Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

University of Warwick

Information Systems (IS) can amplify or reduce social justice by limiting or expanding access to material and non-material resources. Using the lens of symbolic and social boundaries, we focus on the role of cultural discourse in demarcating and contesting boundaries associated with IS design and adoption. We examine news media-based journalistic d...

The availability of parallel and distributed processing at a reasonable cost and the diversity of data sources have contributed to advanced developments in artificial intelligence (AI). These developments in the AI computing environment are not concomitant with changes in the social, legal, and political environment. While considering deploying AI,...

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments, policymakers, foundations, publishers, and researchers poured significant resources into scientific knowledge production on COVID-19 and its impacts while also expanding access to such research. The emphasis on the "open access" publishing model-a set of principles and practices through which researc...

This article proposes the solver-aware system architecting framework for leveraging the combined strengths of experts, crowds and specialists to design innovative complex systems. Although system architecting theory has extensively explored the relationship between alternative architecture forms and performance under operational uncertainty, limite...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies promise to transform how professionals conduct knowledge work by augmenting their capabilities for making professional judgments. We know little, however, about how human-AI augmentation takes place in practice. Yet, gaining this understanding is particularly important when professionals use AI tools to for...

Innovators face tremendous time pressures today, whether they are tackling urgent issues such as public health and climate change or designing new products to stay ahead in a fast-moving competitive market. To meet the challenge, companies are investing in a number of technologies that accelerate innovation, but for many, the process is still frust...

Co-producing scientific research with those who are affected by it is an emerging phenomenon in contemporary science. This article summarizes and reflects on both the process and outcome of a novel experiment to co-develop scientific research proposals in the field of Open Innovation in Science (OIS), wherein scholars engaged in the study of open a...

Organizational decision-makers need to evaluate AI tools in light of increasing claims that such tools out-perform human experts. Yet, measuring the quality of knowledge work is challenging, raising the question of how to evaluate AI performance in such contexts. We investigate this question through a field study of a major U.S. hospital, observing...

We live in a technologically advanced era with a recent and marked dependence on digital technologies while also facing increasingly frequent extreme and global crises. Crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, are significantly impacting our societies, organizations and individuals and dramatically shifting the use of, and dependence on, digital technol...

Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsib...

The innovation journey of new product development processes often spans weeks or months. Recently, hackathons have turned the journey into an ad hoc sprint of only a couple of days using new tools and technologies. Existing research predicts such conditions would result in failure to produce new working products, yet hackathons often lead to functi...

The innovation journey of new product development processes often spans weeks or months. Recently, hackathons have turned the journey into an ad hoc sprint of only a couple of days using new tools and technologies. Existing research predicts such conditions would result in failure to produce new working products, yet hackathons often lead to functi...

Open source software (OSS) development has become increasingly popular among companies. Examples even include former opponents of OSS such as Microsoft. The active involvement of companies in OSS development leads to a growing overlap between OSS communities and companies. Different organizational forms, cultures, norms, ideologies, and practices a...

Open source software (OSS) development has become increasingly popular among companies. Examples even include former opponents of OSS such as Microsoft. The active involvement of companies in OSS development leads to a growing overlap between OSS communities and companies. Different organizational forms, cultures, norms, ideologies, and practices a...

Analogy—the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains—has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and distributing it across many information processors, both human and machine. Doing so has t...

Here's what managers can learn from hackathon organizers about spurring innovation. Today, managers recognize that innovation requires a high level of work autonomy for their employees. This encourages curiosity, enables independent thinking, and provides an environment in which employees can experiment and test new problem-solving approaches with...

Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it from individuals outside those boundaries, and rejecting...

Roles provide a key coordination mechanism in peer-production. Whereas one stream in the literature has focused on the structural responsibilities associated with roles, the another has stressed the emergent nature of work. To date, these streams have proceeded largely in parallel. In seeking to enhance our understanding of the tension between stru...

Open innovation processes promise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products, or services arising from these approaches.We believe we’ve hit on an important hidden factor for this failure and that it holds the key to a successful integration and execution of open innovation methods.

Finding analogical inspirations in distant domains is a powerful way of solving problems. However, as the number of inspirations that could be matched and the dimensions on which that matching could occur grow, it becomes challenging for designers to find inspirations relevant to their needs. Furthermore, designers are often interested in exploring...

Finding analogical inspirations in distant domains is a powerful way of solving problems. However, as the number of inspirations that could be matched and the dimensions on which that matching could occur grow, it becomes challenging for designers to find inspirations relevant to their needs. Furthermore, designers are often interested in exploring...

R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries and protecting it from external non-professionals. The history of scientific and technological innovation is rich with cases of rejection of meritorious innovation when created outside disciplinary boundaries. Recently, a new model—typically called “open”...

Research on peer-production suggests that as participants choose what actions to perform, prototypical activity patterns emerge. Recent work characterized these patterns and demonstrated that informal emergent roles are highly stable. Nonetheless, we know little about the ways in which contributors take on and shed emergent roles. The objectives of...

Increasingly, new forms of organizing for knowledge production are built around self-organizing coproduction community models with ambiguous role definitions. Current theories struggle to explain how high-quality knowledge is developed in these settings and how participants self-organize in the absence of role definitions, traditional organizationa...

Will the digital revolution actually transform the process of innovation? A professor from NYU spent three years with NASA's engineers and scientists to uncover the significant opportunities and challenges involved with new models for R&D work.

Today’s organizations are increasingly experimenting with crowdsourcing for innovation as a way to source new fresh ideas. However, there is much mystery and little evidence on the impact of such ideas on organizations. For one, new ideas may clash against old ideas — a well-known “Not Invented Here” (NIH) phenomenon. Secondly, organizations may no...

Abernathy's (1978) empirical work on the automotive industry investigated relationships among an organization’s boundary (all manufacturing plants), its organizational design (fluid vs. specific), and its ability to execute product and/or process innovations. Abernathy's ideas of dominant designs and the locus of innovation have been central to sch...

This paper contrasts traditional, organization-centered models of innovation with more recent work on open innovation. These fundamentally different and inconsistent innovation logics are associated with contrasting organizational boundaries and organizational designs. We suggest that when critical tasks can be modularized and when problem-solving...

Abernathy's (1978) empirical work on the automotive industry investigated relationships among an organization’s boundary (all manufacturing plants), its organizational design (fluid vs. specific), and its ability to execute product and/or process innovations. Abernathy's ideas of dominant designs and the locus of innovation have been central to sch...