Innovation in logistics and Supply Chain Management (SCM)

For some decades now, innovation has been considered essential to "survival" in all sectors of activity. The general idea is that an innovative company (one that produces and/or adopts novelty, that renews itself and/or its offering, or even its offering system) is more successful than one that is not. For companies, the challenge is to answer two questions: how to innovate? and to achieve which innovation(s)? The first refers to the innovation process, the second to its outcome.

In terms of results, priority is often given to what is "visible" to the customer, and to which he or she can attach value. Companies are therefore primarily looking for innovations in terms of products (what new products should be offered to customers?), product-related services (e.g. new ways of distributing the product or providing after-sales service), product-service combinations (e.g. designing a new product that is easier to maintain), or even services as such (e.g. moving from selling a product to selling its use).

But innovation is also about what the customer doesn't usually see: the way products and services are designed, produced and made available, known as process innovation. This type of innovation is often accompanied by organizational innovations that enable us to be more effective and/or efficient and/or more sustainable. These innovations, most often "invisible" to the customer, nonetheless have an impact on products and/or services (via, for example, their impact on production costs, process flexibility or responsiveness), as well as social and societal benefits. This article looks at innovations in logistics and supply chain management (SCM), showing that they can combine product and/or service innovations, process innovations and organizational innovations.

In terms of process, given that companies are embedded in supply chains (SCs), and that their activity depends on that of other members of these chains (except for companies that are totally vertically integrated), innovation, whatever the type of innovation sought, can no longer be thought of at the level of a single company, but at the level of SCs. For any innovation to succeed, it must fit into the supply system delivered by the SC. This is even truer for innovations in logistics and SCM, since logistics activities and processes, like SCM, are cross-functional, both intra-organizational and inter-organizational.

Our article pays particular attention to the inter-organizational aspects of the innovation process in logistics and SCM, which are less discussed than the intra-organizational aspects.

Adopting a process-based approach, innovations in logistics and SCM can be studied according to four interdependent categories. The first concerns...