1. Introduction

Suppliers innovate in order to stay competitive in global markets and enhance their sales. However, they are faced with difficulties in marketing, i.e. a high resistance to their innovations. They usually approach the value chain by dealing with their immediate customers and essentially pushing their innovations into the value chain. But immediate customers often have low incentives to adopt supplier innovations. The value associated with a supplier innovation is not always evident for suppliers’ immediate customers. It becomes more obvious when materials get closer to their final application. To break through immediate customers’ innovation resistance, suppliers rely more and more on VCM. By pursuing VCM, they enlarge their target group beyond their immediate customers and address their downstream customers as well. Treading on relatively unexplored grounds, the aims of this book are to explore the relevance of VCM and comprehend its process, identify the critical factors for suppliers’ marketing success, and compare the performance of VCM trials, using a multi-method design linking case study research and computational modeling.