Christoph Ihl

Hamburg University of Technology | TUHH · Institute of Entrepreneurship

Scholars have suggested that autonomy can lead to better entrepreneurial team performance. Yet, there are different types of autonomy, and they come at a cost. We shed light on whether two fundamental organizational design choices—granting teams autonomy to (1) choose project ideas to work on and (2) choose team members to work with—affect performa...

Open innovation, in the form of inbound and outbound open innovation, is an ever-increasing research field. Research into outbound open innovation (i.e., the inside-out process) focused mostly on the commercialisation of internal knowledge. However, we know very little about firms’ voluntary nonpecuniary knowledge disclosure. This paper sheds light...

The use of Internet platforms such as open innovation platforms is a quite new strategy in innovation management that marks a rethinking from classical principles of coordination in innovation processes. Instead of relying exclusively on the internal expertise of their own researchers and developers, companies are increasingly integrating external...

Entrepreneurs face the challenge of having to conform to gain legitimacy, while at the same time differentiating themselves to gain competitive advantage. We show how entrepreneurs can craft an entrepreneurial narrative to succeed in this task among the user audiences empowered to evaluate their products. Building on theories of categorization, opt...

Monetary rewards have become widely used to compensate user engagement in innovation contests. Building on literature on social judgement of organisations, we provide evidence on another important effect of monetary rewards in innovation contests, namely a signalling effect that may either enhance or lower a contest host’s legitimacy and subsequent...

The manufacturing and disposal of shoes is a widely underestimated environmental problem. A regular shoe consists of up to thirty parts of different materials, such as leather, synthetics, rubber and textile, which are inseparably stitched or glued together and treated most often with hazardous chemicals to achieve the desired physical quali-ties....

In den letzten Jahren haben Unternehmen in fast allen Branchen eine Reihe von Initiativen zur Identifizierung neuer digitaler Technologien und zur Nutzung ihrer Vorteile durchgeführt (Technology Foresight). Sowohl die Weiterentwicklung bestehender als auch die Implementierung neuer Technologien führt zu einer digitalen Transformation der gesamten W...

Open innovation is an established approach to improve innovation performance, but many organizations have failed to embed open innovation in their innovation processes permanently and at scale. Building on an investigation of 756 international organizations, we show that the existence of distinct routines and organizational structures can explain w...

Practitioners increasingly use innovation contests to harness the knowledge of external crowds for internal innovation purposes in exchange for prize money. While some innovation contests have the objective to attract professional experts from distant fields to obtain technical solutions, other innovation contests primarily target customers or user...

„Wert“ und „Wertschöpfung“ sind einige der am meisten verwendeten Begriffe in der Managementliteratur. Das primäre Ziel ökonomischer Aktivität ist, Wert zu schaffen. Wert wird produziert, indem Menschen mit dem ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Wissen und weiteren Ressourcen handeln. Wertschöpfung kann als die Nutzung dieses Wissens in einer arbeitstei...

Dieses Kapitel stellt interaktive Wertschöpfungsmodelle vor, die im Produktions- und Absatzbereich angesiedelt sind. Wir fokussieren uns hierbei auf die Strategie der Mass Customization, die auf eine Individualisierung von Produkten und Leistungen für einzelne Kunden abzielt, dies aber im Gegensatz zu einer klassischen Einzelfertigung (oder handwer...

Open Innovation und sieht den Innovationsprozess als einen vielschichtigen offenen Such- und Lösungsprozess, der zwischen mehreren Akteuren über die Unternehmensgrenzen hinweg abläuft. Statt sich nur auf die internen Fähigkeiten der eigenen Forscher und Entwickler zu verlassen, werden externe Problemlöser in den Innovationsprozess integriert. Dies...

Aus der klassischen industriellen Vorstellung der Wertschöpfung (die aber immer noch das Denken vieler Manager und Wissenschaftler prägt!) hat sich in einem evolutionären Prozess das neue Wertschöpfungsmodell der interaktiven Wertschöpfung (IWS) gebildet, das die klassischen Koordinationsprinzipien Hierarchie und Markt durch neue Prinzipien ergänzt...

Interaktive Wertschöpfung (IWS) beschreibt eine arbeitsteilige Zusammenarbeit zwischen Anbieterunternehmen und externen Akteuren (insbesondere Kunden) im Sinne eines sozialen Austauschprozesses. Die externen Akteure reagieren dabei auf einen offenen Aufruf zur Mitwirkung eines Herstellers, um zu einem konkreten Problem einen Beitrag zu leisten bzw....

Interaktive Wertschöpfung (IWS) steht für ein Wertschöpfungsmodell, bei dem externe Akteure, zum Beispiel Kunden, Nutzer, Fachexperten, Wissenschaftler, Handelspartner oder bestimmte Zulieferer, eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Sie reagieren dabei auf einen offenen Aufruf einer Organisation zur Mitwirkung, um für ein konkretes Problem einen Beitrag zu...

Dieses Lehrbuch vermittelt in komprimierter Form die wesentlichen Inhalte des Standardwerkes“ Interaktive Wertschöpfung“ von Ralf Reichwald und Frank Piller. Unternehmerische Wertschöpfung findet heute zunehmend nicht mehr sequentiell im Sinne einer klassischen Wertschöpfungskette statt, sondern interaktiv und iterativ zwischen einem fokalen Untern...

Ihl and Piller address the promise of 3D printing technologies to re-localize production in closer proximity to markets and end customers by exploring microeconomic benefits for producers and consumers. These technologies give rise to new possibilities at the intersection of production and consumption and fuel recent trends like mass customization...

A main challenge in new product development (NPD) is to match a new design to customer preferences. Recent reviews show large failure rates in the commercialization of new designs. In most of the cases, the reason of failure has not been a lack of technological capability of the firm, but an incorrect understanding of real customer needs and demand...

The stressed financial situation in the public sector and the continuous aspiration for austerity in western governments and public bodies is omnipresent. As one core element in the New Public Management shift, Germany, like many other countries, has experienced significant reforms in public sector accounting and reporting in the last decade. We an...

Based on prior research on academic patenting and self-determination theory, we highlight the importance of scientist’ self-determined motivation to engage in academic patenting, a “taste for patents”. In a large scale empirical study, we can show that this self-determined taste for patenting arises among scientists that publish less, but more exte...

Current theories for firms’ outbound open innovation in terms of knowledge disclosure postulate several reasons for their behavior. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, motives for firms’ knowledge disclosure contrary to commercialization are analyzed. In contrast to earlier studies, we not only include commercial motivational factors,...

With the paradigm shift from transactional to relational purchasing, suppliers are confronted with considerable restraints on the customers’ side. The relational paradigm in industrial markets assumes that most industrial sales are repurchases of products or services from a focal supplier. In consequence, it is critical for suppliers to understand...

Idea co-creation has become a popular way for firms to engage consumers in the early stages of commercial new product or service development. In line with their commercial objectives, the hosting organizations typically use monetary incentives in order to properly compensate consumers. Next to these commercial topics, idea co-creation becomes incre...

In the automotive industry alternative powertrains cause a wide spread of knowledge and a growing importance of varied disciplines. Consequently, research unveils a disruption of established relations and an emergence of new kinds of decentralized developments encouraging our research. This paper introduces a networked development project which has...

Mass customization (MC), i.e. offering customers exactly what they want without losing in operational efficiency, has been positioned as a viable business strategy in ecommerce for many years. Still, many companies have failed in implementing profitable MC. We explain these failures by the lack of strategic capabilities in these firms and examine t...

Previous open innovation research has mostly focused on firm level investigations of inbound and outbound activities to generate and commercialize technological innovation in R&D intensive industries. With this study, we want to complement research on open innovation and ideation in creative industries, where output is largely determined by the ing...

What motivates university scientists to identify practical applications for their research results and consider having them patent-protected? A wealth of research points towards a complex blend of factors, including organizational antecedents, social norms and personal-level expectations. Few studies, however, have attempted to investigate the effe...

Learning from broad experience with open innovation: how it works, who contributes to it, and arenas for innovation from manufacturing to education. In today's competitive globalized market, firms are increasingly reaching beyond conventional internal methods of research and development to use ideas developed through processes of open innovation (O...

In firm-initiated ideation with users, the hosting organization typically dominates the commercial exploitation of users’ revealed ideas. In light of this asymmetric exploitation, offering monetary prizes for the best performing participants or the most valued ideas seems to be a reasonable form of compensation and incentivation. However, we questi...

In the past decade, research on open innovation has brought renewed attention to ways how firms can gain from the interaction with external sources of knowledge and innovation. Complementary internal management practices, however, that explain why some firms benefit from open innovation more than others are still largely unexplored. This study adop...

The objective of this paper is to discuss the impact of social media on customer co-creation in the innovation process. Customer co-creation denotes an active, creative and social collaboration process between producers and customers (users), facilitated by a company, in the context of new product or service development. We propose a typology of co...

In many retail situations, customers today face vast assortments and often have limited ability to find exactly what they need. By implementing a need-based toolkit for assortment matching, retailers can limit this complexity of choice, increasing the satisfaction of consumers with the goods acquired. Building such a need-based system however is co...

Customer co-creation denotes an active, creative and social collaboration process between producers (retailers) and customers (users), facilitated by the company. Customers become active participants in an open innovation process of a firm and take part in the development of new products or services. In this paper, we provide a review of the evolut...

Zusammenfassung Markt- und Kundenorientierung gilt als notwendige Bedingung für den Unternehmenserfolg. In der Marketingtheorie und -praxis greift das Konzept aber oft zu kurz, weil in vielen klassischen Ansätzen eine Kopplung an Innovationsaktivitäten ganz fehlt oder ein eher passives Kundenbild dominiert, das Kunden als aktive Innovatoren ausblen...

Recent reviews show large failure rates in the commercialization of new product designs. Often, the reason of failure has been not a lack of technological capability of the firm, but a wrong understanding of customer preferences. Extending the concept of adaptable smart products, our concept of "embedded toolkits for user co-design" proposes to des...

This paper introduces the open school concept, which aims to strengthen the openness of the university to its students. In an open school, students do not take a passive role as service consumers; they are active members of their university. Though the open school reflects a new mindset in higher education, it uses available technologies. The web-b...

A main challenge in new product development (NPD) is to match a new design to customer preferences. Recent reviews show large failure rates in the commercialization of new designs. In most of the cases, the reason of failure has been not a lack of technological capability of the firm, but a wrong understanding of the customer needs and demands. One...

Nennung der Autoren in alphabetischer Reihenfolge. Alle Autoren haben zu gleichen Teilen zu diesem Beitrag beigetragen. Autorenvorstellung: Christoph Ihl ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Betriebswirtschaftslehre – Information, Organisation und Management an der Technischen Universität München. Im Rahmen seiner Forschungstätigkeit...

In this paper we introduce the GameCreator an Internet platform that enables consumers to create and download their own mobile java games on the Internet without any programming skills, totally from scratch, or by adjusting a preconfigured ready made top game. Further, we shed light on the motivational aspects of self-created mobile games, and disc...

Seit jeher gelten Innovationen als Schlüssel zu Wachstum und Unternehmenserfolg. Zu Beginn der 70'er Jahren wurde diese These aus einzelwirtschaftlicher Sicht wieder verstärkt aufgegriffen. Begründet wird ihre steigende Bedeutung vor allem durch die zunehmende Verkürzung der Lebenszyklen von Produkten und Dienstleistungen. Zahlreiche empirische Stu...

User toolkits enable consumers to develop customized product applications without having dedicated technical knowledge. Applied in the field of handheld computing, toolkits are a very powerful instrument to meet the growing demand for customized mobile applications. In this paper, the theoretical principles and functionalities of user interaction t...

Personalization in Virtual Communities has two main different functions. On the one hand it helps to reduce the offered information to an appropriate quantity and on the other hand personalized user pages offer the possibility to present the personality of the community members to get attention and in touch with other members. The paper takes a loo...

Mass Customization ist in aller Munde. Das Modewort wird in unzähligen Fachbeiträgen, Zeitungsartikeln und Internetseiten aufgegriffen und von Hochschullehrern, Unternehmensberatern und Praktikern gleichermaßen propagiert. Die Aufmerksamkeit und Akzeptanz, die das Konzept erfährt, trägt zunächst zu seiner sinnvollen Verbreitung bei. Allerdings werd...

OBJECTIVES: The integration of customers, users and external actors (often titled as "co-creation") is a widely discussed phenomenon in NSD and has been labeled as one of ten future key research fields recently in Journal of Service Research (Ostrom et al, 2010). Service research focused on service delivery processes traditionally refers to custome...