Emanuele Pizzurno

The urgency for innovative solutions to reduce the human footprint on the environment and to reduce poverty and other social issues is globally acclaimed. This movement towards a radical shift is involving in different modes all relevant actors from the whole society, from policy makers to managers from citizens to scientific community. Despite this premise, we are all still experiencing a slow and incremental stop-and-go, with partial solutions and steps forward, as well steps behind and new emerging issues originated by questionable human actions (as the recent Coronavirus crisis). The scientific community has provided public evidence of this scenario and published a number of papers providing explanations and alternatives and in-depth researches on the phenomena, always involving companies in being part of the solution. However, the consciousness of the consequences and a large variety of available solutions seem to be not enough if all the social and environmental troubles are still open, as demonstrated by the fact that these are central in the 2030 SDGs agenda of the United Nations. A missing piece seems to be a widespread adoption of sustainable practices by the companies and this paper aims to take a step forward in this direction, highlining how companies can be sustainable and, at the same time, high-performing.

This paper examines divergences in the degree of openness towards innovation partners (i.e. search breadth). Our explorative analysis, focused on Italian SMEs competing in mid-high tech industries, generally confirms our hypothesis based on behavioral theory of the firms. In particular, we show that Italian family-owned SMEs have a lower search breadth than their nonfamily counterparts. Furthermore, our preliminary findings points out that the stronger the family is, the less Italian SMEs will be open to cooperate with external actors supporting R&D processes.

This paper describes Eni experience, from the awareness of its weakness against external actors (mainly Service Companies) to the definition of a structured approach to partnership, i.e. Open Innovation (OI), in order to overcome such weakness. Implementing OI is complex and the Major’s position is not easy to change. In particular, the strong appeal to outsourcing geophysics, drilling, onshore and offshore operations and well activities by Eni Exploration and Production (E&P) division led to a technological trajectory difficult to be corrected in the short term. Indeed, E&P innovation is in Services Companies’ hands, so compromising Eni’s ability to innovate. Thus, although E&P technologies were re-included among the research activities and managed in an open logic, the weakness in the E&P division could have some negative effect on Eni’s absorptive capacity. Despite the limitations of case study methodology, the paper sheds light on an industry where OI is still unexplored.

The paper discusses the results of an empirical research about the management and organisation of firms offering new product development services. A wide literature has discussed about their rising importance as actors in the open innovation field; it arises in reason of the highly competitive market which pushes enterprises in a "continuous innovation" condition. In order to create and to maintain their competitive advantage, these firms have increased pressure on time, costs and effectiveness of their new product development process searching for an optimization of such activities. In an open innovation context, this involves also collaborations outside the boundaries of the firm. So it is possible to observe the growing tendency to outsource, among activities related to research & development, those tied to the new product development (as marketing, feasibility study, industrial design, mechanical design, electronic design, engineering, rapid prototyping, pre-production and testing), creating new business opportunities. In fact, this has carried to the birth and spread of enterprises that perform technical-scientific services and in particular those which are associated with the development of a new product. The aim of this paper is to give a brief while complete picture of these kinds of firms, completing existing literature with actual data and information, and referring mainly to the Italian Landscape. The information to such study have been found through seventeen case studies of Italian new product development (NPD) companies, able to support the entire new product development process of their clients. The analysis of the gathered data has allowed the characterization of the enterprises and the appraisal of the correlations between managerial variables (the range of the services offers, price, number and duration of the projects, organizational structure, and managerial model). Moreover this allows to define some peculiarities of NPD enterprises the elements that increase business performance, guaranteeing the success once the new products are on the market. Some emerging key factors are (i) price definition: the traditional cost approach methodologies are combined with estimated idea profitability (income approach); (ii) Performance Measurement System (PMS) in NPD projects (taking into consideration conventional economic indicators but also employees creativity and commitment); (iii) evolutionary trends, from a managerial and organisational point of view; (iv) phases of NPD process covered: the clients are progressively less involved in several NPD phases, but maintain fully control over first phase (idea generation) and the last one (commercialisation). The paper is this organised into four different sections: (i) Literature review: description of the conceptual context of this study, giving the basic theoretical background, concepts and definitions; (ii) research objective and methodology: definition of the paper's research objectives and methodology; (iii) empirical study: description of the case studies and analysis of data gathered; (iv) conclusions and managerial implications: discussion of the results and final considerations about the elements able to foster the development of the NPD service market and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of companies within such a market.