LAUSR

This paper seeks to instigate a new area of research in the Early Purchasing Involvement (EPI) literature around the question: How should a Purchasing function evolve in order to identify and capture innovation in the supplier market? Particularly, we attempt to characterise the specificities of the Innovation-Purchasing function, an emerging function acting in the fuzzy-front-end of projects. The contribution of this paper is a reification of the role of this function in an Open Innovation context, through the description of Early Purchasing Involvement in the Innovation (EPI2) agenda. For that, we collected data through an internal benchmarking study within a multinational/multidivisional firm of the automotive sector. Our study reveals similarities and differences between the observed practices of what we call EPI2 and the more classical EPI activities in a New Product Development (NPD) context. This study provides a model that can help practitioners and raises some propositions to test in new research.