Discontinuous innovation and supply relationships: strategic dalliances

Abstract

The authors address the need for supply relationships to generate, support, and respond to discontinuous innovation (DI), noting that established ways of working appear insufficient. The peculiarities of DI are explained and contrasted with well‐known concepts within innovation. The need for customer firms to be both closely collaborative with suppliers while also exploring potential, unpredictable DI elsewhere is proposed, by means of strategic dalliances . A model is presented for understanding and exploring this emerging management challenge.