Data Collection

This section describes the data collection procedure. First, the nature of the data sources is described. Second, the selection of informants for the interviews is de-scribed. Finally, the case protocol is explained, with particular attention for the inter-view procedure used to elicit information about causal relationships.

Data Sources

Data for the theory-testing cases were collected through in-depth interviews with key informants and documents (Table 4.3). Data collection took place in 2004. Key in-formants were selected on information provided in the first interview with the initial contact person who were asked to identify all company employees who worked on the project. Two informants had left their respective firms but agreed to an interview nevertheless. One manager that was identified as a key informant was not available

2 The author gratefully acknowledges Linda van Haren and Kevin Mori for making the audio tape

for interviewing. Generally, informants were first notified by the initial contact per-son about the study, and contacted by the researcher later.

Earlier interview reports were entered into the case study for Hardcoat. Only inter-view reports of the theory-building stage that addressed the product innovation were used. The data referring to Hardcoat have been left out of the analysis in Chapter 2, and are used here to create a longitudinal case study.

Table 4.3: Data Sources in the Theory-testing Stage

Cases Hardcoat SquirtEco Mussel Bag Limburgs

Land Total

Interviews 4

(6.25 hours) 5

(7.5 hours) 4

(5.5 hours) 5

(6.5 hours) 18 (25.75 hours)

Informants 4 6 4 4 18

Earlier interview reports 9^a - - - 9

Documents and artifacts 21 15 14 9 58

a Selected interview reports from fieldwork for the theory-building stage, with information about Hardcoat, to allow for longitudinal case study.

All interviews were tape-recorded and fully transcribed. This resulted in a case data-base of the written interviews with approximately 200,000 words. To keep inventory of the information acquired from the interviews, two-page contact summary forms (Miles and Huberman 1994) were composed within hours of data collection for most interviews. Acquired documents or artifacts were catalogued in an EndNote reference library under keywords, based on the construct categories in the theoretical model.

Documents of the theory-testing case studies were internal documents (such as mar-keting manuals, written guidelines, and strategic plans), external documents (such as press reports and web sites). The documents were mainly used for triangulation pur-poses, i.e. to verify information provided by informants. In several instances, how-ever, informants would talk about a topic and refer to the relevant document for more detail. In those cases, documents are used as an additional data source. Some docu-ments were very information-rich, such as a detailed introduction manual, describing in detail how a product was introduced. Artifacts include products or packaging of the product innovations and advertising materials.

Informants

Table 4.4 shows the principal domains in which the informants were active. In identi-fying key informants, special care was taken to ensure that a business function that had significant involvement in the development project was represented by an infor-mant, to avoid any functional biases in the data collection and to be able to triangulate findings across informants with different perspectives. The table shows that infor-mants from various domains were interviewed. In the food industry, no inforinfor-mants were interviewed whose primary domain was ‘environmental management’. The rea-son for this is that the two firms under investigation in the food industry did not have

a manager whose primary task was environmental management. In both firms, the environmental management function was part of manufacturing or quality manage-ment. In one case, the person responsible for environmental management was inter-viewed because he was involved as an R&D participant in the development project, which is classified under the R&D domain in Table 4.4. In the other case, the person responsible for environmental management was not involved in the development pro-ject.

Table 4.4: Informants for the Theory-Testing Cases

Domain Chemical Food Total

General Management 1 2 3

Marketing 5 3 8

R&D 2 3 5

Environmental Management 2 0 2

Total 10^a 8 18

a Informants from fieldwork for the theory-building cases are not included in this table, although data from nine interviews from the theory-building stage were used to perform a longitudinal case study of Hardcoat.

Case Protocol

Before data collection started, an elaborate case protocol was developed (Yin 1994).

The protocol contained the full data collection and analysis procedure, interview guides, blank information displays, and the coding scheme. Two structurally different interview guides were used: one for the initial interviews, focusing on obtaining a general understanding of the firm and agreement on case study details, and the main interview guide, to obtain the data for theory-testing . The main interview guide took the shape of a training guide and a field guide. The training guide was a document of four pages, stating several probe questions for each topic. The interviewer would typically review the training guide before an interview. The field guide was an abridged version, allowing the interviewer to have an overview in a quick glance (see Appendix 1). A separate training and field interview guide were used to improve the quality of data collection by advance training and is advocated by Yin (1994). The order of the interview guide was changed to reflect the area of expertise of the infor-mant. For instance, an interview with an R&D informant would typically start with questions about the development process, whereas an interview with a marketing in-formant would typically start with introduction strategy. By rotating the topics in the interview guide, rich data were collected on all of the topics under research, because informants have the tendency to give the most elaborate responses about issues that are brought up early in the interviews. The language of the interview guides, as well as the interviews themselves, was Dutch, as this is the mother tongue of all infor-mants and the interviewer. Headings in the interview guide were innovation process characteristics, innovation product characteristics, introduction characteristics, inno-vation performance, and industry/market context. The antecedents in the model, top management commitment to green issues, scope and scrutiny in stakeholder

orienta-tion, were discussed under the headings of the constructs to which they are proposed to be antecedents.

To elicit information about causal relationships between constructs, two different probes were applied (Figure 4.1). First, an informant would be invited to use back-ward logic to elaborate on the causal relationship. The informant was asked to give an explanation for an element of GPI strategy, first in an open format, then in a closed format in which the interviewer would provide possible explanations in terms of pro-posed antecedents. Second, an informant would be probed to use a forward logic, by inviting the informant to provide examples or philosophize what would change in an element of GPI strategy if a proposed influencing factor were to be different. The pro-posed influencing factor could be different in another market, in time, a different product innovation of the firm or of a competitor. To aid the informant in this task, the interviewer would suggest a ground for comparison based on information earlier in the interview or in earlier interviews in the same case study. Table 4.5 provides an example of the interview procedure, applying both forward and backward logic. This interview procedure was used for all proposed causal relationships in the model.

Figure 4.1: Backward and Forward Logic in the Interview Procedure

Consequence

Consequence Antecedent

Antecedent Was the consequence caused by the

antecedent?

Was the consequence different when the antecedent was different?

Backward Logic:

Forward Logic: