Accounting, cross-company negotiations, and time-based compromises: a case study of product innovation

This chapter deals with accounting and product innovation. It analyses how accounting is involved in innovation conducted between ABB Robotics, a producer of industrial robots, and its close customers and suppliers. Product innovation has been put forward as highly critical for value creation on industrial markets in both the accounting and marketing literatures. Robotics develops, manufactures, and sells robots and is one of the world's largest robot manufacturers. S4, the development of a new industrial control system, is a large innovation project. A central customer in S4 is General Motors (GM). Being one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world, GM provided both knowledge and credibility to Robotics. A few years after the introduction of S4, customers had begun to ask for new functionality. However, Robotics had not finished the next platform, called S5, and therefore it was necessary to make an extension of S4. This became the S4B project.