Research strategy Case Study 1: Theory-testing research: testing a necessary condition

strategy is the preferred strategy Chapter 4. The propositions predict that success only will occur if the condition stated in the proposition is present. This means that these propositions can be tested by assessing whether the assumed necessary condition has indeed been present in successful projects. The proposition will be rejected if success also occurs in the absence of this condition. A single such case would be sufficient for such a rejection, in principle.

5.2.5 Candidate cases

Because it is sufficient for our test to find a single innovation project that was successful in the absence of the conditions specified by our propositions, any such case would suffice. It could be a project from any company and in any sector. Because we have been investigating certain aspects of Nokia’s innovation projects anyway see Dittrich, 2004 and, therefore, knew how to find the information about these projects that was relevant to this study, it was convenient for us to select some of Nokia’s innovation projects for this study. We have made use of the alliance database of the Centre for Global Corporate Positioning CGCP see www.cgcpmaps.com. The CGCP database contains information on alliances of a large number of firms. Alliance agreements in this database are defined as common interests between independent industrial partners, which are not connected through majority ownership. Only those collaborative agreements con- taining some arrangements for technology transfer or joint research have been collected for this database. The information in the database includes the starting date of the alliance as well as its form and its goal. If available, financial details have been included in the database as well. These data have been systemically collected from Internet resources, such as press releases on corporate websites and online pro- fessional journals. The database has been maintained continuously. The definition of innovation projects used to build the database is the same as was used in this case study. From this database we only analysed those innovation projects that had as an explicit goal the market intro- duction of a new product.

5.2.6 Case selection

First we identified in the CGCP database all alliances in which Nokia was a partner. Second, we identified the radical and incremental innovation projects within this selection. We used the following two criteria, derived from Henderson and Clark 1990: ■ whether the technology developed in the project was new or already available; ■ whether the market for the new product was new or a current one. An innovation project was categorized as radical if both the technology and the market were new, and an innovation was considered to be an incremental one if both the technology was already available and the market was current. For our purposes we could dismiss all projects that were not clear-cut cases of radical or incremental innovations, such as projects in which the technology was new but not the market. Third, we assessed which projects had been successful, i.e. which projects had resulted in the market launch of a new product. This was assessed through inspection of press releases. Finally, we selected five radical and five incremental successful inno- vation projects from the two lists of radical and incremental successful innovation projects in which Nokia had been a partner. We did this in a rather arbitrary way, without using any criterion in particular.

5.2.7 Hypotheses

For the five successful radical innovation projects, we specified the three propositions in this study as follows. Hypothesis 1a: All five projects are alliances with new partners. Hypothesis 2a: All five projects are alliances with partners that have different technological capabilities. Hypothesis 3a: All five projects are alliances with contracts with a low level of commitment short-term. For the five successful incremental innovation projects, we specified the three propositions in this study as follows. Hypothesis 1b: All five projects are alliances with existing partners. Hypothesis 2b: All five projects are alliances with partners that have similar technological capabilities. Hypothesis 3b: All five projects are alliances with contracts with a high level of commitment long-term.