A bibliographic analysis of 20 years of research on innovation and new product development in technology and innovation management (TIM) journals

In this perspectives article, we analyze 20 years of research on the topics of “innovation management” and “new product development” in the technology and innovation management (TIM) domain. More specifically, we investigate the questions related to three issues: (i) Performance: Which authors, institutions, countries, journals, and papers have been most productive (number of papers) and most influential (number of citations)? (ii) Networks: What are the links between authors, between countries, between institutions, between journals and co-citation? (iii) Attention: What has been the shift in research attention (i.e., stated keywords) over time? To do this, we use the VOSViewer bibliographic method to assess the domain’s performance and its changes in research attention and present maps of the knowledge structure and networks. Our study adds to and improves upon previous bibliometric reviews in terms of extensivity (i.e., data from 7,612 papers), scope, and accuracy. In addition to the descriptive evaluations of the domain, we also suggest several implications from these results. For performance, we highlight a weak link between productive authors and influential authors, which could be explained by productive authors being part of extensive co-authorship networks, being selective and publishing less but in the highest quality journals, and working in countries with institutions that pioneer research on the topic (and conversely, less influential authors working in countries with an incentive structure that rewards quantity but not quality). Our network results help explain that collaborations are linked to research productivity rather than influential research. Further, our network results reveal collaborations based on country linkages that might create research echo chambers in which research attention is augmented or reinforced by a geographical network. From our results on research attention, we discuss how the dominant keywords are restricted to TIM topics and highly influenced by seminal papers and authors outside the TIM domain. Thus, the field is predominantly inward-looking, drawing from other cognate business and management fields, and hardly drawing from other academic fields. These findings elucidate and extend the concerns other innovation management scholars have raised, noting that the lack of varied and cooperative authorship within the TIM domain has led to stale, repeated methods and metrics in TIM papers, potentially reducing the field’s future influence. We conclude by outlining some adverse implications of our paper. We explain how its evaluations could further produce confirmation biases author and institution standing and motivate publication strategies and incentives that exacerbate research misconduct.