This book examines key issues, challenges, opportunities and trends in innovation processes and supply chain management. It proposes ways for organizations to improve their performance by developing business strategies, establishing business innovation activities, and aligning business and innovation activities among firms. Further, it showcases and analyzes the implementation of inter- and intra-organizational process improvement activities and the implementation of organizational innovation solutions to address new product and process-related collaborative relationships across the supply chain. The book is useful for researchers, academics and professionals, presenting some of the most advanced research, concepts, and case studies on the relationship between innovation and supply chain.

Part I. Innovation and Supply Chain Management

Chapter 1. The Intellectual Structure of the Relationship between Innovation and Supply Chain Management
Part II. The importance of supplier-client relationships
Chapter 2. Coordination of New Product Development and Supply Chain Management
Chapter 3. An Investigation of Contextual Influences on Innovation in Complex Projects
Chapter 4. Necessary Governing Practices for Success and Failure of Client-supplier Innovation Cooperation
Chapter 5. Collaborative new Product Development in SMEs and Large Industrial Firms. Relationships Upstream and Downstream in the Supply Chain
Chapter 6. It's Time to Include Suppliers in the Product Innovation Charter (PIC)
Chapter 7. Mission Impossible: How to Make Early Supplier Involvement Work in New Product Development?
Part III. Strategies and implications for innovation
Chapter 8. Purchasing Involvement in Discontinuous Innovation: An Emerging Research Agenda
Chapter 9. National Culture as an Antecedent for Information Sharing in Supply Chains: A Study of Manufacturing Companies in OECD Countries
Chapter 10
Risk allocation and supplier development in Automotive Supply Chains: A Study of Nissan Europe
Chapter 11. Does Supply Chain Innovation Pay Off?
Part IV. Information and Technology
Chapter 12. Technological Innovations in Supply Chains
Chapter 13. The Role of Informational and Human Resource Capabilities for Enabling Diffusion of Big Data and Predictive Analytics and Ensuing Performance
Chapter 14. Adoption of Industry 4.0 Technologies in Supply Chains
Chapter 15. Advanced Supply Chains: Visibility, Blockchain and Human Behaviour.