Tingting Yan published in management journal
Tingting Yan, associate professor of supply chain management at the Mike Ilitch School of Business, had a recent article accepted into the Journal of Operations Management (JOM). JOM publishes operations management journals that are original and relevant to the field. The title of the article is “Trading-off Innovation Novelty and Information Protection in Supplier Selection for a New Product Development Project: Supplier Ties as Signals.” The article is about how suppliers’ inter-organizational ties can affect a purchasing manager’s perception of suppliers.
Yan’s co-authors are Yang Yang, Kevin Dooley and Sangho Chae.
Abstract: A supplier's inter-organizational ties can be a source of novelty as well as information leakage risk when a buyer involves suppliers in a new product development project. We use signaling theory to explain how supplier ties affect a purchasing manager's perception of suppliers. Three types of supplier ties are considered: ties with external innovation partners, with customers outside the buying firm's industry, and with the buying firm's competitors. We posit that managers use supplier ties as signals to indicate a supplier's potential in contributing to innovation novelty or information protection. Results from two scenario-based experiments with practicing managers support most of our hypotheses. When innovation novelty is the goal, managers perceive other-industry customer ties and external innovation ties as positive signals, while competitor ties as a negative signal. When information protection is the goal, all three types of ties are perceived negatively. When both goals are considered, information protection has a greater influence than innovation novelty on the final supplier selection likelihood.
