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The Mediating Role of Value Capture – Investigating Determinants of Social Capital on OI Platforms
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In this study, we draw on social capital theory to address the challenge of open innovation (OI) platforms to establish sustained knowledge exchange between platform participants by overcoming the fear of being exploited and the inherent lack of trust in a rather anonymous setting. Social capital theory provides a comprehensive framework for examining the nature of social connections through its focus on both structural networks and interpersonal relationships. Prior research has recognized that social capital is an essential stock variable to activate and maintain knowledge exchange between participants of a network – however, this construct is not yet established in the context of OI platforms. Results of an empirical study of 61 OI platforms show that a high level of decentralized control among seekers, solvers and the intermediary is positively related to social capital and that this effect is mediated by securing value capture for the crowd. The results suggest that it is crucial to (re-)design OI platforms in terms of decentralizing control during joint value creation, i.e. sharing power among stakeholder groups, while securing value capture in order to build social capital in a digital collaboration context.
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... However, in practice, open innovation intermediaries still play an important role. Adjusting to changing demands, many move from providing access to their own pool of solvers, to building brand-specific open innovation platforms with a software-as-service business model or offer consulting services to facilitate open innovation activities along the innovation process (Leckel, 2020). ...
A market study of intermediaries, brokers, platforms, and facilitators helping organizations to profit from open innovation and customer co-creation. This market study surveyed 106 intermediaries, investigating their open innovation services offered, project specifics, business model, productivity, and characteristics of their participant pool. In addition, OIA clients and solution providers have been interviewed In total, this study is the largest inquiry of the global market of open innovation.
The paradox of openness describes the fundamental tension between knowledge sharing and knowledge protection in open innovation. While sharing is vital for value creation, protecting is critical for value appropriation. Prior research has examined this paradox of openness from the perspective of the seeking firm, focusing on the firm-level challenges of inbound open innovation. In this article, we complement that research by illuminating the tensions between sharing and protecting in individual-level outbound open innovation, where we argue that the paradox of openness is most prevalent, yet much less well understood. Drawing on the experience of individual participants, or solvers, in intermediated crowdsourcing contests, we analyze textual data from 2,149 answers to five open-ended narrative questions embedded in a large-scale solver survey, as well as 43 in-depth interviews of solvers. Our findings indicate that individual solvers face fundamental sharing-protecting tensions that carry considerable economic and psychological costs. We also document how solvers attempt to navigate the paradox of openness by employing three formal and four informal value appropriation practices. They build elaborate configurations of these practices, which they tailor to the idiosyncrasies of each contest. They also dynamically adjust these configurations over time, as the contest and the interaction with the seeker unfold. We end by outlining how these findings contribute to a more multifaceted conceptualization and a richer understanding of the paradox of openness.
In July 2017, the University of New Hampshire hosted and co-sponsored the third triennial PDMA-UNH Doctoral Consortium. As in the two prior events held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Consortium brought together leading new product development (NPD) and innovation scholars and practitioners, as well as sixteen of some of the most promising doctoral students doing research in this respective field. One highlight of the Consortium involved the “hot-topics” research workshop that aimed to develop and expound on some of the most promising research questions of theoretical and practical significance related to five emerging areas identified in consultation with outside innovation academics and practitioners. The five "hot topics" include open innovation, 3D printing and innovation, Internet of Things (IoT), big data/analytics and innovation, and sustainability focused innovation. Each area was focused on in two round-robin sessions, led by an academic and addressed by two separate groups consisting of a mix of academics, practitioners, and doctoral candidates. This editorial is a summary of the research themes, possibilities, ideas, and priorities that emerged from this research workshop. Our goal is to stimulate substantial further research on these topics that advances the knowledge in NPD and innovation and contributes to both managerial and academic practice.
When crowdsourcing intermediaries lose crowd members, they lose potential high-quality solutions in the future. As the number of contests and intermediaries grows, it is increasingly critical for crowdsourcers to meet the needs of solvers and avoid seeing them migrate to the competition. Besides winning contests, intensive communication and customized feedback are solvers’ most central needs. For this study, we surveyed 202 solvers about the importance of communication in crowdsourcing contests. Based on our quantitative and qualitative insights, we derive key principles that can help crowdsourcers maintain and grow their solver base.
Purpose
Virtual crowdsourcing initiatives, and in particular crowdsourcing competitions, have become a promising means of harnessing users’ creativity to help corporate innovation. To date, research has tended to focus on the outcome of the competition, i.e. on the creative solution. There is, however, a lack of understanding in such crowdsourcing environments of the creative process itself and the influence of social interaction on the platform during this process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a series of qualitative interviews with participants from a major European crowdsourcing platform. The platform acts as an intermediary between companies and firms, and has launched more than 370 idea competitions.
Findings
The results suggest that there are not only positive interactions going on between participants. Below the surface, there also appear destructive processes provoked by the fierce competition among the contestants for prizes and a position in the Top Innovator lists. Such destructive behavior includes bullying of successful contestants, excessive use of like-functions among befriended contestants, and mutual donation of prize money among in-group members.
Practical implications
Negative social interaction among contestants of crowdsourcing communities can potentially threaten the platform provider’s business model. Managers of crowdsourcing platforms should engage in the development of strong social norms explicitly disapproving destructive behavior.
Originality/value
This study is the first to investigate in detail the phase of idea generation on crowdsourcing platforms, and the nature and impact of social interactions among contestants.
Lateral exchange markets (LEMs) are sites of technologically intermediated exchange between actors occupying equivalent network positions. To develop an enriched understanding of these markets, the authors develop a more broad-based and differentiated understanding of peer-to-peer, sharing, and access-based markets. They focus on two key axes: the extent of (1) consociality and (2) platform intermediation. Drawing on these attributes, the authors theoretically deduce four ideal types-Forums, Enablers, Matchmakers, and Hubs. Each type provides value in a different way: Forums connect actors, Enablers equip actors, Matchmakers pair actors, and Hubs centralize exchange. Twenty organizational cases reveal insights into the failure, adaptation, and success of LEMs. Lateral exchange markets shift responsibility for personal and exchange security to relevant personal actors, to institutions, or to the governing algorithms of technology platforms. Extending the general proposition that sociality increasingly infuses market logics, the findings suggest a new frontier in which social resources and software platform algorithms interact as operand resources whose negative consequences (e.g., opportunism) require careful management through assurances and institutional arrangements matched to the type of LEM operation.
In this article, we attempt to extend and nuance the debate on intellectual property (IP) strategy, appropriation, and open innovation in dynamic and systemic innovation contexts. We present the case of four generations of mobile telecommunications systems (covering the period 1980-2015), and describe and analyze the co-evolution of strategic IP management and innovation ecosystems. Throughout this development, technologies and technological relationships were governed with different and shifting degrees of formality. Simultaneously, firms differentiated technology accessibility across actors and technologies to benefit from openness and appropriation of innovation. Our analysis shows that the discussion of competitiveness and appropriability needs to be expanded from the focal appropriability regime and complementary assets to the larger context of the innovation ecosystem and its cooperative and competitive actor relations, with dispersed complementary and substitute assets and technologies. Consequently, the shaping of complementary and substitute appropriability regimes is central when strategizing in dynamic and systemic innovation contexts. This holds important implications for the management of open innovation, innovation ecosystems, platforms, and coopetition.
Firms use ideation contests to generate ideas from consumers. This type of collaboration provides access to new knowledge and reveals latent consumer needs. But it also is risky, as firms give up control to an unknown crowd. Some contestants use ideation contests to post content that is unintended and unwanted by contest hosts, a behavior that represents deviant co-creation. Drawing on literature from sociology and consumer research, deviance is defined as a relative, norm-violating behavior that has the potential to activate others. We report the results from a netnography study to define the phenomenon of deviant co-creation in ideation contests. Based on these findings, we provide a theoretical foundation for deviant co-creation and conceptualize and empirically illustrate various patterns of deviant content, ranging from destructive to constructive. The study reveals that deviant content in ideation contests includes illegitimate as well as legitimate content. Legitimate content includes five themes: humorous, provocative, unique, violation from technical, and social norms. Deviant content usually bewilders evaluators and draws their attention to the content. Destructive deviant content may trigger visible and malicious protests or result in mocking and ridicule on the contest platform and other social media, thereby exposing the contest host to reputational risks. Constructive deviant content can lead to positive discussions in comment sections and other social media outlets, as well as foster further development of an initial idea, thereby contributing to the firm's innovation potential. This article provides managers a deeper understanding of deviant content raising awareness for the dark side risks as well as indicating how to leverage it to achieve constructive co-creation.
Read the full text of this paper via http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpim.12369/full (open access)
Research on user innovation shows that tensions in collaborations between firms and innovation communities can hinder innovation, and that innovation intermediaries can help resolve these tensions by bridging opposing interests. Despite the compelling role of innovation intermediaries, few studies on such mediation exist. Using an embedded case study, this article examines the role of an innovation intermediary that facilitates online innovation contests for client firms and identifies an apparent membership paradox evolving around three key tensions of power, competence, and identity. The article reveals that innovation intermediaries shape new understandings of power, competence, and identity that shift focus from resolving tensions to managing paradoxes. The membership paradox (re)appears at both the project level (between control and openness) and at the individual level, between professionalism and personality for employees and between imitation and authenticity for community participants. This article contributes to the user innovation literature by demonstrating how opposing firm and community interests are mediated through managing new forms of membership uncertainty. Moreover, the lens of paradox management offers a novel dimension to explaining why tensions that arise between firms and innovation communities are difficult to resolve, and also how the ensuing gaps in mutual understanding might be tackled. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings for user innovation researchers and practitioners are discussed.
Advances in information technology bring changes to the nature of work by facilitating companies to go beyond the wisdom of their workforce and tap into the "wisdom of the crowd" via online crowdsourcing contests. In these contests, active and motivated individuals collaborate in the form of self-organized teams that compete for rewards. Using a rich data set of 732 teams in 52 contests collected from the crowdsourcing platform, Kaggle.com, from its launch in April 2010 to July 2012, we studied how the allocation of members' social and intellectual capital within a virtual team affects team performance in online crowdsourcing contests. Our econometric analysis uses a rank-ordered logistic regression model, and suggests that the effect of a member's social and intellectual capital on team performance varies depending on his or her roles. Though a team leader's social capital and a team expert's intellectual capital significantly influence team performance, a team leader's intellectual capital and a team expert's social capital do not. Further, we found that the alignment of a member's social and intellectual capital within a team has a significant influence on team performance. Moreover, the intensity of the competition moderates the impact. When a contest is highly competitive, the social and intellectual capital alignment negatively affects team performance, and when the competitive intensity is low, this alignment positively affects team performance. Our findings provide insights into improving performance in team-based competitions in crowdsourcing communities.
Companies have increasingly shifted from innovation initiatives that are centered on internal resources to those that are centered on external networks (said another way, a shift from firm-centric innovation to network-centric innovation). In this paper, we combine insights from product development and network theory with evidence from an extensive field study to describe the nature of a hub firm's orchestration processes in network-centric innovation. Our analysis indicates that network orchestration processes reflect the interplay between elements of innovation design and network design. Promising directions for future research related to network-centric innovation are discussed.
Purpose
– This paper aims to delineate the meaning, conceptual boundaries and dimensions of consumer engagement within the context of online brand communities both in term of the engagement with the brand and the other members of the online brand communities. It also explores the relationships of consumer engagement with other concepts, suggesting antecedents of engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
– Data are collected through semi-structured interviews with 21 international online brand community members, covering a variety of brand categories and social media platforms.
Findings
– This paper suggests that individuals are engaging in online communities in social network platforms both with other individuals and with brands. The study also identifies three key engagement dimensions (cognition, affect and behaviours). Their meaning and sub-dimensions are investigated. The paper further suggests key drivers, one outcome and objects of consumer engagement in online brand communities. These findings are integrated in a conceptual framework.
Research limitations/implications
– Further research should aim at comparing consumer engagement on different social media and across brand categories, as this study takes a holistic approach and does not focus on any particular category of brands or social media. Consumers’ views should also be evaluated against and compared with marketing managers’ understanding of consumer engagement.
Originality/value
– This paper contributes to the fast-growing and fragmented consumer engagement literature by refining the understanding of its dimensions and situating it in a network of conceptual relationships. It focusses on online brand communities in rich social media contexts to tap into the core social and interactive characteristics of engagement.
We investigated the attempt of a high-technology R&D organization to transform into a market-oriented organization by ©grafting© new, nontechnological knowledge. The intended strategic transformation did not succeed for reasons with wide implications for theory and research. Our findings suggest that the intersection of organizational identity, knowledge, and practice hindered the development of the new knowledge and undermined the broader strategic transformation effort itself. The failure of the graft revealed a previously underrecognized relationship between identity and knowledge that manifested itself in organization members' efforts to preserve the collective practices that characterized how they used knowledge in accomplishing their work.
The aim of this study was to characterise factors affecting citizen participation in community energy initiatives. Data came from an online survey of participants in energy cooperatives and similar organisations. The results offer clear evidence that participants are not exclusively profit-orientated; furthermore, they tend to be well-educated, knowledgeable, enjoy a good income, and operate with a strong organisational commitment and dedication to the beneficial effects of energy initiatives. Surprisingly, these factors do not predict active engagement in the organisations. Attendance at meetings may be high, but participants expressed concerns about the lack of transparency in the operations of governing bodies. Although the majority of members in energy initiatives defined their organisations as democratic and showed awareness of their influence and power as individuals, members' aspirations and organisational realities diverged owing to obstacles that constrain these initiatives from realising their full potential as change agents for an environmentally responsible society.
Research on open innovation suggests that companies benefit differentially from adopting open innovation strategies; however, it is unclear why this is so. One possible explanation is that companies' business models are not attuned to open strategies. Accordingly, we propose a contingency model of open business models by systematically linking open innovation strategies to core business model dimensions, notably the content, structure, governance of transactions. We further illustrate a continuum of open innovativeness, differentiating between four types of open business models. We contribute to the open innovation literature by specifying the conditions under which business models are conducive to the success of open innovation strategies.
Crowdsourcing as a model for distributed problem solving has been rapidly gaining in popularity. In investigating what drives the solvers to participate in crowdsourcing, the extant research has one-dimensionally only viewed the origins of motivation. While these studies have revealed that crowdsourcing systems’ use is driven by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, they fall short of explaining how these motivations change over time from initial to continued use. To address this research gap, our study highlights the dynamic nature of human motivation and shows that by including the aims of motivation in the analysis, we can better capture the dynamic nature of motivation across time. With a case study of a photography crowdsourcing platform, we illustrate how the solvers’ motivations change from the initial use to sustained participation. While initial use seems to be inspired by selfish motivations, continued use requires both selfish and social motivations to be satisfied. This study contributes to theory by extending our understanding of the motivational factors driving the use of crowdsourcing systems by looking into both the origins and the aims of motivation together with the temporal dimension. It also contributes to practice by providing suggestions in terms of communication strategies for crowdsourcing organizers.
The internet has given rise to new organizational forms of integrating users into firm innovation. Companies willing to make use of external resources can now outsource innovation-related tasks to huge "crowds" outside the company. The extant literature on participation motives assumes a symbiotic relationship between the firm and external contributors in which both parties have largely complementary motives and are only interested in their own utility. In two experimental simulations, we show that this understanding has to be amended: Potential contributors not only want a good deal, they also want a fair deal. Fairness expectations with regard to the distribution of value between the firm and contributors (distributive fairness) and the fairness of the procedures leading to this distribution (procedural fairness) impact the likelihood of participation beyond considerations of self-interest. Fairness expectations are formed on the basis of the terms and conditions of the crowdsourcing system and the ex ante level of identification with the firm organizing it. In turn, they impact the individuals' transaction-specific reactions and also inform their future identification with the firm. These findings contribute not only to research on open and user innovation, but also to theories on organizational fairness by enhancing our understanding of the emergent field of fairness expectations.
To innovate, firms often need to draw from, and collaborate with, a large number of actors from outside their organization. At the same time, firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas. This gives rise to a paradox of openness—the creation of innovations often requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection. Based on econometric analysis of data from a UK innovation survey, we find a concave relationship between firms’ breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation, and the strength of the firms’ appropriability strategies. We show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search. There is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors. We explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy.
Fostering and maintaining buyer–supplier relationships is a fundamental premise of many channel initiatives. Indeed, these relationships may culminate in significant performance enhancements and competitive advantage. Yet these relationships may also result in competitively harmful events such as partner opportunism. Despite this potential competitive erosion, there is a lack of studies examining the interplay between the drivers and deterrents of opportunism. By building on transaction cost economics and social capital theory, we examine, via a sample of 400 manufacturing firms in China, how the interplay between drivers (relationship-specific investments and behavioral uncertainty) and deterrents (inter-firm social capital) of opportunism affect partner opportunism in buyer-supplier exchanges. The significance of this interplay between the drivers and deterrents sheds new light on how a firm can leverage social capital to curb the harmful effects of opportunism.
To attract and to commit users to participate in online open innovation communities it is important to know the motivations of the members and ways to enhance commitment. One way to motivate members to participate is to reward them by monetary or non-monetary rewards. In this study we focus on studying the role of rewarding in online open innovation intermediaries. The data was collected by interviews of maintainers and a web survey in three intermediaries as well as by reviewing rewarding mechanisms in twelve open innovation intermediaries. In the studied communities respondents found monetary rewarding important. Also non-monetary rewarding based on quality of ideas in form of ranking lists on the website was found important as well as acknowledging the highest quality answers. According to the maintainers' interviews combinations of monetary and non-monetary rewarding was important. The review of existing communities rewarding mechanisms indicated that both rewarding methods are currently used in many open innovation intermediaries.
Open innovation has attracted a significant amount of attention from scholars and practitioners. Prior research on open innovation has mainly focused on collaborative inventing. However, understanding the processes and outcomes of joint inventing is not sufficient for understanding sustained open‐innovation activities and the competitive advantages of the actors involved in open innovation. Instead, an understanding of value creation and value capture is paramount for advancing our understanding of sustained open‐innovation activities. Open innovation requires collaboration among distributed but interdependent actors who rely on each other's capabilities in value co‐creation. Value co‐creation in open innovation is driven not only by actors’ value creation but also by their ability to capture value. While value creation and value capture are discussed in the open‐innovation literature, the advancement of this stream of research is hindered by conceptual ambiguity, especially in relation to the concept of value capture. This article adopts a value perspective on open innovation, offers consistent conceptualizations of value creation and value capture, and outlines potential avenues for further research at the interface of open innovation, value creation, and value capture.
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This study examines how intermediaries, in general, and those with digital service platforms specifically, engage with clients to help them innovate their services within their service ecosystem. Based on an embedded, longitudinal case study, the results reveal the cumulative development and deployment of technological, marketing, and co‐creation capabilities by intermediaries, and how these capabilities allow intermediaries to engage with clients, so as to enable clients' open service innovation despite their internal challenges. In turn, this article extends theory on service innovation by clarifying the role and function of intermediaries in service ecosystems in enabling clients leverage open service innovation. Second, this study contributes to resource‐based scholarship by clarifying how these three sets of capabilities and their micro‐foundations relate to each other. Despite the obvious importance of technological capabilities, online intermediaries are more than just ‘virtual' service platform providers. The intermediary's technological and marketing capabilities assist clients deal with project‐related and organizational challenges to open service innovation. Acting as a higher‐order capability, co‐creation capabilities—through shaping marketing and technological capabilities over time and also through conditioning their deployment—improve the proficiency of these capabilities. The findings advance insights on the agential role of the intermediary's co‐creation capabilities, purposefully developed and deployed to foster client‐engagement, and thus support service organizations in leveraging open service innovation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Crowdsourcing relies on online platforms to connect a community of users to perform specific tasks. However, without appropriate control, the behavior of the online community might not align with the platform’s designed objective, which can lead to an inferior platform performance. This paper investigates how the feedback information on a crowdsourcing platform and systematic bias of crowdsourcing workers can affect crowdsourcing outcomes. Specifically, using archival data from the online crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, combined with survey data from actual Kaggle contest participants, we examine the role of a systematic bias, namely, the salience bias, in influencing the performance of the crowdsourcing workers and how the number of crowdsourcing workers moderates the impact of the salience bias on the outcomes of contests. Our results suggest that the salience bias influences the performance of contestants, including the winners of the contests. Furthermore, the number of participating contestants may attenuate or amplify the impact of the salience bias on the outcomes of contests, depending on the effort required to complete the tasks. Our results have critical implications for crowdsourcing firms and platform designers.
The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0775 .
What are the key factors that facilitate innovation and creativity? This chapter begins by challenging the traditional emphasis on IP rights as an incentive to creators to innovate. While it is true, that IP rights provide for a much-needed tool to protect creative ideas, we argue that a much more important policy objective is to facilitate the dissemination of ideas in the society. Moreover, we submit that in the age of networked societies, dissemination of ideas could be facilitated by creating a trust-based ecosystem with different incentives for various kinds of intermediaries to emerge and compete with each other and making sure that users are actually able to choose through which intermediary information should be accessed or disseminated. We begin this chapter by offering a brief exposition of the notions of social capital and mutual trust. Mutual trust is a complex phenomenon involving multiple stages of cognitive decisions between a trustor and a trustee. The degree of trust evolves over time and is based on the experience between the communicating parties. Accumulation of trust between members of a society (a kind of social capital) significantly contributes to sharing of ideas and enhances cooperation. In more complex societies, trusting one’s neighbor (intermediary) is one of the major factors that minimizes risk and facilitates communication through neighbors (intermediaries). In designing a trust-based innovation ecosystem, it is first of all important to identify the relevant stakeholders and their main interests. Such stakeholders and their interests may vary depending on their geographical location or the market in which they are operating. We argue that innovation thrives in more flexible regulatory environments, which pose less restrictions and are able to swiftly adjust to the changing needs of technological evolution. Moreover, we suggest that regulators should aim to create ecosystems where more intermediaries could emerge and compete with each other. Having multiple intermediaries enables users to choose whom they believe to be able to provide higher quality products and services. Higher level of trust between various stakeholders of ecosystem contributes to sharing, collaboration, dissemination of information and innovation.
In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of performance feedback on the outcome of crowdsourcing contests. We develop a dynamic structural model to capture the economic processes that drive contest participants’ behavior, and estimate the model using a rich data set collected from a major online crowdsourcing design platform. The model captures key features of the crowdsourcing context, including a large participant pool, entries by new participants throughout the contest, exploitation (revision of previous submissions) and exploration (radically novel submissions) behaviors by contest incumbents, and the participants’ strategic choice among these entry, exploration, and exploitation decisions in a dynamic game. We find that the cost associated with exploratory actions is higher than the cost associated with exploitative actions. High-performers prefer the exploitative strategy, while low-performers tend to make fewer follow-up submissions and prefer the exploratory strategy. Using counter-factual simulations, we compare the outcome of crowdsourcing contests under alternative feedback disclosure policies and award levels. Our simulation results suggest that the full feedback policy (providing feedback throughout the contest) may not be optimal. The late feedback policy (providing feedback only in the second half of the contest) leads to a better overall contest outcome.
The statistical tests used in the analysis of structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error are examined. A drawback of the commonly applied chi square test, in addition to the known problems related to sample size and power, is that it may indicate an increasing correspondence between the hypothesized model and the observed data as both the measurement properties and the relationship between constructs decline. Further, and contrary to common assertion, the risk of making a Type II error can be substantial even when the sample size is large. Moreover, the present testing methods are unable to assess a model's explanatory power. To overcome these problems, the authors develop and apply a testing system based on measures of shared variance within the structural model, measurement model, and overall model.
Hackathons are events where people who are not normally collocated converge for a few days to write code together. Hackathons, it seems, are everywhere. We know that long- term collocation helps advance technical work and facilitate enduring interpersonal relationships, but can similar benefits come from brief, hackathon-style collocation? How do participants spend their time preparing, working face-to- face, and following through these brief encounters? Do the activities participants select suggest a tradeoff between the social and technical benefits of collocation? We present results from a multiple-case study that suggest the way that hackathon-style collocation advances technical work varies across technical domain, community structure, and expertise of participants. Building social ties, in contrast, seems relatively constant across hackathons. Results from different hackathon team formation strategies suggest a tradeoff between advancing technical work and building social ties. Our findings have implications for technology support that needs to be in place for hackathons and for understanding the role of brief interludes of collocation in loosely-coupled, geographically distributed work.
Scholars of the theory of the firm have begun to emphasize the sources and conditions of what has been described as “the organizational advantage,” rather than focus on the causes and consequences of market failure. Typically, researchers see such organizational advantage as accruing from the particular capabilities organizations have for creating and sharing knowledge. In this article we seek to contribute to this body of work by developing the following arguments: (1) social capital facilitates the creation of new intellectual capital; (2) organizations, as institutional settings, are conducive to the development of high levels of social capital; and (3) it is because of their more dense social capital that firms, within certain limits, have an advantage over markets in creating and sharing intellectual capital. We present a model that incorporates this overall argument in the form of a series of hypothesized relationships between different dimensions of social capital and the main mechanisms and processes necessary for the creation of intellectual capital.
A widespread “pro-standards view” holds that compatibility standards and modularity are beneficial but are under-supplied by imperfect markets. The author stresses that this view is not unambiguously proven by economic logic, but tentatively concludes that it is more right than wrong, especially where it affects horizontal competition. Introduction Standards mavens often think that compatible competition is more competitive, more efficient, and more salubrious than incompatible competition; and they worry that private interests do not reliably reflect these social advantages. Such a view suggests that policy should seek compatibility and should guard against sabotage by special interests that gain from incompatibility. Economists know that this pro-standards view (PSV) is not always right: It depends. Yet, stressing “on the one hand versus on the other hand” may give policymakers the wrong idea. As a step toward averting that problem, I undertake the uncomfortable project of going beyond “it depends” – even though it does. At a rigorous level, any such attempt must fail, but if I push myself to decide anyway, I make the judgment call that policy probably should thoughtfully encourage compatibility, especially in horizontal contexts. The PSV channels the spirit of much sound economic analysis: The standards mavens are more right than wrong.Outside the horizontal context, the key question is, How does competition deal with complementarities? Ambivalence on that question infests telecommunications policy and a wide swath of antitrust, including tying, aftermarket competition, essential facilities, intrabrand competition, and bundling. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Technology has transformed individuals from mere consumers of products to empowered participants in value co-creation. While numerous firms experiment with involving a crowd in value creation, few companies turn crowdsourcing projects into thriving platforms with a powerful business model. To address this challenge, this article analyzes successful platforms to identify patterns of effective crowdsourcing-based business models. The results provide guidance for managers who need to create new (or adapt existing) business models.
Crowdsourcing for innovation is typically conducted as an "innovation challenge." Despite the popularity of innovation challenges, there appears to be a growing consensus that innovation challenges do not succeed at generating solutions with competitive advantage potential. This article presents three ways in which managers can assure that their innovation challenges are fruitful: foster different crowd roles to encourage contribution diversity; offer knowledge integration instructions and dual incentives; and offer explicit instructions for sharing different types of knowledge. (I nnovation challenges, also known as innovation tournaments and idea con-tests, are a manifestation of crowdsourcing. 1 When running an innovation challenge, a company posts an open call on the Web to solicit solutions from a diverse range of individuals. For example, GE's Innovation Challenge soli-cited new technologies for its sustainability product line and a Lego Challenge asked the public to suggest unique Lego products as new revenue streams. By 2017, over half of consumer goods producers are projected to employ crowdsourcing for 75% of their consumer innovations. 2
We argue that under certain circumstances crowdsourcing transforms distant search into local search, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of problem solving. Under such circumstances a firm may choose to crowdsource problem solving rather than solve the problem internally or contract it to a designated supplier. These circumstances depend on the characteristics of the problem, the knowledge required for the solution, the crowd, and the solutions to be evaluated.
OVERVIEW: The term “open innovation” was introduced in my 2003 book, which outlined a new model for industrial innovation. Since that time, the concept has been adopted by hundreds of academic articles and been incorporated into the innovation practices of a similarly large number of companies. At the editors’ invitation, this article reviews this recent history and offers a perspective on where open innovation is going in the future.
Leveraging social network sites is high on the list of priorities for a lot of businesses that are eager to find more effective ways to reach, learn about, and engage customers in new product development ( NPD ). However, the rapidly changing landscape of social network sites can be difficult to navigate successfully and doubts remain about whether and how they can be used to good effect. In fact, empirical research confirming a positive relationship between the use of social network sites in NPD and business performance is scarce.
This paper reports on research examining the use of social network sites for three purposes, namely for market research guiding the development of new products, for getting customers to collaborate in the NPD process, and for new product launch. The results of this research suggest that the benefits expected from using social network sites in NPD are largely not being realized by businesses. Using social network sites to conduct market research leading into the NPD process was not found to contribute to business performance, and in fact was found to have negative relationships with both profitability and market growth. Using social network sites to get customers to collaborate in the NPD process was found to be positively related with innovativeness but not with market growth or profitability. Finally, using social network sites for new product launch was where the most positive indications were seen, since this was found to be positively related with innovativeness, market growth, and profitability.
Thus, it appears that while businesses may get good results from using social network sites for product launch, they still have a learning curve to traverse before they can successfully use them for market research or customer collaboration in NPD . While there is currently a great deal of enthusiasm—even hype—about the potential opportunities of using social network sites for NPD , this research suggests that businesses should move carefully and recognize that just jumping on the social network bandwagon will not insure success.
This paper addresses a major gap in reported research on open innovation (OI): how do companies implement open innovation? To answer this question a sample of 43 cross-sector firms were reviewed for their OI implementation approaches. The study analyzed how firms moved from practising closed to open innovation, classifying the adoption path according to the impetus for the adoption of the OI paradigm and the coordination of the OI implementation. The way firms adopted OI was found to vary according to (1) their innovation requirements, (2) the timing of the implementation and (3) their organizational culture.
In this paper, we review the research on virtual teams in an effort to assess the state of the literature. We start with an examination of the definitions of virtual teams used and propose an integrative definition that suggests that all teams may be defined in terms of their extent of virtualness. Next, we review findings related to team inputs, processes, and outcomes, and identify areas of agreement and inconsistency in the literature on virtual teams. Based on this review, we suggest avenues for future research, including methodological and theoretical considerations that are important to advancing our understanding of virtual teams.
This study explores how the motivation and knowledge of individuals participating in innovation projects broadcast on the Internet affect their contribution performance. By analyzing a data set that combines information from the content analysis of postings and matched survey data from contributors, we find that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations affect the number of different types of contributions to solution threads. While extrinsic desire for monetary rewards tends to be positively related to the making of non-substantial contributions, intrinsic enjoyment tends to breed more substantial postings, and knowledge diversity facilitates all types of contributions to open innovation projects. This study also finds support for interaction effects between motivation and knowledge diversity. We identify the most valuable contributors as those who combine high levels of intrinsic enjoyment in contributing with a cognitive base fed from diverse knowledge domains. Our research complements emerging findings on the individual performance of external problem solvers in crowdsourcing and broadcast search. The findings will be useful for platform managers striving to attract potentially valuable participants to ensure high levels of substantial contributions to innovation challenges.
Social capital as a concept has over the last decade or more been gaining significance in relation to a number of linked fields of analyses, including the identification of factors influencing educational attainment; explanations of differing levels of participation in formal and informal adult education; and conditions necessary to the construction and enhancement of institutions and practices conducive to lifelong learning. Within these contexts, social capital has come to be defined in a variety of ways, all of which have been linked to collective norms, values and relationships reflecting the involvement of human individuals in 'a common life based on family and community'. In this respect, social capital enhancement appears to have direct links with community development education in that community development is generally defined as a social learning process which serves to empower individuals and to involve them as citizens in collective activities aimed at socio-economic development. In this contribution, the author questions the validity and efficacy of social capital as an analytical concept in the field of adult education research by exploring a number of key issues related to the assumed links between community development and social capital enhancement. The analysis is based on research currently being conducted by the School of Social and Community Sciences of the University of Ulster.
This conceptual paper analyses why social capital is important for learning and economic development, how it is created and its geography. It argues that with the rise of globalisation and learning-based competition, social capital is becoming valuable because it organises markets, lowering business firms' costs of co-ordinating and allowing them flexibly to connect and reconnect. The paper defines social capital as a matrix of various social relations, combined with particular normative and cognitive social institutions that facilitate co-operation and reciprocity, and suggests that social capital is formed at spatial scales lower than the national or international, because the density of matrices of social relations increases with proximity. The paper also offers a discussion of how national and regional policies may be suited for promoting social capital.
This paper starts with a discussion of definitions of social capital, then turns to issues in measurement, and finally, presents some evidence on the consequences of social capital. In the last five years, I have been working exclusively on some specific and perhaps unique problems about social capital in the United States, so all of my examples are going to be drawn from the United States experience. I don’t want to be interpreted as saying these trends are common to all OECD countries. It is just that the United States has been the main focus of my research for the past five years. There are, among those of us who work in the area, some marginal differences in terms of exactly how we would define social capital, but Michael Woolcock correctly says in his paper that among the people who are working in this field, there has been a visible convergence, definitionally, toward something like the definition he offers. The central idea of social capital, in my view, is that networks and the associated norms of reciprocity have value. They have value for the people who are in them, and they have, at least in some instances, demonstrable externalities, so that there are both public and private faces of social capital. I am focussing largely on the external returns, the public returns to social capital, but I think that is not at all inconsistent with the idea that there are also private returns. The same is no doubt true in the area of human capital, i.e. there are simultaneously public and private returns. In the great debate of the two Cambridges about "capital", the focus of much of the discussion was on whether physical capital was homogeneous enough to be susceptible to aggregate measurement. There is room for similar debates about human and social capital. Obviously there are many different forms of physical capital. For instance, both an egg-beater and an aircraft carrier enter into the American national accounts as little bits of physical capital, and yet they are not interchangeable. Try fixing your morning omelette with an aircraft carrier, or try attacking the Serbs with an eggbeater. The same thing is true about social capital. Social capital is certainly far from homogeneous.
Current democratic theory and recent international policy initiatives reveal an intense interest in the relationship between social capital and democracy. This interest is the most recent variant of a long theoretical tradition positing that a vigorous associational life is beneficial for the creation and maintenance of democracy. Despite the popularity of this view, little quantitative empirical evidence exists to support the relationship. Here, the relationship between social capital and democracy is tested using data from a large, quantitative, cross-national study. Two additional tests are introduced. First, the plausible reciprocal effect-from democracy to social capital-is included in models. Second, the potentially negative impact of some associations on democracy is considered. Using data from the World Values Survey and the Union of International Associations in a cross-lagged panel design, results show that social capital affects democracy and that democracy affects social capital. Additional tests demonstrate that associations that are connected to the larger community have a positive effect on democracy, while isolated associations have a negative effect. Theory relating social capital to democracy is drawn from the literature on civil society, political culture, and social movements.
R apid environmental changes and recent
technological advances have triggered
and accelerated the use of virtual teams. A
virtual team is a collection of individuals
who are geographically or otherwise dispersed,
and who collaborate via communication
and information technologies in order
to accomplish a specific goal. A growing
number of organizations are adopting virtual
team systems to meet needs such as
globalization, higher productivity, cost savings,
and improved customer service. In
spite of the rapid proliferation of virtual
teams, very little attention has been paid to
how they can function effectively. Theories
on team processes have often been based on
work conducted in nonvirtual teams. However,
recent studies on virtual teams demonstrate
that the way virtual teams manage
internal conflict is critical to their success.
Therefore, exploring what leads to conflict in
virtual teams, and how it can be resolved,
would not only contribute to the body of
literature on conflict resolution but also help
virtual teams enhance their effectiveness.
Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore
sources of conflict in virtual teams and
develop conflict resolution systems for such
teams. In this paper, first the definition and
the characteristics of a virtual team are
addressed. Second, sources of conflict in
virtual teams are identified. Third, virtual
negotiation and mediation systems are introduced
as conflict resolution mechanisms for
virtual teams. Finally, ways of training conflict
resolution skills in virtual settings are
suggested.
Propositions about the influence of environmental constraints on organizational behavior are rare, but they are essential in administrative science. Behavior depends on the patterns of inputs from the environment to an organization and on the interpretation of these inputs as tasks by members of the organization. A study of two Norwegian firms shows how the autonomy of managerial personnel-their decisions for and against independent action-may be influenced by the structure of the environment, by the accessibility of information about the environment, and by managerial perceptions of the meaning of environmental information.
Reputations emerge if an actor's future partners are informed on his present behavior. Reputations depend on the "embeddedness" of interactions in structures or networks of social relations. They illustrate the effects of such embeddedness on the outcomes of interactions.This article presents simple game-theoretic models of reputation effects on efficiency (in the Pareto sense) in interactions. In a comparative perspective, the authors start with a baseline model of a social system in which reputation effects (of a specific kind) are excluded: actors do not receive information on their partners' behavior in interactions with third parties. Such a system of "atomized interactions" is compared to a system with interactions that are "perfectly embedded": actors are immediately informed on all interactions of their partners with third parties.Efficiency is more easily attained as a result of individually rational behavior in perfectly embedded systems. In a final step, the comparative perspective is broadened, and the extreme assumptions of either an atomized or a perfectly embedded social system replaced. Intermediate cases arise in the consideration of "imperfect embededness," that is, a situation in which actors are informed only after some time lag on the behavior of their partners vis-a-vis third parties. It is shown that the conditions for efficiency become more restrictive as the information time lag lengthens.