors, actions and interactions of a customer and supplier in inter-organizational innovation depend to a large degree on the various traits of the actors: Do the characteristics of the customer and supplier complement each other? Do the customer and supplier employees communicate frequently and openly? Do they trust each other? Do both firms' corporate goals and cultures match? A review of the literature shows that such supplier traits – apart from the technological expertise and product development capabilities of the supplier – have been largely neglected in prior research on new product development (NPD) with supplier contribution. Therefore, the objective of this research is to conceptualize additional supplier traits and to determine the impact of these supplier traits on the customer firm's innovation and new product performance. A better understanding of the influence of these supplier traits helps firms in selecting suitable suppliers to work with in NPD projects. The next section provides a concise overview of the literature on supplier involvement in customer NPD. This is followed by the development of the research model and hypotheses. Next, data collection procedures are described, followed by a description of the measurement model and the analysis of the structural relationships. The article concludes with a discussion of the study's findings and their implications to theory and practice.