Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive picture of the innovative efforts undertaken over time to develop the digital technologies for managing the interface between supply chain management and marketing processes and the role they play in sustaining supply chain management-marketing (SCM-M) integration from an information processing point of view.Design/methodology/approach: Patent analysis and actual examples are used to carry out this study. In detail, first, the authors identify the subset of enabling technologies pertaining to the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) that can be considered the most relevant for effective SCM-M integration (i.e. Industrial Internet of Things, Cloud computing, Big Data analytics and customer profiling, Cyber security). Second, the authors carry out a patent analysis aimed at providing a comprehensive overview of the patenting activity trends characterizing the set of digital technologies under investigation, hence highlighting their innovation dynamics and applications.Findings: This research provides insightful information about which digital technologies may enable the SCM-M integration. Specifically, the authors highlight the role those solutions play in terms of information acquisition, storage and elaboration for SCM-M integration by relying on illustrative actual examples. Moreover, the authors present the organisations more involved in the development of digital technologies for SCM-M integration over time and offer an examination of their technological impact in terms of influence on subsequent technological developments.Originality/value: So far, much has been said about why marketing and supply chain management functions should be integrated. However, a clear picture of the digital technologies that might be adopted to achieve this objective has yet to be revealed. Thus, the paper contributes to the literature on SCM-M integration and Industry 4.0 by highlighting the enabling technologies for the Industry 4.0 that may particularly serve for managing the SCM-M interface from an information processing perspective.

In the past few decades, a firm’s innovative climate has received much attention in the context of innovative behavior, competitiveness, and business performance. The existing literature has relied to a great extent on innovative climate as an interacting factor and overlooked its role as an antecedent of various organizational phenomena. Furthermore, the interaction effects of the firm’s size and age on the relationships between innovative climate and other organizational variables have gone unnoticed. This study adds to the literature by empirically assessing the effects of the firm’s innovative climate on organizational learning and employees’ innovative behavior as well as its consequences on the firm’s competitiveness and business performance. Additionally, it addresses the interaction impacts of firm size and age on the relationships between the abovementioned variables. This research achieves its goal by developing an integrative research design that analyzes complex relations using covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) and regression techniques on a dataset of 408 Chinese law firms. The results indicate that the firm’s innovative climate has a significant positive relationship with organizational learning and employees’ innovative behavior. It is also found that organizational learning has a significant positive influence on employees’ innovative behavior. Meanwhile, organizational learning and employees’ innovative behavior have a significant positive influence on firm competitiveness and business performance. Another important finding is that contextual factors, i.e., firm size and age, strengthen these relations. Theoretical and managerial implications, including links to firm size and age, are provided.

Innovativeness in the tourism and hospitality sector is essential for competitiveness and survival. Leadership plays a key role in promoting (or hampering) firm innovativeness. This article intended to examine the role of transformational leadership (TL) and organization citizenship behavior (OCB) on Spanish tourism firms’ innovativeness (OI). It also investigated whether firm size and age moderate the relationship between TL, OI, and OCB. The cross-sectional survey method was used to collect data from 329 middle-level managers in Spanish tourism firms. The findings of the data revealed that TL and OCB have significant impacts on firm innovativeness; also, OCB mediates the relationship between TL and firm innovativeness. Firm size and age moderate the relationship between TL and firm innovativeness; also, firm size moderates the relationship between TL and OCB. It was found that large firms were more innovative than small ones; also, younger firms showed a higher level of innovativeness than old firms. Managerial and specific firm size and age implications were provided.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand if and how the technological diversifications of collaborating firms and public research organisations (PROs) affect the technological impact of the resulting joint-patented innovations.Design/methodology/approach: The authors conduct an analysis on a database of 590 dyadic joint patents, assigned to both firms and PROs, registered from 1976 to 2010 to the US Patent and Trademark Office and belonging to green technological classes, as defined by the International Patent Classification green inventory.Findings: The study reveals that the assignees’ technological diversification has a significant influence on the impact of the patents jointly developed. Indeed, the results show that the most impactful joint patents result from collaborations involving technologically diversified firms.Research limitations/implications: This research sheds further light on the establishment of R&D collaborations between firms and PROs to jointly innovate. Specifically, it provides a novel perspective to investigate the impact of joint patents, by focussing on the assignees’ technological profile.Practical implications: The present work suggests that firms characterised by a higher degree of technological diversification are more likely to co-develop patent of higher technological impact, as resulting from collaboration with PROs.Originality/value: This study investigates the factors affecting the impact of joint patents resulting from collaborations between firms and PROs. In particular, the present research focusses on the effect of a relevant characteristic of the partners, such as their technological diversification.

In Cultural and Creative Industries, innovation contributes to generating a competitive advantage thanks to the fundamental role assumed by the human creativity and the quest for novelty. In particular, the music industry stands out as one of the most successful ones, in terms of both revenue and employment. The music industry is also quickly and constantly growing, supported by the new digital technologies and the rise of streaming platforms and digital services, which have increased the availability of continuous, reliable, and timely data. Consequently, this may allow the implementation of novel techniques to study product innovation occurring in the music industry. Nonetheless, quantitative approaches to study innovation in this industry are scant. The present study aims at filling this gap by developing a quantitative approach to analyze product innovation dynamics in the music industry exploiting data collected through Music Information Retrieval technologies. We selected a successful band as a case study and analyzed each song released from 1984 to 2016 to obtain a quantitative representation of their musical production. We then developed and applied quantitative similarity metrics to see how each album was similar or different from the previous ones and from the most relevant music genres, to better understand innovation dynamics in music production.