Call for papers for the sixth emerging discourse incubator: Radical innovations and extreme disruptions: How could a firm thrive from the coevolution of the two?

Abstract

The topic for JSCM's sixth emerging discourse incubator (EDI) is to explore innovation–disruption mutual causality by bridging the supply chain innovation and disruption literatures. To compete today, companies often resort to radical innovations in products, processes, services, profit models, supply chain configurations, and more (Bellamy et al., 2020). At the same time, extreme turbulence caused by natural disasters and man-made disruptions pushes firms to build resilient supply chains (Sodhi & Tang, 2020). Both radical innovations and extreme disruptions create a high level of uncertainty. Hence, these two seemingly opposite forces drive organizations and individuals to constantly evolve, adapt, and improve in order to survive and thrive (Ketchen & Craighead, 2021; Wieland, 2020).

Radical innovations are man-made uncertainty that are usually associated with creating growth opportunities: upward uncertainty. Extreme disruptions could be either man-made or natural uncertainty that are usually associated with large decreases in performance: downward uncertainty. Despite these differences, both affect supply chain management by significantly disrupting routines and creating ambiguity about outcomes. Therefore, radical innovations and extreme disruptions have been well studied by supply chain scholars.

However, these two streams of research very rarely intersect. The supply chain disruption literature has focused on categorizing disruptions and examining corresponding mitigation strategies (Bode et al., 2011; Talluri et al., 2013). Among many different types of supply chain disruptions, disruptions originating from suppliers have received extensive attention due to their significant impacts on a firm's operational performance (Tomlin, 2006). Interestingly, the supply chain innovation literature has also advocated for the important roles of suppliers in contributing to a buying firm's innovation performance (Kumar et al., 2020; Narasimhan & Narayanan, 2013). Therefore, suppliers could be a source of disruptions or a resource for innovation. However, these two streams of work have not sufficiently examined how radical innovations and extreme disruptions might coevolve over time.

High levels of uncertainty, either as a driving force or a consequence, are associated with both radical innovations and extreme disruptions. Hence, the occurrence of one could trigger the emergence of the other. Innovations could either trigger or prevent disruptions. For instance, the development, production, and distribution of new products or services introduce new suppliers, processes, or even business models, thus increasing the likelihood of supply chain disruptions. Customers might not like an innovation, supply might not be sufficient for surprisingly high demand for the innovation, or competitor's innovations or the leakage of intellectual property could trigger an unexpected drop in demand (Ried et al., 2021). At the same time, an innovative supply chain might support the development of higher risk management capabilities, which will help prevent disruptions from happening (Kwak et al., 2018).

Equally, disruptions could create opportunities and motivations for firms to innovate. A new environmental policy could disrupt supply chains by banning the sourcing of certain materials, which would then motivate firms to invest in green innovations. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, though devastating at a global scale, also created slack resources such as idle workforces and facilities, which motivated firms to revise business processes, create new products, improvise new business models, or seek new customers for surviving or even thriving during the crisis (Harris et al., 2020; Kovács & Falagara Sigala, 2021; Wang et al., 2020).

Therefore, research needs to explore the mutual causality between innovations and disruption by bridging the supply chain innovation and disruption literatures. The goal of this EDI is to develop integrated supply chain management theories that help a supply chain to better handle uncertainty, be it upward in terms of innovations, downward in terms of disruptions, or both. One possible starting point could be paradox theory. This theory explains how tensions and potentially conflicting demands are addressed, which could help researchers to explore the relationships between radical innovations and extreme disruptions in a complex network of stakeholders, interdependencies, and systems (Miron-Spektor et al., 2018; Wieland, 2020). Therefore, it could allow researchers to adopt a unified way of examining a firm's innovation and risk management strategies to identify theory-building/testing opportunities (Azadegan & Dooley, 2021). However, other theoretical perspectives such as the complex adaptive system view or dynamic capabilities are appropriate and welcome for this EDI. Finally, the building of new theories is always welcomed in JSCM.

What we are NOT looking for in this EDI are descriptive studies that simply report firm innovations because of extreme disruptions such as Covid-19 or disruptions resulting from firm innovations, without theorizing the causal relationship between innovation and disruption.

All submissions are expected to contribute to theory; we envisage that exploring the innovation–disruption mutual causality will offer rich opportunities to elaborate on existing theory or build new theory. At a minimum, by expanding research to consider post-disruption innovations or post-innovation disruptions, all submissions should explicate boundary conditions, laying a foundation for further theoretical development. For any questions, please contact Tingting Yan, [email protected], Wendy Tate, [email protected], and Mark Pagell, [email protected].

Timeline:

May 2022: Initial call for submissions

January 2023: Invited papers and Co-Editors' introduction of the invited papers is expected to appear online in order to initiate the discourse

January 2023 to January 2024: Submission window for regular submissions