This case study is based on a research project that analyzed how expert evaluators combine different modes of thinking when screening ideas for innovation. The findings of this research project are detailed in the journal article, “How experts screen ideas: the complex interplay of intuition, analysis and sensemaking” by Sukhov et al. What makes the research project interesting is that it combined three concepts that have been used to study idea screening (intuition, analysis, and sensemaking) and analyzed what these concepts look like in practice and how they are combined to find high-quality ideas. This case study focuses on the methodological choices that enabled implementing this research project. At the heart of the research project was a mixed-methods research design that combined grounded theory coding with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (also referred to as fsQCA) to elaborate different idea screening activities and show how they are used to make decisions on idea quality. Reading this case study helps to understand how to combine these analytical techniques and develop research designs that elaborate different dimensions of data and show how these different dimensions are used together. These ideas can be applied in three primary ways. First, this research design provides a systematic way to analyze datasets that consist of rich qualitative data and multiple cases. Second, it enables studying how alternative (or even competing) theories work together to explain empirical phenomena. Third, this study outlines one way to use fsQCA on qualitative data.

There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts.

The importance of understanding customers in order to sustain the long-term success of the company has been claimed by academics and practitioners for decades, to the point that the claim has turned into a truism. And still, the role of customer knowledge in organizational renewal, especially via explorative new product development (NPD), remains ambiguous. While existing literature generally emphasizes the value of customer knowledge, critics argue that a strong customer focus can also de-motivate and misguide exploration. This study adds clarity to our understanding of this tension by drawing from an intensive analysis of the corporate archives of a rapidly growing high-tech company. The authors trace the impacts of customer knowledge on twelve explorative NPD projects. The findings reveal three distinct mechanisms through which customer knowledge influences exploration: generating, guiding, and gatekeeping. The impact of customer knowledge on exploration depends on the selective deployment of these mechanisms. The authors further argue that managers should seek to find a fit between the deployment of customer knowledge mechanisms and the exploration project type in order to increase the likelihood of exploration project success.

Organizations use idea screening to select which ideas will be developed into innovation projects. Extant research has revealed that, during idea screening, expert evaluators use intuition to make rapid holistic decisions about idea quality, analyze ideas in detail to determine their value and employ sensemaking to understand and elaborate on ideas. However, much of this takes place in the minds of the evaluators, which limits our understanding of how experts identify good ideas. This study addresses the issue by mapping the activities that expert evaluators use to screen ideas and by examining how these activities are used to identify high quality ideas. To study this, 204 idea screening cases were collected, using the think aloud method on two samples of experts. The data were analyzed using grounded theory techniques to outline the range of idea screening activities that expert evaluators use and then complemented with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to understand how these activities are combined together to make judgments of idea quality. The findings break down intuition, analysis, and sensemaking into seven key activities that experts use when screening ideas and detail their dimensions on the micro‐level. The fsQCA further shows that experts combine these activities into distinct patterns in order to find high quality ideas, where sensemaking plays a crucial role. This demonstrates that finding high quality ideas often requires effortful interpretation, while also generating opportunities to develop ideas further. These findings add depth to our understanding of how evaluators think when screening ideas, suggesting that expert evaluators can be used for both the screening and development of ideas during the idea screening stage. Integrating idea development into screening can potentially lead to the more effective use of resources, while saving time at the front‐end of innovation.

Authenticity has often been considered to be a key theme in contemporary consumer culture. One of its manifestations is how branded market offerings can maintain authentic meanings, especially in a market increasingly saturated with counterfeit substitutes. By following a Baudrillardian perspective, we focus on fashion objects in the "branded luxury" category to problematize the sanctity of the authentic/counterfeit distinction. We argue that marketing literature generally attempts to normatively maintain and impose the distinction in ways that obscure the complexities of this conceptual interplay. We posit that instead of normative accounts that attempt to sanctify the extant orders of global capitalist markets, literature on luxury consumption should instead recognize the excess of meaning in the semiotic interplay of commodified authentic/counterfeit meanings. Any view of morality in luxury consumption should thus recognize "ambivalence" and "seduction" as its intensive qualities.

The outcomes of new product development (NPD) processes are dependent on the interplay of several interdependent activities. One product development activity can be dependent on the presence or absence of other activities, different kinds of NDP processes may lead to the same outcome, and specific kinds of activities may have a positive effect in one process but no effect in other processes. However, we currently lack means to examine and explain this causal complexity inherent in NPD processes. To address this issue, we introduce mechanism-based approach as a way to capture conjunctural and equifinal causal relations. We build this approach on the philosophical literature on mechanism-based explanations and the methodological opportunities provided by the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to identify how the activities of entities are configured together to generate outcomes. We elaborate this approach by presenting an in-depth historical analysis of the NPD projects of Vaisala, a meteorological instrument company. We discover and suggest that the company’s NPD projects were driven by three mechanisms (ideation, evaluation and commercialisation) and that each of them were actualised by a set of different activity configurations. Accordingly, we contribute to the NPD and innovation literature by showing how mechanism-based explanations take into account both the abstract theorisation of NPD processes and their inherent causal complexity.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to continue the emerging stream of literature that has found knockoffs and counterfeits to be unobtrusive or even beneficial to luxury companies by analyzing how they produce paradoxes of meaning and contribute to the renewal of luxury markets. This is done by exploring them as doppelganger brand images that reappropriate brand imagery for their own purposes. Design/methodology/approach - This is a conceptual paper that focuses on the role of knockoffs and counterfeits in the renewal of luxury markets. Findings - The findings highlight how knockoffs and counterfeits can contribute to the emergence and cyclical diffusion of luxury. As luxury offerings are introduced to the market, knockoffs and counterfeits accelerate the snob effect, aid in anchoring trends and contribute to induced obsolescence. During diffusion, knockoffs and counterfeits can strengthen aspiration, bandwagon and herding effects. In doing so, knockoffs and counterfeits create a paradox as they simultaneously legitimize the idea of the authenticity of genuine offerings through their presence in the market and create cyclical demand for novel offerings by undermining the authenticity claims of existing luxury offerings. Thus, knockoffs and counterfeits can be understood as a paradox of luxury markets that contributes to the market cyclicality not despite but because of this paradoxical interplay. Originality/value - While research on knockoffs and counterfeiting is plentiful in the field of marketing, this is among the few studies that analyze how these offerings contribute to luxury markets and their renewal.

This study examines how a person’s sense of identity (expressed in terms of openness to change vs. conservation) influences the way in which they screen early ideas for innovation projects. To study this, we recruited 20 experts from a leading IT-consultancy firm to individually evaluate and comment on 12 R&D project ideas. This data was then analysed by using a configurational approach (fsQCA) to understand how different experts combine various evaluation dimensions together to make sense of and decide on the goodness of an idea. The findings show that experts who are open to change view ideas as opportunities and approach idea screening as a generative process, while conservative experts are more reserved in their idea screening activities.

Marketing scholars with sociological and anthropological leanings have made great strides in uncovering strategic and theoretical implicationsof consumer collectives and consumption-driven market phenomena. It has not been very common that their perspectives have been brought to bearon retailing practice or theory. This ethnographic study examines a highly successful, globalizing, consumer-driven pop-up retail festival for itspotential lessons about social movements. It reveals new insights into logics and potentialities for retailing as a field of affordances for reimaginingsociety and social practices. It points especially to how eruptions of ‘carnivalesque mood’ unite everyday citizens to imagine change in a highlyregulated social context and how they utilize the practice of retailing collectively to actualize societal change.