About
157
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Introduction
My research is on open innovation, communities and ecosystems. Because I check ResearchGate every 2-4 months, I cannot respond to messages or requests sent via ResearchGate (or LinkedIn or other similar services).
See full CV and links to pubs at http://www.joelwest.org/About/CV.html
Please email kgi@joelwest.org for any article requests.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
Education
September 1994 - September 2000
UC Irvine
Field of study
- Management
Publications
Publications (157)
This Handbook is the first reference created for the large, diverse, and growing field of Open Innovation. Four editors, 75 reviewers, and 136 contributors collaboratively developed 57 handbook chapters. These present the current state of the growing body of work in Open Innovation from leading scholars and researchers in the field. It brings toget...
This Handbook is the first reference created for the large, diverse, and growing field of Open Innovation. Four editors, 75 reviewers, and 136 contributors collaboratively developed 57 handbook chapters. These present the current state of the growing body of work in Open Innovation from leading scholars and researchers in the field. It brings toget...
This Handbook is the first reference created for the large, diverse, and growing field of Open Innovation. Four editors, 75 reviewers, and 136 contributors collaboratively developed 57 handbook chapters. These present the current state of the growing body of work in Open Innovation from leading scholars and researchers in the field. It brings toget...
This Handbook is the first reference created for the large, diverse, and growing field of Open Innovation. Four editors, 75 reviewers, and 136 contributors collaboratively developed 57 handbook chapters. These present the current state of the growing body of work in Open Innovation from leading scholars and researchers in the field. It brings toget...
Open innovation is a powerful concept that can explain various phenomena within the area of innovation management. There are however different organizational obstacles that may limit firms' ability to apply open innovation successfully: the link with corporate and business level strategies might be unclear or missing, and different capabilities and...
For more than three decades, enthusiasts have predicted that direct manufacturing enabled by 3D printing would inevitably supplant traditional manufacturing methods. Alas, for nearly as long, these utopian predictions have failed to materialize. One reason is a flawed assumption that hybrid digital‐physical systems such as 3D printing would advance...
Orchestrating an ecosystem requires coordination to create value, but prior research has tended to emphasize centralized ecosystem control over solutions involving distributed governance. By studying multilateral public-private collaborations to develop scientific knowledge to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, we identify a new model of ecosyste...
For the past two decades, Open Innovation has been a promising and useful concept for guiding academics, practitioners, and policymakers. The applied nature of Open Innovation and its very diverse, inclusive, and open community made it stand out from other theories, concepts, and paradigms. Even though Open Innovation has been studied in different...
Anthrax is caused by Bacillus anthracis and can result in nearly 100% mortality due in part to anthrax toxin. Antimalarial amodiaquine (AQ) acts as a host-oriented inhibitor of anthrax toxin endocytosis. Here, we determined the pharmacokinetics and safety of AQ in mice, rabbits, and humans as well as the efficacy in the fly, mouse, and rabbit model...
Small businesses face multiple sources of uncertainty that can hold negative implications for performance by magnifying liabilities of newness and/or exacerbating resource inadequacies. However, technological uncertainty may hold positive implications for performance by creating opportunities that small businesses are better enabled to exploit. The...
While open innovation ecosystems allow a firm to harness external sources of value creation, these external ties can also constrain its ability to adapt its innovation strategy to pursue new opportunities. This article looks at how an incumbent firm approached such constraints, and used cognitive artifacts to transform its value chain into a collab...
Researchers have debated the relative importance of technology push and demand pull policies in the adoption of environmental technologies. Here, we examine how internationally distributed technology push and demand pull policies interact to support the diffusion of a renewable energy technology. We analyze 40 years (1974–2013) of solar photovoltai...
With its focus on value creation and value capture, open innovation research explicitly or implicitly examines the competitive impacts of collaboration. However, to date such research has not considered the effects of a blockbuster industry structure upon open innovation. Here, we examine a particular form of multilateral collaboration, the open R&...
The abstract and full text of this paper is available on SSRN at http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3437014
Research Summary: Open innovation is about firms harnessing knowledge flows across firm boundaries, but limited research has examined the nature and antecedents of these flows for start‐up firms, as well as the interdependence of inbound and outbound flows. From a new sample of start‐up firms making 3D printers, we show how their degree of openness...
Research Summary
Strategic openness—firms voluntary forfeiting of control over resources—seemingly challenges the premise of the resource‐based view (RBV), which posits that firms should control valuable, rare, and inimitable (VRI) resources. We reconcile this apparent paradox by formalizing whether and when firms—consisting of resource bundles and...
There are many similarities in how firms pursuing an open innovation strategy can utilize crowds and communities as sources of external innovation. At the same time, the differences between these two network forms of collaboration have previously been blurred or overlooked. In this chapter, we integrate research on crowds and communities, identifyi...
Theories of platform strategy and adoption have been largely derived from studies of their application in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. These platforms vary in openness, with the model of open source software providing the best-known exemplar for open platforms. This exploratory field study examines the degree to which...
To explain and promote the adoption of new technologies, researchers have debated the relative importance of technology push and demand pull factors . Here we examine a crucial problem of contemporary innovation policy — promoting the adoption of renewable energy to reduce anthropogenic global warming — that challenges prior models for large scale...
To explain and promote the adoption of new technologies, researchers have debated the relative importance of technology push and demand pull factors . Here we examine a crucial problem of contemporary innovation policy — promoting the adoption of renewable energy to reduce anthropogenic global warming — that challenges prior models for large scale...
Interest in open innovation (OI) as a field of research has grown exponentially since the phrase was coined by Chesbrough in his 2003 book, with numerous articles, special issues, books, and conference sessions. Various reviews of the literature have summarized prior work, offered new frameworks, and identified opportunities for future research. He...
The explicit goal of the inaugural World Open Innovation Conference (WOIC) was to attract both leading academic researchers
in open innovation and leading industry practitioners of open innovation, seeking to get these two groups to engage with one
another. This introductory article sets the intellectual context of the WOIC, summarizes the “top” fo...
Open innovation is about firms harnessing knowledge flows across firm boundaries, but limited research has examined the nature and antecedents of these flows for startup firms. From a new sample of startup firms making 3D printers, we show how their degree of openness for inbound and outbound knowledge flows relates to the firms’ initial capabiliti...
Originally offered as a normative managerial framework for improving a firm’s innovation performance, open innovation has since evolved to encompass a wide range of innovation practices and phenomena, both new and existing. What is common is that they involve innovation-related knowledge crossing the boundaries of a firm (or other organization) to...
Selective openness allows a firm to sell a systemic innovation that combines both open and proprietary technologies. Such firm strategies are now common for open source software and other information goods. However, they pose conceptual and practical uncertainties for hardware-focused companies, particularly as research on open hardware has emphasi...
A longstanding and still-increasing threat to the effective treatment of infectious diseases is resistance to antimicrobial countermeasures. Potentially, the targeting of host proteins and pathways essential for the detrimental effects of pathogens offers an approach that may discover broad-spectrum anti-pathogen countermeasures and circumvent the...
In recent years, the concept of innovation ecosystem has been a pivotal notion for academics and practitioners alike, and there has been an increase in the number of articles published. Yet, little is known about (1) how innovation ecosystems function, (2) how innovations should be designed to allow them to function optimally, (3) what roles partic...
Virtual communities have become increasingly important as a source of innovation, support, brand identity and other complementary goods and services. While in some cases communities act independently of any company, firms are increasingly interested in encouraging and harnessing the efforts of external voluntary communities to support their strateg...
Our understanding of open source models of innovation is primarily based on research on open source software. This research focuses on the underlying challenges in developing a user-based community as a complementary asset, and at the same time strengthening appropriability regimes without losing control over the technologies that are fundamental t...
This volume examines an important area of potential research: the intersection of strategic alliances and open innovation. Although these two streams of research have developed separately, with distinct assumptions and research questions, there is a natural affinity between them in terms of phenomena, theoretical predictions, and managerial implica...
Our understanding of open source models of innovation is primarily based on research on open source software. This research focuses on the underlying challenges in developing a user-based community as a complementary asset, and at the same time strengthening appropriability regimes without losing control over the technologies that are fundamental t...
This paper reviews research on open innovation that considers how and why firms commercialize external sources of innovations. It examines both the “outside‐in” and “coupled” modes of open innovation. From an analysis of prior research on how firms leverage external sources of innovation, it suggests a four‐phase model in which a linear process—(1)...
Two key factors in the success of general-purpose computing platforms are the creation of a technical standards architecture and managing an ecosystem of third-party suppliers of complementary products. Here, we examine Symbian Ltd., a startup firm that developed a strong technical architecture and broad range of third-party complements with its Sy...
In this chapter, we investigate how firms work with universities in the course of their innovation activities. We provide an overview of three main modes of direct interaction between firms and universities: IP licensing, research services and research partnerships. We outline the main characteristics of each mode, its relative importance for firms...
Throughout its brief history, California has established itself as a national or international leader in key industries—such as aerospace, computing and entertainment—through early mover pre-emption and strong clustering effects. California firms were the initial world leaders in producing photovoltaic (PV) solar cells and dominated the initial aer...
Research from a variety of perspectives has argued that innovation no longer takes place within a single organization, but rather is distributed across multiple stakeholders in a value network. Here we contrast the vertically integrated innovation model to open innovation, user innovation, as well as other distributed processes (cumulative innovati...
Throughout its brief history, California has established itself as a national or international leader in key industries — such as aerospace, computing and entertainment — through early mover pre-emption and strong clustering effects. California was also an early leader in the three key technologies of solar energy generation, but has failed to sust...
Silicon Valley is the global exemplar for geographical agglomeration effects in technologyintensive industries. Given it success, it has been frequently studied by social science researchers and journalists, having a major impact not only on the U.S. economy, but also on theory and practice of regional economic development.
Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft’s responses to 12 software technologies in the per...
In 2003, Chesbrough coined the term “open innovation” as a new paradigm for industrial innovation. In this paper, we review and synthesize the growing literature that follows Chesbrough by studying the commercialization of external innovations — one of the key open innovation practices.This paper provides a comprehensive overview and process model...
A recurring theme in the literature on technology and organizations is the concept of mirroring, which posits a duality between technological and organizational design decisions. In this paper we highlight a second, orthogonal duality between components and interfaces: designers of both products and organizations must decide what information to hid...
While industrial innovation was once assumed to be a vertically integrated process, three recent streams of research — open innovation, user innovation and cumulative innovation — have examined how innovation is created outside the boundaries of the firm. However, within these streams are multiple paths by which innovations are created and commerci...
Since the mid-1990s, the mobile phone industry has sought widespread adoption of mobile data services, envisioning a new “mobile Internet” with its own complex value network delivered through smartphone terminals. With its iPhone, Apple rapidly gained smartphone market share while spurring widespread adoption of mobile data services in the United S...
The impact of patents and patent royalties are a major concern of standards setting organisations. Here we examine the patents filed in the UMTS 3rd generation mobile phone standard, governed by the ETSI IPR policy in response to patent issues faced during the earlier GSM standardization. We contrast firm strategies and policy effectiveness between...
During the 1980s, economists developed the concept of positive network effects and switching costs as the key dynamics of de facto standards competition. They concluded that a positive feedback loop usually “tips” a market to the standard with the most users and complementary assets. While recent scholars have acknowledged that not all markets tip,...
The impact of patents and patent royalties are a major concern of standards setting organizations. This study examines the patents filed in the standardization of UMTS, the third-generation mobile phone technology developed under sponsorship of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and others, using a patent policy developed in...
The impact of patents and patent royalties are a major concern of standards setting organisations. Here we examine the patents filed in the UMTS 3rd generation mobile phone standard, governed by the ETSI IPR policy in response to patent issues faced during the earlier GSM standardization. We contrast firm strategies and policy effectiveness between...
Recent research on the commercialization of scientific discoveries has emphasized the use of formal intellectual property rights (notably patents) as a mechanism for aligning the academic and entrepreneurial incentives for commercialization. Without such explicit intellectual property rights and licensing, how is such open science commercialized? T...
Firms that practice open innovation strategies rely on the cooperation of external firms to provide components, complements and customers for the innovations of the focal firm (Chesbrough, 2003). Such strategies can be quite complex in systems-based industries, which inherently require coordinating across a wide range of partners to deliver custome...
Research on open source software, user innovation and open innovation have increasingly emphasized the role of communities in creating, shaping and disseminating innovations. However, the comparability of such studies has been hampered by the lack of a precise definition of the community construct. In this paper we review prior definitions (implici...
Most research on open source software communities has focused on those that are community founded. More recently, firms have founded their own open source communities. How do sponsored open source communities differ from their autonomous counterparts? With comparative examination of 12 open source projects initiated by corporate sponsors, we identi...
Open Innovation describes an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. In some cases, such as open source software, this research and development can take place in a non-proprietary manner. Henry Chesbrough and his collaborators investigate this phenomenon, linking the pr...
Rudi Bekkers, Joel West (2008). Paper presented at the
Here we present a qualitative study of how organizations do (or do not) adopt a new computer server platform standard; namely, Linux using PC-compatible hardware. While discussions of Linux typically focus on its open source origins, our respondents were interested primarily in low price. Despite this relative advantage in price, incumbent standard...
The impact of patents and patent royalties are a major concern of standards setting organisations. Here we examine the patents filed in the UMTS 3rd generation mobile phone standard, governed by the ETSI IPR policy in response to patent issues faced during the earlier GSM standardization. We contrast firm strategies and policy effectiveness between...
Firms involved in open source software face inherent limits on their ability to appropriate returns from technological innovation. Here I examine the business models used by IT vendors given the limited appropriability available for open source software. I show how firms capture value through complementary assets, while creating value and positive...
Here we present a qualitative study of how organizations do (or do not) adopt a new computer server platform standard; namely, Linux using PC-compatible hardware. While discussions of Linux typically focus on its open source origins, our respondents were interested primarily in low price. Despite this relative advantage in price, incumbent standard...
Open Innovation describes an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. In some cases, such as open source software, this research and development can take place in a non-proprietary manner. Henry Chesbrough and his collaborators investigate this phenomenon, linking the pr...
Open Innovation describes an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. In some cases, such as open source software, this research and development can take place in a non-proprietary manner. Henry Chesbrough and his collaborators investigate this phenomenon, linking the pr...
Open Innovation describes an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. In some cases, such as open source software, this research and development can take place in a non-proprietary manner. Henry Chesbrough and his collaborators investigate this phenomenon, linking the pr...
Open Innovation describes an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. In some cases, such as open source software, this research and development can take place in a non-proprietary manner. Henry Chesbrough and his collaborators investigate this phenomenon, linking the pr...
Here we present a qualitative study of how organizations do (or do not) adopt a new computer server platform standard; namely, Linux using PC-compatible hardware. While discussions of Linux typically focus on its open source origins, our respondents were interested primarily in low price. Despite this relative advantage in price, incumbent standard...