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Introduction
This study focuses on suppliers who strive to develop their own innovation capacity to take on a new dynamic role in contributing to customers' innovation activities. These suppliers build their business by facilitating a combination of new knowledge from the technical fields embedded in their network of sub-suppliers with new knowledge embedded with their customers, including lead users or user communities. We term this "supplier-driven innovation".
Our exploratory study aims to contribute to the literature by providing insights into how supplier-driven innovation initiatives enable firms to influence customers' innovation by taking a more proactive role with their key customers. We study the co-creation activities spanning across the supplier-firm's network of sub-suppliers and customers for jointly specifying and expanding potential innovative solution spaces. While many recent studies have taken user-driven innovation as their main focus (Lettl et al. , 2006; Von Hippel, 2005), others have explored the suppliers' contribution to customers' innovation (Johnsen, 2009; Rosell and Lakemond, 2011). However, as our research reveals, no studies thus far have combined the two perspectives into a whole. The present study aims to combine these two strands of research by studying firms who build their business not only by exchanging knowledge but also by creating new knowledge jointly with customers through co-creating activities to build and expand their innovative action space (in line with the work of Håkansson and Waluszewski, 2007). Only a few studies have considered the role of wider supply networks on innovation (Johnsen, 2009, p. 196 - exceptions include, e.g. Rosell and Lakemond, 2011; Teichert and Bouncken, 2011; Wagner, 2009). This limits our knowledge on suppliers' role in innovation, as a narrow focus on developing products excludes insights on suppliers' engagement in developing other parts of a customer's business.
As suppliers engage in supplier-driven innovation, they engage in a transformation from production suppliers with occasionally supplies of knowledge to knowledge brokers who are engaged in the customers' innovation process from the early stages (Johnsen, 2009). Accordingly, this study expands the traditionally perspective of suppliers who are seen as contributors to the efficiency and innovation of their customers through cost reductions and flexible, custom-tailored deliveries (Wagner, 2010) to a more proactive, complex role in developing product and service offerings that are connected across customers and...