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Effects of Practioner's Mood on External Idea Evaluation: Implications for Open Innovation
Abstract
What causes ineffective external idea evaluation in open innovation (OI) still remains an unsolved puzzle, with most such studies focused on creative idea generation or using samples of untrained evaluators. To help better understand the microfoundations of OI, this article examines the effects of mood on external idea evaluation using a practitioner sample. Drawing on “mood-as-an-input” theory, in two behavioral experiments using music induction, cognitive tasks, and idea framing, we test how one's mood affects the innovativeness rating of an externally developed idea, and examine whether this effect is stable within a mood state regardless of the level of creativity (high and low) of an idea. We found that people in happy and sad mood conditions differ in their evaluation of the same external idea, which is explained by differences in assessment of creativity of an idea and not the perceived certainty of its success. Moreover, a given mood state does not affect how ideas low in creativity are rated in their innovativeness, compared to ideas high in creativity. This article by investigating effects of mood within an OI process augments individual level OI literature, while informing the ways external idea evaluation can be managed toward enhancing OI potential.
... Moreover, only a small percentage of project ideas ever achieve commercial success in an innovation and new product development process, making guidance essential for decision makers during design [3]. The importance and difficulty of the evaluation and selection phase are thus evident [3,4]. To address these challenges in the current business environment, a systematic approach to select the best new project ideas is required to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the decision process [5]. ...
... The literature on evaluating and selecting innovative project ideas can be divided into two main categories: qualitative dimensions and decision-support tools with quantitative techniques. The first category focuses on qualitative factors that influence the idea generation and evaluation process, such as the cognitive level [1], behavioral level of participants [4], or other factors that affect the idea generation and evaluation phase [29,30]. The second category mainly employs decision-support tools with quantitative techniques, such as voting, ranking, or scoring, to support decision making [2,3,5]. ...
The innovation process typically follows a predefined sequence of phases: idea generation, screening, evaluation/selection, development, and launch/diffusion. This process exhibits a dynamic and cyclic structure. At each stage, potential ideas may undergo elimination or redefinition based on considerations such as their problem–solution fit or product–market fit. Consequently, the idea evaluation phase can be conducted continuously, involving varying numbers of potential ideas. To address the challenges associated with this process, a systematic approach for selecting the best new project ideas is essential. This study introduces the IF-ABAC method, which extends the alternative-by-alternative comparison-based (ABAC) method to the intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) environment. The proposed approach represents the first combination of fuzzy sets and ABAC within a group decision-making environment. The IF-ABAC method is employed during the evaluation phase, with the best–worst method determining the criteria weights. The study describes how the IF-ABAC approach adeptly manages changes in the set of alternatives after the decision process, addressing the dynamics inherent in decision-making environments. The study further includes an analysis of innovative business ideas in a real case study from Turkey, demonstrating the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis is conducted to illustrate the stability and utility of the method. Finally, the results are compared with three other IF-based multi-criteria decision-making methods from the literature. The study concludes by asserting that the proposed IF-ABAC method provides a comprehensive and practical approach to select innovation project ideas in an environment of uncertainty and complexity.
... On the other hand, only a small percentage of business ideas ever achieve success in the new product development process (Cui et al., 2019). The importance and difficulty of the evaluation and selection phase are thus evident (Bhimani et al., 2021;Cui et al., 2019). Therefore, selection process of ideas is needed to be conducted in a systematic manner (Li et al., 2021). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only created public health issues but also sectoral problems and economic crises. As a response to this unexpected phenomenon, online communities have also started initiatives to tackle it. One of these initiatives was carried out in Turkey. Innovative project ideas were gathered from entrepreneurs and potential contributors regarding the problems brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program occurred over three months (April 2020 to June 2020) through an open innovation platform in Turkey. The scope of this program is to collect business ideas from entrepreneurs and potential contributors, mature ideas with mentors and other entrepreneurs, and select the best ones by jury. In the process of evaluating the ideas, the weighted sum method (WSM) was used by the jury. The main purpose of this study is to reveal the effectiveness of the WSM via online communities in the idea evaluation phase. To demonstrate how this, we implemented different multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) methods to the decision matrix dataset. We compare the results of WSM to those of the other two well-known (TOPSIS and VIKOR) MCDM methods. Besides, we conducted regression and sensitivity analysis to further clarify the differences between the results. Thereafter, we combine the rankings obtained from three MCDM methods by applying three aggregation methods as a compromise solution for the final decision. We find that the decision-makers can use WSM, TOPSIS, VIKOR, and aggregation methods separately according to the criterion weighting and the level of confidence in the scoring of the alternatives.
Evaluating and selecting creative ideas are vital steps in the transition from creativity to innovation. However, research has only recently turned its focus on performance in idea evaluation (i.e., assessment of available options against certain standards such as originality and usefulness) and idea selection (i.e., a dichotomous decision whether to select ideas for further development or implementation). To foster and guide research on idea evaluation and idea selection, shared research paradigms are needed. Thus far, the increased attention for the evaluation and selection of creative ideas has resulted in many scattered tasks, while common ground on how to measure idea evaluation and idea selection performance is lacking. The current systematic literature review, conducted according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-analyses) guidelines, (a) provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of the available idea evaluation and idea selection performance measures and (b) offers a theoretical framework and practical guidelines on how to measure idea evaluation and idea selection performance. In doing so, our systematic review stimulates and guides research efforts into the crucial intermediate step between creativity and innovation: The identification and selection of creative ideas.
A model of category effects on reports from memory is presented. The model holds that stimuli are represented at 2 levels of detail: a fine-grain value and a category. When memory is inexact but people must report an exact value, they use estimation processes that combine the remembered stimulus value with category information. The proposed estimation processes include truncation at category boundaries and weighting with a central (prototypic) category value. These processes introduce bias in reporting even when memory is unbiased, but nevertheless may improve overall accuracy (by decreasing the variability of reports). Four experiments are presented in which people report the location of a dot in a circle. Subjects spontaneously impose horizontal and vertical boundaries that divide the circle into quadrants. They misplace dots toward a central (prototypic) location in each quadrant, as predicted by the model. The proposed model has broad implications; notably, it has the potential to explain biases of the sort described in psychophysics (contraction bias and the bias captured by Weber's law) as well as asymmetries in similarity judgments, without positing distorted representations of physical scales.
Hackathons are time-bounded crowdsourcing events, which have recently prospered in many technology and science domains across the globe. We study Europe’s largest hackathon, Junction, to better understand the distinct crowdsourcing properties and mechanisms of this type of hackathon as a form of tournament-based crowdsourcing. Moreover, we determined how they add value to attending companies and participants. In this regard, six qualitative and quantitative datasets from participants, companies, and the organizer were collected and analyzed. Our findings revealed five distinct crowdsourcing properties and mechanisms of mega hackathons, including intricate crowd selection, strong crowd vibe, instant crowd feedback, versatile crowd potential, and pervasive information technology. Based on our findings, we argue that these properties and mechanisms increase the possibility of finding innovative solutions to companies’ problems in Junction-like mega hackathons. This article concludes with managerial implications for companies to consciously plan and prepare while knowing what to expect during the hackathon.
In today's competitive world, globalization touches all industries. The open innovation (OI) paradigm has garnered increasing importance in academic research and industrial applications. Considering this interest, this paper aims to synthetize up-to-date findings, outline the intellectual structure of OI within the manufacturing research domain, and suggest a future research agenda. Building upon the content analysis of 239 articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus databases, using homogeneity analysis by means of alternating least squares (HOMALS), this study reveals the theoretical underpinnings, research trends, and methodologies of this research field. Our analysis revealed that the study of sustainability, commitment-based human resource practices, and Industry 4.0 (I40) represent important future research streams for OI in the manufacturing industry. In collaborating throughout the supply chain, manufacturing firms could minimize production waste, ensure better working conditions, and adapt business models. In the “new normal” posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to study the effects of managerial competencies, employee training and development, and reward systems on open cultures in manufacturing firms. This study goes on to outline research opportunities in I40, particularly regarding knowledge exchange and technology transfer among partners and OI's influence on the adoption of I40 technologies.
This study examined the effects of mood and risk-taking on divergent and convergent thinking using a Q-learning computation model. The results revealed that while mood was not significantly related to divergent or convergent thinking (as creative thinking types), risk-taking exerted positive effects on divergent thinking in the face of negative rewards. The results were consistent with the representational change theory in insight problem solving. Although this theory accounts directly for insight, the underlying idea of going beyond current contexts and implicit constrains could be applied to creative thinking as well. The results indeed accounted for the relevance of this theory to divergent thinking. The current study is one of the first empirical studies simultaneously examining the role of mood and risk-taking in creativity. In particular, no related studies exist that took a computational approach to estimate the relevant parameters in the framework of dynamic optimization. Our Q learning model enables to distinguish and identify the different roles of mood and risk-taking in updating Q values and making decisions.
The COVID-19 epidemic is associated with negative mood, which has the potential to be a powerful driver of creativity. However, the influence of negative mood on cognitive creativity and emotional creativity remains elusive. Previous research has indicated that self-focused attention is likely to be related to both negative mood and creativity. The current study introduced two self-focused attention variables (i.e., rumination, reflection) to explore how negative mood might contribute to cognitive creativity and emotional creativity. Based on a sample of 351 participants, our study found that (1) negative mood during the outbreak of COVID-19 was associated with cognitive creativity and emotional creativity. Meanwhile, there were significant serial mediation effects of rumination and reflection in the relationship between negative mood and creativity and (2) the psychological impact after exposure to the COVID-19 epidemic was positively correlated with emotional creativity but not with cognitive creativity. These results suggested that individuals, in real life and work, could achieve better creative performance through moderate self-focus. Moreover, individuals with different mood states can be induced to enhance their creativity in times of crisis through intervention training to promote reflection.
Concurrent increase in the degree of competition and access to information makes it both a challenge and necessity for firms to develop their ability to sense, seize and exploit knowledge-based advantages. Since ab-sorptive capacity reflects an organization's ability to extract innovative ideas from its environment, it plays a critical role in fostering intrapreneurship and innovative performance within existing firms. In this paper, we adopt micro-foundations perspective and study how goal orientations of employees affect their individual-level absorptive capacity, which would in turn shape collective innovative performance. Furthermore, we examine conditions under which individuals' absorptive capacities can efficiently aggregate and leads to increased collective innovation performance. We tested our theoretical model using an original dataset collected from 648 knowledge workers from 126 functional areas. Our analysis show that individuals' learning and prove orientation are important predictors of their absorptive capacity, and that individuals' aggregate absorptive capacity would lead to positive innovation outcomes especially when their activities are highly coordinated.
Open innovation crowdsourcing enables online crowds to quickly generate a plethora of creative ideas. A key challenge is the convergence of ideas for further consideration from massive numbers of candidate ideas with diverse quality. Based on Cognitive Load Theory, we executed a laboratory experiment to test the associations between three types of cognitive load manipulations and idea convergence outcomes. Our findings show that germane cognitive load positively correlates with idea convergence quality, satisfaction with process, and satisfaction with outcome. Intrinsic cognitive load is negatively associated with satisfaction with process and satisfaction with outcome, while extraneous cognitive load negatively correlates only with satisfaction with outcome. We further identified the positive moderation role of knowledge self-efficacy, perceived goal clarity, and need for cognition on the relationships between germane cognitive load and idea convergence quality. Our findings can inform open innovation organizers when designing tasks and interventions to improve convergence outcomes.
Investigating the mood-creativity relationship in everyday life is important for innovation promotion in organizational management. This study explores the relationship between mood states and everyday creativity using two different measurement methods. Both the experience sampling method (ESM) and the day reconstruction method (DRM) were simultaneously applied to conduct a 15-day follow-up study of the relationship between 10 typical positive and negative moods and creativity in daily situations. In total, 31 corporate employees participated in the study. Participants reported their mood states and creativity at three time points per day by using ESM; they also recalled and reported their mood states and creativity for at least three major events per day at the end of each day by using DRM. In total, we collected 935 valid measurements from ESM and 1260 valid measurements from DRM. The results revealed that highly active, positive moods including happiness, concentration, feeling active and interested had significant positive correlations with creativity, while the low-activity, negative mood states of feeling tired and sleepy were associated with low creativity. Both DRM-based and ESM-based results were largely consistent in measuring individual’s mood states and everyday creativity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to conduct DRM for mood-creativity relationship. The high consistency between the two daily research methods provides further empirical evidence toward a comprehensive understanding of mood and creativity. As DRM imposes a lessened respondent load on the participants as compared to ESM, our results suggest DRM as a promising tool for further mood-creativity research.
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Measuring behavior requires research methods that can capture observed outcomes and expose underlying processes and mechanisms. In this chapter, we present a toolbox of instruments and techniques we designed experimental tasks to simulate decision environments and capture behavior. We deployed protocol analysis and text analysis to examine the underlying cognitive processes. In combination, these can simultaneously grasp antecedents, outcomes, processes, and mechanisms. We applied them to collect rich behavioral data on two key topics in strategic management: the exploration–exploitation trade-off and strategic risk-taking. This mix of methods is particularly useful in describing actual behavior as it is, not as it should be, replacing assumptions with data and offering a finer-grained perspective of strategic decision-making.
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Innovation contest platforms are used to collect innovative ideas of consumers. Previous research on innovation contests has principally focused on participants’ idea generation. In this paper, we analyze ideas evaluation by participants in coopetitive crowd innovation contests within a network perspective. Using data from an innovation contest platform, we create a network of users through their interactions. Then, we measure the impact of participants’ centrality scores on received and given evaluation. Our results reveal that in-degree, out-degree and authority scores are correlated with the received positive evaluation, whereas authority is negatively correlated with the number of evaluations made. We also show that betweenness centrality and hub scores have no impact. By identifying the social influencers with network scores, we propose a methodology to reduce crowd innovation voting bias and to help managers to better select the ideas.
At the heart of emotion, mood, and any other emotionally charged event are states experienced as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated. These states - called core affect - influence reflexes, perception, cognition, and behavior and are influenced by many causes internal and external, but people have no direct access to these causal connections. Core affect can therefore be experienced as free-floating (mood) or can be attributed to some cause (and thereby begin an emotional episode). These basic processes spawn a broad framework that includes perception of the core-affect-altering properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation; it accounts for prototypical emotional episodes, such as fear and anger, as core affect attributed to something plus various nonemotional processes.
Idea evaluation is a vital stage in the front end of innovation, which helps managers decide the direction of future innovation projects. Often, idea evaluations are crowdsourced from users in order to know their preferences. However, since early ideas are incomplete, evaluations may be exposed to cognitive bias. Previous research suggests that people have a tendency to fill in the gaps in idea descriptions and understand them implicitly, but this can lead to additional processing and result in the undervaluation of the idea. This study tests the relationship between idea completeness, the assessors’ subjective comprehension, and the perceived quality of early ideas for public transport services. The results show that there is no consistently direct effect between completeness and idea quality, which suggests that idea evaluations do not rely on informed decision-making (i.e., decisions based on the provided information). In fact, people who think they comprehend an idea also perceive its quality more higher than people who do not comprehend it. An increase in completeness acts as an aid for comprehension. These findings have important implications for idea management, and point to the significant effect of incomprehension during evaluation, something which needs to be taken into account when using crowdsourcing.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/caim.12262
Creative ideas are highly valued, and various techniques have been designed to maximize the generation of creative ideas. However, for actual implementation of creative ideas, the most creative ideas must be recognized and selected from a pool of ideas. Although idea generation and idea selection are tightly linked in creativity theories, research on idea selection lags far behind research on idea generation. The current research investigates the role of processing mode in creative idea selection. In two experiments, participants were either instructed to intuitively or deliberatively select the most creative ideas from a pool of 18 ideas that systematically vary on creativity and its sub-dimensions originality and usefulness. Participants in the intuitive condition selected ideas that were more creative, more original, and equally useful than the ideas selected by participants in the deliberative condition. Moreover, whereas selection performance of participants in the deliberative condition was not better than chance level, participants in the intuitive condition selected ideas that were more creative, more original, and more useful than the average of all available ideas.
Generating creative ideas in a brainstorm session `is a crucial part of innovation. However, for actual implementation, the most creative ideas must be selected from a pool of ideas. To date, idea selection has remained relatively unexplored and validated instruments to measure idea selection performance are not systematically employed. This study aimed to improve creative idea selection performance in a field study. In this study, an idea pool of 18 ideas was used, and participants had to select the 5 most creative ideas from the idea pool. Right before participants performed the idea selection task, in the experimental condition, a promotion focus and positive affect was induced in combination with a self-affirmation task. Participants in the control condition performed corresponding filler tasks. The selection of the 5 most creative ideas from the idea pool of 18 ideas was performed individually. Participants in the experimental condition selected ideas that were more creative than did participants in the control condition. These findings provide first evidence that the selection of creative ideas can be enhanced through a combined induction of promotion-focus, positive mood and self-affirmation.
Through interviews and a large-scale survey of R&D scientists and engineers, this paper explores individuals’ attempts to absorb external knowledge, focusing on their efforts to identify and assimilate external knowledge and promote its utilization. Extant research does not explicitly address whether individuals should better specialize in certain absorption efforts or rather work as generalists dedicated to a range of efforts. We suggest that assimilation efforts increase the value of individuals’ efforts at external search and at promoting the utilization of external knowledge, which culminates in two main absorption roles that can help individuals achieve greater innovation performance. We argue that gatekeepers who combine external search with assimilation effort help to achieve innovation by contributing to building potential absorptive capacity, while shepherds who combine assimilation with utilization effort aid innovation by building realized absorptive capacity. We find support for these predictions and discuss the implications for research and managerial practice in open innovation.
In small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where typically the decision-making process is highly centralised, important decisions, such as open innovation (OI) adoption, will be strongly influenced by the characteristics of their Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). Pointing the attention to the strategic leadership and human elements, this paper sheds light on the micro-foundation of OI by emphasising the role that the personal traits of key individuals in innovation. OI adoption could result in the enactment of several OI modes – each representing an opportunity of potential change (of market, of technology or/and of the organisation) – and this paper attempts to examine the relationships between the CEO characteristics and each of the OI modes. Our analysis, using Korean SME data, shows that CEOs' positive attitude , entrepreneurial orientation (EO), patience and education can play important roles in facilitating OI in SMEs. However, this paper also observed that the effects of CEO characteristics on OI adoption were differently configured according to the nature of each OI mode, for example, CEOs' patience and EO had different impacts depending on the degree of uncertainty in the OI mode. This suggest that OI must be understood as a wide innovation spectrum, and, to increase opportunities for successful OI adoption, CEOs have to attempt to compensate for characteristics they may lack by recruiting appropriate complementary top managements. The research has practical implications for CEOs and policy makers who are interested in enhancing competitiveness of SMEs.
The aim of this article is to contribute to responsible innovation by developing a conceptual framework for the processes of creativity and innovation. The hypothesis is that creative and innovative processes are similar in that both are affective in nature. I develop this conceptual framework through an interpretation of the insights of Henri Poincaré’s notion of the ‘four stages’ in the creative process and Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of the entrepreneur. Building on this framework, I analyze the creative and innovative practices of the film director Lars von Trier and the entrepreneur Steve Jobs. The interpretation and analysis suggest that the processes of creativity and innovation are similar in nature in that both are based on the moods of disturbance and enthusiasm; but that they differ in that creativity is based on the feelings of interest and irritation, whereas innovation is based on the feelings of desire and anger. In the conclusion I discuss the implications of this for responsible innovation with regard to the social aspect of resistance towards innovation and the ethical aspects of anger in entrepreneurial leadership.
Four experiments indicated that positive affect, induced by means of seeing a few minutes of a comedy film or by means of receiving a small bag of candy, improved performance on two tasks that are generally regarded as requiring creative ingenuity: Duncker's (1945) candle task and M. T. Mednick, S. A. Mednick, and E. V. Mednick's (1964) Remote Associates Test. One condition in which negative affect was induced and two in which subjects engaged in physical exercise (intended to represent affectless arousal) failed to produce comparable improvements in creative performance. The influence of positive affect on creativity was discussed in terms of a broader theory of the impact of positive affect on cognitive organization.
Novelty recognition is the crucial starting point for extracting value from the ideas generated by others. In this paper we develop an associative evaluation account for how personal and contextual factors motivate individuals to perceive novelty and creativity. We report 4 studies that systematically tested hypotheses developed from this perspective. Study 1 (a laboratory experiment) showed that perceivers’ regulatory focus, as an experimentally induced state, affected novelty perception. Study 2 (a field study) found that perceivers’ promotion focus and prevention focus, measured as chronic traits, each interacted with normative level of novelty and creativity: perceivers who scored higher on promotion focus perceived more novelty (or creativity) in novel (or creative) targets than those who scored lower, whereas perceivers who scored higher on prevention focus perceived less novelty (or creativity) in novel (or creative) targets than those who scored lower. Study 3 (a field study) showed that organizational culture affected the perception of novelty and creativity. Study 4 (a laboratory experiment) found perceiver-by-idea-by-context 3-way interaction effects: for perceivers with prevention focus, the positive relation between normative level of novelty and novelty ratings was weakened in the loss-framing condition versus the gain-framing condition. We discuss implications of the findings for future research and management practice.
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. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on OI, organised at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study OI – originally an organisational-level phenomenon – across multiple levels of analysis. While our integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting and integrating various perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorising will be needed to advance OI research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research – particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.
Existing research has produced mixed, inconclusive, and even conflicting findings on the impact of open innovation (OI) on innovation output. This article takes a meta-analysis approach, systematically reviews the existent literature to identify the main contextual factors, and statistically tests the significance of these factors in influencing the effect of OI on innovation output. Based on the data of 139 studies published by 2020, this article demonstrates that 1) OI has a stronger effect on innovation output in coupled OI (a combination of inbound and outbound OI) than the inbound or outbound OI alone; 2) OI has a stronger effect on innovation output in developing than developed countries; 3) OI has a stronger effect on innovation output at subfirm than firm level; and 4) OI has a stronger effect on innovation output in service than manufacturing industries. The findings have important implications for managers, researchers, and policy-makers.
Research and development (R&D) project selection is essential for many organizations; however, it is a complex decision since it is affected by many factors. These factors vary among organizations because of their different objectives and conditions and limited budgets for the investments. Therefore, the main motivation of this article is to create a method to help improve the ex-ante selection of R&D projects in regulated organizations. More importantly, the case application is the electric transmission utilities sector, which plays one of the most critical roles in the entire electric power system. The main objective of this article is to develop a model to select R&D projects based on a holistic approach aligned to strategies, utility objectives, and market conditions in the electric transmission sector. At the same time, it identifies, categorizes, and quantifies the factors associated with R&D projects in the power sector. The analysis is framed into a multicriteria model, hierarchical decision model—HDM proposed by (Kocaoglu, 1983), which considers all the aspects associated with R&D projects. The model and the application are potentially applicable to regulated organizations around the world. Moreover, the flexibility of the model allows it to be adopted by electric transmission utilities with similar characteristics to utilities in the United States. A complete analysis of criteria and subcriteria has been done. There are gaps in the literature that have been identified and that support the idea of using a multicriteria analysis to evaluate R&D projects. The methodology is described, and the application of the model is provided.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to fill a significant research gap in academic literature pertaining to open innovation (OI). To do so, this paper empirically tests the impact of organizational culture, employees’ knowledge, attitudes and rewards as antecedents and mediators of OI adoption in organizations, facilitating a more thorough understanding by using an empirical multi-level approach.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzes the results of the “Identification of Industrial Needs for Open Innovation Education in Europe” survey through a quantitative analysis using logistic regression models. This survey includes 528 employees working in 28 different industrial sectors in 37 countries, most of which are in Europe.
Findings
The results suggest a positive impact of organizational characteristics on the adoption of OI (i.e. including the adoption of outside-in and inside-out OI activities in participating organizations), showing that the openness of an organization’s culture increases its likelihood of adopting an OI paradigm. More importantly, the results highlight the positive mediating effect of employees’ knowledge and rewards on this relationship.
Research limitations/implications
The data set that was the basis of this paper was generated in European countries, the results of the analysis are limited and appropriate for this region and may vary when applied to other regions of the world.
Practical implications
The proposed multi-level approach offers new insight into organizational knowledge. It enables the improvement of OI and knowledge management practices in organizations by assisting practitioners and academics in recognizing the relationship between organizational culture; employees’ knowledge, attitudes and rewards; and the adoption of the OI paradigm.
Social implications
This paper offers a possible explanation on why open-border cultures are more likely to have a successful OI adoption, by relating it to factors that advance in the presence of an open-border culture, such as active participation of OI relative departments in knowledge sourcing and knowledge exchange, and rewarding employees for OI activities.
Originality/value
This paper presents a new framework which links organizational culture to OI, moving on from merely examining culture in terms of its positive or negative impact on OI adoption. It contributes to research on the OI paradigm and knowledge management by highlighting the significance of antecedents and mediators from a multi-level perspective using multiple units of analysis. Most previous studies focus on a single unit of analysis.
Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery.
Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery.
In separate chapters, the authors take up visualization, concept formation, categorization, memory retrieval, and problem solving. They describe novel experimental methods for studying creative cognitive processes under controlled laboratory conditions, along with techniques that can be used to generate many different types of inventions and concepts. Unlike traditional approaches, Creative Cognition considers creativity as a product of numerous cognitive processes, each of which helps to set the stage for insight and discovery. It identifies many of these processes as well as general principles of creative cognition that can be applied across a variety of different domains, with examples in artificial intelligence, engineering design, product development, architecture, education, and the visual arts.
Following a summary of previous approaches to creativity, the authors present a theoretical model of the creative process. They review research involving an innovative imagery recombination technique, developed by Finke, that clearly demonstrates that creative inventions can be induced in the laboratory. They then describe experiments in category learning that support the provocative claim that the factors constraining category formation similarly constrain imagination and illustrate the role of various memory processes and other strategies in creative problem solving.
Bradford Books imprint
Open innovation (OI) has gained a lot of popularity in the last decade, as sharing research and innovation efforts offer several benefits for firms and industries. However, implementing a successful OI environment within firms has several internal and external challenges. Therefore, researchers are investigating the factors that might contribute to achieving a successful OI adoption. This paper investigates the effect of management support on the successful adoption of OI. The paper uses regression techniques with data from an OI survey that was conducted in Europe in 2014. Respondents, from several countries and industries, were asked to evaluate their firm's current OI adoption level, as well as, several internal competencies. The dataset analysis results showed that there is a positive correlation between management support of OI and the possibility of successful adoption of OI. Moreover, the results offered insight on some of the dynamics of how management support affect OI adoption.
Concurrent increase in the degree of competition and access to information makes it both a challenge and necessity for firms to develop their ability to sense, seize and exploit knowledge-based advantages. Since absorptive capacity reflects an organization's ability to extract innovative ideas from its environment, it plays a critical role in fostering intrapreneurship and innovative performance within existing firms. In this paper, we adopt micro-foundations perspective and study how goal orientations of employees affect their individual-level absorptive capacity, which would in turn shape collective innovative performance. Furthermore, we examine conditions under which individuals' absorptive capacities can efficiently aggregate and leads to increased collective innovation performance. We tested our theoretical model using an original dataset collected from 648 knowledge workers from 126 functional areas. Our analysis show that individuals' learning and prove orientation are important predictors of their absorptive capacity, and that individuals' aggregate absorptive capacity would lead to positive innovation outcomes especially when their activities are highly coordinated.
Open innovation has become a mainstream phenomenon in the current business landscape. However, despite the fact that innovation projects generally have different attributes (e.g., complexity and uncertainty), most studies on open innovation have only considered firm-level characteristics (e.g., firm size and firm openness) to determine how to manage open innovation successfully. Project-level studies on open innovation management are still scant—There are only a few conceptual and qualitative articles on the topic, and there is a lack of quantitative insights. Based on a survey designed to collect detailed data from 201 innovation projects undertaken by American firms, this article provides a quantitative cross-project analysis of how two, key innovation project attributes (i.e., complexity and uncertainty) are related to five factors for successful open innovation management: 1) openness level, 2) external partner choice, 3) open innovation mechanism choice, 4) collaboration process formalization, and 5) internal firm practices. This exploratory study contributes to the open innovation literature by highlighting the importance of microfoundations (i.e., innovation project attributes) in successful open innovation management. This article concludes by suggesting a number of relevant project-level future research opportunities in the field of open innovation management, and some methodological recommendations on how to address such opportunities.
Research Summary
Why do incumbent firms frequently reject non‐incremental innovations? Beyond technical, structural, or economic factors, we propose an additional factor: the degree of the top management team’s (TMT) frame flexibility, i.e., their capability to cognitively expand an innovation’s categorical boundaries and to cast the innovation as emotionally‐resonant with the organization’s identity, competencies, and competitive boundaries. We argue that inertial forces generally constrict how TMTs perceive innovations, but that frame flexibility can overcome these constraints, increasing the likelihood of adoption and broadening the organization’s innovation practices. We advance a theoretical model that relaxes the assumption that cognitive frames are static, showing how they become flexible via categorical positioning, and introduce a role for emotional frames that appeal to organizational members’ sentiments and aspirations in innovation adoption.
Managerial Summary
Confronting a technological change is one of the most difficult challenges facing any incumbent firm. Technological transitions create pressure for leaders to reframe their mental models while continuing to develop existing capabilities and product category variants. Yet at key junctures in a product class and during technological change, a concrete definition of the firm’s innovation boundaries and identity hold a firm hostage to its past. We show how a flexible cognitive frame – coupled with emotional framing – helps leaders and organization members become emotionally engaged in transformation efforts and, in turn, learn about executing non‐incremental innovation over time. At technological transitions, perhaps there is no more important role for leaders than to expand their cognitive frame and to infuse these expanded frames with emotion.
Understanding the receiving side of creativity has both scientific and practical value. Creativity can add value to organizations after it is perceived, evaluated, and eventually adopted. In this paper, we review four decades of empirical research on the receiving side of creativity scattered across several business and social science fields. A comprehensive framework surfaces out of our review, indicating four groups of factors affecting the evaluation and adoption of creativity, namely, characteristics of target, creator, perceiver, and context. Although the receiving side of creativity has received far less attention than the generative side in management literature, vibrant research efforts in other scientific fields have built a solid foundation to understand creativity receiving in the workplace. We call for more studies on this important topic and discuss how future research could contribute to its development by advancing conceptual clarity, methodological precision, and integration between theories, disciplines, and different sides of the creative process.
The existing literature offers conflicting advice regarding the types of task instructions that increase the quality of ideas during idea generation. Our research examines three types of task instructions: unbounded (participants are asked to generate any ideas they want), suggestive (participants are asked to propose ideas that improve current product benefits), and prohibitive (participants are asked to propose ideas that do not involve current product benefits). We explore the effectiveness of these three types of task instructions in a field study involving 6406 ideas from eYeka, a global crowdsourcing platform. As compared to unbounded task instructions, we find that suggestive task instructions are significantly related to lower idea originality, feasibility, and value. In addition, we find that idea originality and value are statistically equivalent for unbounded and prohibitive task instructions. Together, our results suggest that either unbounded or prohibitive task instructions should be used when crowdsourcing innovative ideas.
Purpose
Open innovation communities are a growing trend across diverse industries because they provide opportunities of collaborating with customers and exploiting their knowledge effectively. Although open innovation communities can be strategic assets that can help firms innovate, firms nonetheless face the challenge of information overload incurred due to the characteristic of the community. The objective of this paper is to mitigate the problem of information overload in an open innovation environment.
Design/methodology/approach
This study chose MyStarbucksIdea.com (MSI) as a target open innovation community in which customers share their ideas. We analyzed a large dataset collected from MSI utilizing text mining techniques including TF-IDF and sentiment analysis, while considering both term and non-term features of the dataset. Those features were used to develop classification models to calculate the adoption probability of each idea.
Findings
The results showed that term and non-term features play important roles in predicting the adoptability of ideas and the best classification accuracy was achieved by the hybrid classification models. In most cases, the precisions of classification models decreased as the number of recommendations increased, while the models' recalls and F1s increased.
Originality/value
This research dealt with the problem of information overload in an open innovation context. A large amount of customer opinions from an innovation community were examined and a recommendation system to mitigate the problem was proposed. Using the proposed system, the firm can get recommendations for ideas that could be valuable for its business innovation in the idea generation phase, thereby resolving the information overload and enhancing the effectiveness of open innovation.
In this paper we uncover the emotional factors that contribute to the adoption, or rejection, of different categories of innovation by dairy farmers in Munster, Republic of Ireland. Although emotions have been extensively researched in different fields, little research to date has examined the effects of emotions on farmers' decision making. Munster is the most important region for grass-based dairy farming in Ireland and this type of farming still plays an important role in Ireland's economy and sense of self. By using in-depth interview data from 27 dairy farmers and 6 other participants in the local industry we identified three categories of innovation that were influenced by different emotional pathways. We further uncovered the strong value-driven emotions that underpin the Irish dairy farmers' beliefs about what farming is, and means, and the influence that this has on innovation choices.
High-level cognitive constructs, such as creativity and intelligence, entail complex and multiple processes, including cognitive control processes. Recent neurocognitive research on these constructs highlight the importance of dynamic interaction across neural network systems and the role of cognitive control processes in guiding such a dynamic interaction. How can we quantitatively examine the extent and ways in which cognitive control contributes to creativity and intelligence? To address this question, we apply a computational network control theory (NCT) approach to structural brain imaging data acquired via diffusion tensor imaging in a large sample of participants, to examine how NCT relates to individual differences in distinct measures of creative ability and intelligence. Recent application of this theory at the neural level is built on a model of brain dynamics, which mathematically models patterns of inter-region activity propagated along the structure of an underlying network. The strength of this approach is its ability to characterize the potential role of each brain region in regulating whole-brain network function based on its anatomical fingerprint and a simplified model of node dynamics. We find that intelligence is related to the ability to “drive” the brain system into easy to reach neural states by the right inferior parietal lobe and lower integration abilities in the left retrosplenial cortex. We also find that creativity is related to the ability to “drive” the brain system into difficult to reach states by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (inferior frontal junction) and higher integration abilities in sensorimotor areas. Furthermore, we found that different facets of creativity—fluency, flexibility, and originality—relate to generally similar but not identical network controllability processes. We relate our findings to general theories on intelligence and creativity.
We present a large-sample survey of open innovation adoption and management in large firms, a follow-up to a previous study. We repeat some of the survey measures from the first survey, finding that open innovation continues to be widely practiced in about 80 percent of responding firms. Outside-in open innovation is more often practiced than inside-out. In other words, large firms are net takers of free knowledge flows, in part because they are concerned about IP protection for outbound knowledge. When we added new measures to examine open innovation at the project level, we found that firms selectively manage knowledge flows into and out of projects and are formalizing processes as they move from problem definition to execution. We conclude with observations about the organizational challenges and risks of shifting to an open innovation approach.
The use of external knowledge for innovation (i.e., inbound or outside-in open innovation) has received substantial attention in the innovation literature. However, the “human side” of open innovation is still poorly understood. We consider the role of employee characteristics with respect to predicting firm-level openness. Drawing on the human capital, learning and creativity literatures, we theorize that knowledge diversity of the firm’s employees is positively associated with employees’ ability to identify and absorb external knowledge, which aggregates to increased firm-level openness—that is, firms’ use of external knowledge in their pursuit of innovation. Based on a combination of three data sources, namely, two survey data sources and register data, we find support for our hypothesis that employees’ educational diversity is positively associated with firm-level openness. However, we find no direct association between employees’ work history diversity and firm-level openness but rather—as also hypothesized—a conditional relationship based on educational background, which implies that diverse work history only has a positive impact at higher levels of educational diversity. To reduce endogeneity concerns, we undertake a series of robustness checks.
Purpose
The paper aims to understand how individuals differ in individual absorptive capacity – their ability to recognize, assimilate, transform and exploit external knowledge. These individual absorptive capacities are a key knowledge management building block for an organization’s open innovation practices. The study examines individual antecedents – human capital, social capital and cognition – and innovation outcomes of individual absorptive capacity.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a quantitative study of 147 employees in a single medium-sized Dutch industrial firm. Based on a survey and structural equation modeling, the antecedents’ prior knowledge diversity, network diversity and cognitive style are examined in relation to individual absorptive capacity. Further, the mediating effects of individual absorptive capacity on its antecedents and innovation outcome are investigated.
Findings
The main findings are that prior knowledge diversity, external network diversity and a bisociative cognitive style explain differences in individual absorptive capacity. A bisociative cognitive style appears to be the most important factor. Also, this study finds that individual absorptive capacity mediates between its antecedents and individual innovation performance and is therefore a relevant factor to capture value from external knowledge sources.
Research limitations/implications
The study extends open innovation theory by exploring individual-level factors that explain the ability to capture value from external knowledge. It suggests that differences in open innovation practices are explained by heterogeneity at the individual level. Further, it explains how individuals’ potentials for open innovation are mediated by their absorptive capacities. These insights enable future researchers to further examine individual-level factors in knowledge management practices and to explore cross-level individual-organizational interactions for open innovation.
Practical implications
This paper highlights that individuals’ engagements in open innovation practices are explained not only by individuals’ motivations but also by their abilities to absorb external knowledge. Further, it helps managers to design knowledge management practices to promote employees’ absorptive capacities, to improve open innovation processes.
Originality/value
This study investigates the neglected individual-level factors of open innovation practices from a micro-foundational and knowledge management perspective. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to examine individual-level antecedents and outcomes of individual absorptive capacity.
Can decision-maker roles—roles with responsibility to allocate resources towards ideas—shape which ideas people in those roles view as creative? Prior theory suggests that expertise should influence creativity assessments, yet examples abound of experts in different roles disagreeing about whether the same idea is creative. We build and test a social context model of creative idea recognition to show how decision-maker roles can shift creativity assessments. In an experimental study, we show that relative to non-decision-making roles, decision-making roles inculcate an economic mindset and so lead to downgrading otherwise creative ideas with cues of low social approval. A field study replicates and extends this finding showing that organizational decision-making roles can habitually evoke an economic mindset that shapes creativity assessments. In both studies, decision-maker role, economic mindset, and social approval levels were unrelated to idea usefulness ratings. By integrating work on organizational roles, economic mindsets, and implicit theories of creative ideas, we provide a broadly applicable theoretical framework to describe how social context shapes creativity assessments. This work has important implications for the creativity and innovation literatures, and suggests a new interpretation of the longstanding puzzle of why organizations desire but often reject creative ideas.
