Examining supplier, buyer, and customer triads: The critical role of conflict in interaction processes and product/service innovations

As solutions in business-to-business markets become more complex, firms embed external products and services to better cater to customer needs. Complex solutions sometimes lead to triadic relationships, where interactions emerge between the supplier, the business-to-business buyer, and their customers. Infrequent examination of these relationships led this research to focus on understanding the interaction and innovation processes in triadic relationships. Using a single longitudinal case study, this study discovered four key outcomes that emerged from triadic interactions—product enhancement, service refinements, e-resource integration, and complementary synergy. These outcomes corresponded with a movement from a linear relationship (supplier with buyer and buyer with the customer) to a network relationship (each member has a relationship with other members). Surprisingly, our findings indicated that conflict is an antecedent to cooperation and the development of triadic relationships. Finally, shallow triadic relationships lead to incremental innovation, but deep triadic relationships lead to radical innovation. From our findings, we derive implications for theory and practice.