Towards Optimized Innovation and Product Introductions in Agri Food Supply Chains: A Conceptual Model and Innovation Score Card

摘要

Research relevance and purpose Companies in all sorts of business, and increasingly also in agribusiness, face the need to invest constantly in product innovation. Product lifecycles have shortened, competition has intensified, and consumer markets show signs of saturation. In many markets, niche strategies and product differentiation offer the only way to combat erosion of margins. Globalisation has lifted the scale of competition to new heights and has raised the stakes: ever more management and engineering effort is put into product development, ever larger investments are poured into market launch. However, despite of all this, product innovation and market introduction remain a hazardous venture. Figures show high failure rates of new products on consumer markets. Depending on the definition of success and failure, it appears that between 40 and 80 percent of products launched on the market do not succeed in fulfilling their commercial purpose. This paper tries to make a contribution to increasing the probability of success in product innovation and market launch by identifying and considering the factors that appear to determine this success rate. It does so by bringing together elements that are identified in various strands of literature. On the one hand, the literature on innovation management provides clues as to what makes a product innovation effort successful, and on the other hand, the literature on product introductions provides evidence of what factors play a role in a successful launch. Both strands of literature focus on a variety of issues of management and organisation. However, most authors consider product innovation and introduction from the point of view of the single firm. This paper adds the perspective of the chain. If production is organised in a supply chain of independent firms, this adds several complications to the issues of organising and managing product innovation in a concerted manner. Successful product innovation in the context of a supply chain requires organisational and managerial features that may be at odds with demands that are usually put to chains, like flexibility and transparency. With regard to the chain level of analysis in this paper we focus on managing supply chain relations as a critical success factor. Consequently, in this paper we focus on both factors and actors contributing to success and failure of innovations and introductions, both on the level of the company and the innovation project as well as on the level of the supply chain. The purpose of our research is twofold. First we integrate the different strands of literature in a conceptual model in which critical success factors on the company level are translated into factors influencing product introduction success on the supply chain level. Secondly, we use the conceptual model to develop a method by which we can analyse supply chains on their innovative nature. We call this method the innovation score card. It shows the innovation-aspects of the analysed supply chain and the opportunities for improvement. The model and method are confronted with empirical evidence obtained in studies of fresh vegetables and expert interviews. This research is a first attempt in developing a quantitative method for analysing the innovativeness of a supply chain. Research aim Research on critical success factors of the innovation process and product introductions mainly focus on factors on the level of innovation projects within a company. One can think of factors like the introduction and commercialisation of the product, the organisation of the innovation process and the degree to which marketing and R&D are integrated (Hultink, 1998). Far less research is conducted on factors which determine the success of the innovation process and product introductions at company level. Research into this topic is pending, with results being explored further at this moment. This underlying research takes both perspectives into consideration, h