Product and Process Innovation from Reverse Supply Chain and Network Management

Reverse flows, which emerge and move within supply chains as well as between supply chains and supply network partners, may represent a significant source of knowledge. They could also act as a very important source of inspiration and ideas for both product and process innovation. Despite the rapidly increasing volume of reverse flows, the existing theory of innovation management and reverse supply chain management reflects neither the indicated situations, nor the potential of feedback from reverse flows at all. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the current knowledge of reverse supply chain management within the framework of innovation management while answering the following research questions: 1. Do firms use reverse flows as feedback for product and process innovation?; 2. What is the position of individual sources of feedback for innovation when managing reverse flows?; 3. Which factors of reverse supply chain or network management (or reverse flows management) and innovation and knowledge management can differentiate between firms that do and firms that do not use reverse flows - as feedback for product and process innovation, if any? Results of the empirical survey were analysed to get answers to the introduced questions, using several methods of statistical analysis, namely univariate analysis and bivariate statistics: the Mann-Whitney U test and chi-square test. The results show that there are differences between firms that use reverse flows as inspiration for product and process innovation and those that do not; some of the differences were even verified with statistical significance. The most influencing factors are: the level of the internal and external integration and coordination, the level of knowledge of reverse supply chain management, level of perception of necessity to manage reverse flows, the level of quality of reverse supply chain management planning, the level of knowledge management (KM) as part of a corporate strategy, the level of knowledge sharing with partners and the level of internal sharing of knowledge for the purpose of obtaining new ideas.