Knowledge that Transforms

This study systematically reviews 200 articles published over the past three decades to reveal how appropriability and appropriation have been explained and how those perspectives resonate with developments in the innovation environment. Our results show that despite the extensive stream of literature, little effort has been made to systematically advance theory on appropriability and appropriation. Based on and extending prior literature, we propose a conceptual framing that distinguishes appropriability and appropriation, and that explains how innovating organizations build their readiness to benefit from innovation and how they realize that potential. We outline appropriability as the potential to benefit from an innovation, which accrues through instruments of appropriability: isolating appropriability mechanisms and complementary assets; and appropriation as the realization of that potential, which manifests in private and social benefits when the instruments are employed in processes for exclusion, leverage, or disclosure. We highlight the strategic importance of aligning these elements and appropriability conditions in realizing appropriation outcomes. The paper closes with a discussion on the framework's applications and relevant future research avenues.

This study examines the barriers and enablers within the adoption process of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMTs) and their relationship to different innovation types as outcomes of this process. Whilst the requirement to improve AMT adoption is widely acknowledged, the existing literature lacks a comprehensive understanding of the main barriers and enablers within the adoption process. Furthermore, it does not reveal how these barriers and enablers are related to different innovation types. We provide a systematic literature review of the barriers and enablers to AMT adoption. The findings of this review are based on a total of eighty-seven peer-reviewed articles from the business and management literature from 1999-2019. Our findings provide several contributions to the literature. Firstly, by integrating evidence from empirical studies, we identify five main types of barriers and four main types of enablers to adoption. Secondly, we conceptualise three key stages of the AMT adoption process and classify the barriers and enablers on the basis of whether they apply to an individual stage, or whether their influence is pertinent across the whole process. Thirdly, we reveal the relationship between categories of barriers and enablers associated to innovation types outcomes: product, process, service or business model innovations. The results of our study provide important implications for both managers and policy makers based on the evidence of the key barriers and enablers. Further, we suggest several directions for future research, including the need to examine the post-installation stage.