CFP IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management Special Issue on "Hybrid Innovation Management and Global Corporations"

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IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
Special issue on: “Hybrid Innovation Management and Global Corporations” 
 
Guest editors: Yuosre Badir (Asian Institute of Technology, AIT), Christopher Tucci (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL), Chihiro Watanabe (Tokyo Institute of Technology).
Email: badir@ait.ac.th   
 
 
Innovation is a complex phenomenon that involves all areas of technological, economic, and social activity. It can come from anyone within or outside a company and occur anywhere along the value chain. Nowadays, due to globalization and liberalization of economies, in addition to emerging “big” players, market competition has intensified and the rate of technological change has increased. Companies are reviewing their innovation systems and seeking new methods for innovation generation and new ways of managing the entire innovation process so they can compete on a global level.
 
In such a competitive market, global corporations operate within different regions, countries, and continents, and are more exposed to different innovation management systems / techniques / practices, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. To compete anywhere, be that in the West or East, in developed or developing economies, global corporations may wish to adopt an appropriate hybrid innovation management style in which they retain their own values and strengths of the practices that have made their innovation system effective, while changing what has to be changed. Hybrid innovation management incorporates different, and sometimes opposing, innovation management systems / techniques / practices from other countries/firms and fuses them into one homogeneous system. Examples of different/opposing management systems include, but are not limited to: open vs. closed innovation, internal vs. external R&D, hierarchy vs. market transaction, exploration vs. exploitation, flexible vs. rigid organization, performance-based vs. seniority-based HR promotions/compensation systems, shareholder- vs. stakeholder-focused approaches, strong vs. weak social ties, etc.
 
Transfer of innovation management systems / techniques, or some of its elements, from one country / firm to another always involves uprooting original constructs and introducing them into different institutional systems (for example, culture, national strategy and policy, socio-economic systems, entrepreneurial infrastructure, and education). Effective corporations must consider the characteristics of the original and new institutional systems. The appropriate hybrid innovation management system depends on how well it fits the surrounding institutional systems as well as the company’s culture and business.
 
This special issue offers a prime opportunity to understand the development and implementation (or practice) of hybrid innovation management in global corporations and its relation with institutional systems. Some interesting questions may include: In the hybrid innovation management context, what should be retained and what changed? How do institutional systems influence innovation management practices? Which differences in innovation management practices are of particular importance? Where do they come from? What facilitates the fusion of different innovation management practices? What are the barriers to fuse innovation management practices? Should global corporations try to fuse or let coexist different innovation management practices? How does the existence of different innovation management practices in global corporations influence their innovation performance? And how is hybrid innovation management implemented at local/global levels?
 
Both research and practice papers are welcome, as are papers that advance theory development, use large-sample methods, or that explore one or a few global corporations in-depth. We are interested in articles discussing hybrid management of global corporations related, but not limited, to: Innovation management; corporate strategy; strategic alliances; organization design; organizational behavior; human resources; organization culture; and institutional systems.
 
Submission Deadline: November 30, 2009. Papers should be submitted electronically to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tem-ieee. The cover letter should indicate that the paper is being submitted to the special issue on hybrid innovation. Initial editorial decisions will be reached in 2010.