Tobias Röth

Innovation politics impact the development and introduction of innovations, yet knowledge about the influence of specific political behavior or behavioral patterns remains blurred. Based on a literature review and the articles in this Special Issue, we propose a three‐part framework that identifies the building blocks of political behavior in innovation: what motivates actors to be political, the different types of political actors, and the effect of various political behaviors on innovation outcomes. Emphasizing the evolving landscape of innovation politics, the framework aims to highlight research gaps and guide future studies toward improving our understanding of the functional and dysfunctional aspects of innovation politics.

Idea screening is crucial as it must select the most promising ideas that are best suited to increase front‐end success. Although paradox theory indicates that learning tensions characterize the evaluation and screening of idea creativity, we know little about how idea screeners navigate through the associated competing demands. In response, we investigate the effects of idea screeners' paradoxical thinking on the assessment of the creativity of ideas as well as its motivational antecedents of paradoxical thinking. By analyzing a survey ( N = 326) and an experiment ( N = 292), we show that paradoxical thinking increases front‐end success and both dimensions of idea creativity (encompassing meaningfulness and novelty). In turn, by creating a motivational context (comprising decision autonomy, encouragement to take risks, and tolerance for mistakes), firms can provide the antecedents to adopt paradoxical thinking. Our study contributes to and extends the literature on screening idea creativity and paradox theory.

The business model innovation (BMI) concept has become a well‐established phenomenon of current academic research. While Foss and Saebi's ( Journal of Management , 2017, 43, 200–227) seminal literature review on BMI revealed 349 articles on BMI published between 1972 and 2015, an additional number of 1727 articles on the topic have been published since 2016. In contrast to this overall interest in the BMI phenomenon, innovation‐focused journals include only a limited number of publications on BMI. Further, besides the valuable insights and fruitful research directions of extant literature reviews, they tend also to overlook the linkages between traditional innovation management and the majority of BMI research. Given this underrepresentation of BMI research in the innovation management literature, we conduct an integrative literature review to bring the disconnected literature closer together and offer directions for future research. Our literature review applies the review strategy of blending and merging the literature across domains. First, we blend the knowledge base of the BMI domain by applying the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Body of Knowledge categories. Second, we merge the literature across domains by developing an integrative framework. As recent BMI literature increasingly converged to two lines of research, our framework differentiates between the relatedness of the BMI and BMI openness. Thereby, we offer new avenues for future research that can enrich the dialogue on BMI research in the innovation management community. These results demonstrate how the BMI domain covers aspects that fit, contribute to, and extend classical innovation‐focused research, how both research domains can be merged to enrich each other, and how future research can foster the dialogue across disconnected domains.