Philipp Tuertscher

• Dr.oec.
• Professor of Collaborative Innovation at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The development of a novel boundary infrastructure for large-scale interorganiza-tional collaboration presents a challenge that is ill-understood: how can individual boundary objects, which do not suffice for large-scale collaboration and might even engender conflict, be developed into a coherent boundary infrastructure that facilitates the crossin...

Orchestrating open innovation initiatives characterized by frequent changes in stakeholders and activities can be a daunting task. As these initiatives need to adapt to the constantly changing requirements of the process, they can benefit from an open organizing approach that enables the direct participation of stakeholders, not only in the innovat...

BSOs are large research organizations established purposefully to address fundamental and complex scientific research challenges that cannot be addressed in isolation by individual universities, research institutes, or even government agencies. Unlike universities and other national research institutes, BSOs are unique scientific organizations by v...

Tackling grand challenges calls for collaborative innovation approaches that can gather various stakeholders around a common goal. One such approach receiving growing scholarly attention is collaborative crowdsourcing. By enabling crowds to collaboratively share and integrate their knowledge, perspectives, and partial solutions, collaborative crowd...

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...

Scholars across disciplines increasingly hear calls for more open and collaborative approaches to scientific research. The concept of Open Innovation in Science (OIS) provides a framework that integrates dispersed research efforts aiming to understand the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of applying open and collaborative research pract...

There is no doubt that digital technologies are spawning ongoing innovation across most if not all sectors of the economy and society. In this essay, we take stock of the characteristics of digital technologies that give rise to this new reality and introduce the papers in this special issue. In addition, we also highlight the unprecedent opportuni...

Solving complex societal challenges requires innovation processes that involve heterogeneous organizations collaborating for sustained periods of time. These multiparty collaborations are confronted with incongruent temporal structures, creating temporal complexities that hamper joint action. We draw on an in-depth longitudinal field study of a mul...

Innovation in a digital world increasingly revolves around open platforms that consist of a core technology and a large variety of complementary products developed by an ecosystem of independent complementors. The platform ecosystem literature has mainly focused on indirect network effects arising from the quantity of complements, with little atten...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study how the online temporary crowd shares knowledge in a way that fosters the integration of their diverse knowledge. Having the crowd integrate its knowledge to offer solution-ideas to ill-structured problems posed by organizations is one of the desired outcomes of crowd-based open innovation because, by i...

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...

In recent years, we have seen a growing trend in which the term digital is affixed to other management concepts, implying that there is something different with “digital.” These concepts include “digital innovation,” “digital transformation,” and “digital business strategy,”among a variety of other concepts (Yoo et al 2010; Bharadwaj et al 2013; Tu...

One approach for tackling grand challenges that is gaining traction in recent management literature is robust action: by allowing diverse stakeholders to engage with novel ideas, initiatives can cultivate successful ideas that yield greater impact. However, a potential pitfall of robust action is the length of time it takes to generate momentum. Cr...

In the digital age, open innovation is increasingly organized around platform ecosystems. This paper investigates how firms can coordinate open innovation as a platform strategy for the development of complementary products by independent third parties. We draw on a qualitative case study of Philips Hue – a connected lighting platform for consumers...

We begin this paper by examining the process of innovation using Usher’s model of cumulative synthesis which comprises four steps: perception of an incomplete pattern, setting of the stage, the act of insight, and critical revision and full mastery. Going beyond a synoptic view on the process of innovation implied by this sequence, Usher’s model al...

In many online communities, users reveal innovative and potentially valuable intellectual property (IP) under conditions that entail the risk of theft and imitation. Where there is rivalry and formal IP law is not effective, this would lead to underinvestment or withholding of IP – unless user-organized norms compensate for these shortcomings. This...

In crowdsourcing communities, thousands of users reveal their ideas in order to get feedback, to obtain assistance and suggestions for further refinement, and eventually to gain the endorsement of their fellow voters in the course of the tournament. All of this is in done under conditions that entail the risk of theft and imitation. The intangible...

In many online communities, users reveal innovative and potentially valuable intellectual property (IP) under conditions that entail the risk of theft and imitation. When there is rivalry and formal IP law is not effective, this would lead to underinvestment or withholding of IP – unless user-organized norms compensate for these shortcomings. In ex...

We report on a longitudinal study of the emergence of the ATLAS detector, a complex technological system developed at CERN, Geneva. Our data show that the coordination of initial architectural choices was driven by cycles of contestation and justification that resulted in the creation of what we term interlaced knowledge – pockets of shared knowled...

Which factors are responsible for the success of crowdsourcing tournaments? Current theorizing on crowdsourcing appears to assume that there is a deterministic relationship between factors such as the organization of the tournament, characteristics of the participants attracted, and specific situational factors on the one hand and the quality of th...

Innovation is often thought of as an outcome. In this chapter we review the literatures on innovation processes pertaining to the invention, development, and implementation of ideas, as they unfold within firms, across multi-party networks, and within communities. Moreover, we explore four different kinds of complexities associated with innovation...

We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the research site for our exploration. Our probe of the emergence of Wikipedia articles highlights a distinctive property of such digital technologies: in their very use, they ge...

The collective effort required to develop, build, and run the ATLAS detector has been structured as a ‘collaboration’, a distributed problem-solving network characteristic of Big Science, itself a relatively recent kind of enterprise involving big budgets, big staffs, big machines, and numerous laboratories. While ATLAS is an archetypical example o...

Interest in the area of virtual work continues to increase with articles being written from different disciplinary perspectives—e.g., information systems (IS), management, psychology, and transportation. In this paper, we map research on virtual work to (a) understand the intellectual base from which this field has emerged, (b) explore how this fie...

The traditional scientific approach to design extols the virtues of completeness. However, in environments characterized by continual change, there are challenges in adopting such an approach. We examine Linux and Wikipedia as two exemplary cases to explore the nature of design in such a protean world. Our observations highlight a pragmatic approac...

Proponents of modularity suggest that the development of complex technological systems can be coordinated by pre-specifying their architecture(s), i.e., the coordination of interdependent components is embedded in clearly defined interface specifications. Such an approach, I suggest, begs a more fundamental question – What are the origins of archit...

The traditional scientific approach to design extols the virtues of completeness. However, in environments characterized by continual change, there are challenges in adopting such an approach. We examine Linux and Wikipedia as two exemplary cases to explore the nature of design in such a protean world. Our observations highlight a pragmatic approac...

The nature of the problem tackled by the ATLAS collaboration - the creation of a radically innovative particle detector experiment - makes ATLAS an exceptional case for studying DPSNs. The problem solving is distributed across multiple groups of problem solvers comprising 2000 scientists in 165 working groups across the globe. Similarly, the engine...

In den folgenden vier Kapiteln betrachten wir die Beziehung zwischen jungen Unternehmen und ihren Kunden. Wir fokussieren uns im speziellen auf die Kundenbeziehung von wissensintensiven Start-ups, wie Software- und Biotechnologieunternehmen, mit etablierten Unternehmen, wie Grossbanken und Pharmaunternehmen. Dieser Fokus wurde aus zwei Gründen gewä...