It is widely acknowledged that suppliers contribute positively to innovation in New Product Development (NPD). However, it remains rather unclear what suppliers actually contribute to innovation. Based on a literature review focusing on 80 articles and a focus group meeting with strategic purchasing managers, a conceptual framework is developed categorising different supplier inputs to innovation. This model is formulated by characterising supplier inputs on a component level and an architectural level, related to knowledge extension and knowledge reconfiguration, respectively. Further, supplier inputs can be incremental or radical in nature, resulting in either a dependence on the supplier’s process knowledge or the supplier’s technology knowledge. These situations imply different conditions for knowledge integration.
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Rosell et al. (2012) studied this question.