Linus Dahlander

ESMT Berlin

In their search for innovation, organizations often invite suggestions from external contributors. Soliciting suggestions is a form of distant search, since it allows organizations to tap into knowledge that may not reside within their organizational boundaries. Organizations engaging in distant search often face a large pool of suggestions, an out...

The ‘variance hypothesis’ predicts that external search breadth leads to innovation outcomes, but people have limited attention for search and cultivating breadth consumes attention. How does individuals’ search breadth affect innovation outcomes? How does individuals’ allocation of attention affect the efficacy of search breadth? We matched survey...

Users often interact and help each other solve problems in communities, but few scholars have explored how these relationships provide opportunities to innovate. We analyze the extent to which people positioned within the core of a community as well as people that are cosmopolitans positioned across multiple external communities affect innovation....

Using a longitudinal dataset of research collaborations over 15 years at Stanford University, we build a theory of intraorganizational task relationships that distinguishes the different factors associated with the formation and persistence of network ties. We highlight six factors: shared organizational foci, shared traits and interests, tie advan...

Project forms of organizing are theorized to rely upon horizontal as opposed to vertical lines of authority, but few have examined how this shift affects progression—how people advance in an organization. We argue that progression without hierarchy unfolds when people assume lateral authority over project tasks without managing people. With a longi...

Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance, enable, or replace traditional open innovation (OI) practices, changing the scope and efficiency of both outside-in and inside-out OI. This article provides a comprehensive framework to analyze AI’s influence on OI, supported by illustrative examples, and outlines the key implications for organizations and...

Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Buil...

Using unique data from the LEGO Ideas platform and a novel approach of algorithm-based abduction, we combine multiple methods to provide new insights into crowd selection. Through qualitative content-coding, interviews, and prior literature, we derive an initial set of variables. We then use machine learning for feature selection and to identify th...

Research Summary The paradox of rejecting novel ideas while being motivated to select them exists in many realms. Deviating from prior research that investigated several internal levers to promote the funding of novel ideas in the sciences, we focus on an external lever by investigating how seconded employees increase the selection of novel ideas i...

While the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is pervasive, many companies struggle with AI implementation challenges. This article presents results from a survey of 2,525 decision-makers with AI experience in China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as well as interviews with 16 AI implementation experts—in order to und...

Research Summary Seeking causal evidence on biases in idea evaluation, we conducted a field experiment in a large multinational company with two conditions: (a) blind evaluation, in which managers received no proposer information, and (b) non‐blind evaluation, in which they received the proposer's name, unit, and location. To our surprise—and in co...

The literature on open innovation has documented how companies expand their boundaries to become more open, leaving out how boundaries narrow as open innovation relationships end--the closing of open innovation. We explain how open innovation creates new relationships on multiple levels--among firms, individuals, and technologies. Drawing on open i...

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching...

Using a 22-year study of an elite university’s faculty networks and their work activities, we extend network ecology to concern top-down processes of environmental selection and bottom-up processes of individual adaptation. We argue that faculty enact distinct types of collaborative work activity that are central to their role: research training (c...

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...

This paper sheds fresh light on our 2010 paper How Open Is Innovation by taking into consideration notable developments in innovation over the last decade. The original paper developed four types of openness: sourcing, acquiring, selling, and revealing. Reflecting on important technological, organizational, and societal changes in the past decade,...

We examine how groups fall prey to the sequence effect when they make choices based on informed assessments of complex situations, for example, when evaluating research and development (R&D) projects. The core argument is that the temporal sequence of selection matters because projects that appear in a sequence following a funded project are themse...

Online communities that typically defy traditional forms of hierarchy often rely on lateral authority delegated to peer evaluators. While peer evaluations are supposed to be meritocratic, we theorize that people engaged in peer evaluation are often motivated to behave strategically. Processes that make evaluations transparent also motivate actors t...

Crowdsourcing—asking an undefined group of external contributors to work on tasks—allows organizations to tap into the expertise of people around the world. Crowdsourcing is known to increase innovation and loyalty to brands, but many organizations struggle to leverage its potential, as our research shows. Most often this is because organizations f...

GitLab is a software company that works “all remote” at the scale of more than 1000 employees located in more than 60 countries. GitLab has no physical office and its employees can work from anywhere they choose. Any step of the organizational life of a GitLab employee (e.g., hiring, onboarding and firing) is performed remotely, except for a yearly...

Crowds can be very effective, but that is not always the case. To actually render the usage of crowds effective, several factors need to be aligned: crowd composition, the right question at the right time, and the right analytic method applied to the responses. Specific skills are mandatory to tap into the creativity of a crowd, harness it effectiv...

When organizations crowdsource ideas, they select only a small share of the ideas that contributors submit for implementation. If a contributor submits an idea to an organization for the first time (i.e., is a newcomer), and the organization does not select the idea, this may negatively affect the newcomer’s relationship with the organization and w...

Crowdsourcing-a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries-provides access to knowledge beyond an organization's local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, we first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they...

Many universities have developed large-scale interdisciplinary research centers to address societal challenges and to attract the attention of private philanthropists and federal agencies. However, prior studies have mostly shown that interdisciplinary centers relate to a narrow band of outcomes such as publishing and grants. Therefore, we shift at...

Firms in open source software (OSS) are active in a field encompassing all the characteristics of a public good, given the non-excludability and non-rivalry nature of OSS. The fact that many important inputs to the innovative process are public should not be taken to mean that innovators are prevented from capturing private returns. The objective o...

This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholars – having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on ‘Researching Open Innovation’ at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management....

Building on a unique, multi-source, and multi-method study of R&D projects in a leading professional service firm, we develop the argument that organizations are more likely to fund projects with intermediate levels of novelty. That is, some project novelty increases the share of requested funds received, but too much novelty is difficult to apprec...

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss topics within the issue including the workforce diversity, online business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces, and social and psychological connections among chief executive officers (CEOs).

More than five decades after the seminal works on how individuals process information and make decisions within organizations were published (Cyert & March, 1963; Simon, 1957), the thesis that individuals, groups, and organizations are bounded in their rationality and ability to attend to information continues to remain salient. Individuals and org...

Prize competitions, an alternative to patents and grants for motivating potential inventors, have gained renewed interest in recent years. We analyze targeted prizes that are formalized into standards that solutions can be evaluated against ex ante, where the organizer of the prize competition stipulates a problem to be solved and distributes it to...

The ‘variance hypothesis’ predicts that external search breadth will lead to innovation outcomes, but time for search is fixed and cultivating breadth takes time. How does individuals’ external search breadth affect innovation outcomes? We match survey data with complete patent records, to examine the search behaviors of elite experts at one of the...

This paper draws attention to a new dimension of organization, the semiformal organization, and it reveals how the allocation of different membership forms can render knowledge-intensive organizations more flexible and exploratory in their knowledge creation efforts without sacrificing the functions stably enacted via the formal organization. Most...

This paper analyzes organizations' attempts to entice external contributors to submit suggestions for future organizational action. While earlier work has elaborated on the advantages of leveraging the knowledge of external contributors, our findings show that organizational attempts to attract such involvement are likely to wither and die. We deve...

We examine the effects of team structure and experience on the impact of inventions produced by scientific teams. Whereas multidisciplinary, collaborative teams have become the norm in scientific production, there are coordination costs commensurate with managing such teams. We use patent citation analysis to examine the effect of prior collaborati...

We study how an individual’s exposure to external information regulates the evaluation of entrepreneurial opportunities and entrepreneurial action. Combining data from interviews, a survey, and a comprehensive web log of an online user community spanning eight years, we find that technical information shaped opportunity evaluation, and social infor...

This paper is motivated by a desire to clarify the definition of ‘openness’ as currently used in the literature on open innovation, and to re-conceptualize the idea for future research on the topic. We combine bibliographic analysis of all papers on the topic published in Thomson's ISI Web of Knowledge (ISI) with a systematic content analysis of th...

The purpose of this paper is to explore how what people know and whom they know outside their organization shapes their innovative status among their colleagues. Combing innovation and network theory, we suggest that individuals that have diverse, heterogeneous knowledge relative to their colleagues and who can draw upon diverse contacts from acros...

Relying on four in-depth case studies of firms involved with open source software, we investigate how firms make use of open source communities, and how that use is associated with their business models. Three themes – accessing, aligning and assimilating – are inductively developed for how the firms relate to the external knowledge created in the...

This article analyses whether regions develop capabilities in terms of scientific, technological and business activities within specific biotechnology areas. We take a broad definition of biotechnology, and identify four industry areas: (1) core biotechnology; (2) drugs; (3) medical technologies; (4) agriculture. Capabilities and specialization-div...

A growing body of literature has explored the motivations for individuals to take part in free and open source software (FOSS), yet how firms participate is largely an unattended research area. Building on information from an extensive dataset of secondary sources and 30 in-depth interviews, I show that de novo entrants have emerged in conjunction...

This chapter outlines the background for understanding the relations between firms and open source communities. It briefly describes the methodology and data sources, and then describes how the relations between firms and communities evolve over time in four different case studies. One important mechanism determining an Open Source Software (OSS) f...

Since Teece's seminal paper explaining who were the gainers from technological innovation, increased globalization and the information and communication technology revolution have brought new ways for firms to organize and appropriate from innovation. A new more open model of innovation suggests that firms can benefit from sources of innovation tha...

This paper deals with the occurrence and spatial distribution of collaborations within biotechnology. By starting from a total population of 45 firms involved in biotech R&D, we shed light on how many collaborate with (1) other firms, (2) venture capitalists, and (3) actors in science and technology and whether these partners can be found in the re...

This paper deals with the relationships between firms and communities in open source software (OSS). A particular feature of OSS is that important resources are not directly controlled by firms, but partly reside within communities that co-exist with the firms. Despite this, firms explicitly try to utilize the resources within these communities in...

Firms in open source software (OSS) are active in a field encompassing all the characteristics of a public good, given the non-excludability and non-rivalry nature of OSS. The fact that many important inputs to the innovative process are public should not be taken to mean that innovators are prevented from capturing private returns. The objective o...

The development of knowledge requires investment, which may be made in terms of financial resources or time. Open source software (OSS) has challenged much of the traditional reasoning by suggesting that individuals behave altruistically and contribute to a public good, despite the opportunity to free-ride. The lion's share of the existing literatu...

On-going debates rage over the to what extent spatial proximity, on the one hand, versus global interactions on the other hand, affect economic development. Spatial proximity of networks and firms with their partners are claimed as important for a number of phenomena, including firm survival, innovativeness and regional economic development. Howeve...