Exploring ideation and implementation openness in open innovation projects: IT-enabled absorptive capacity perspective

Advancements in information technology (IT) have made organizational boundaries so porous, thereby resulting in a trend toward leveraging external knowledge for innovation. However, firms experience significant obstacles in drawing external knowledge. This study aims to disentangle the role of IT-enabled absorptive capacity in new product development performance. The research model was tested with survey data of open innovation projects from 152 firms. Our findings indicate that IT-enabled absorptive capability improves open innovation project performance in terms of new product innovativeness and product speed to market, but we do not detect a significant direct influence of openness on performance. Our findings also show that the interaction of IT-enabled absorptive capacity and ideation openness significantly amplifies new product innovativeness while the interaction of IT-enabled absorptive capacity and implementation openness accelerates the product speed to market. This study theoretically contributes by building an IT-enabled absorptive capacity theory in the open innovation context and uncovering the effects of two dimensions of openness. In practice, it offers managers strategies to successfully conduct open innovation projects in deploying effective ITs and leveraging various types of openness during the two phases.     

Measuring and Enabling Learning Behaviour in Product Innovation Processes

It is generally acknowledged that innovation is one of the most important predictors of firm success or failure. Successful innovation processes require creating new organizational capabilities to handle the external pressure for new products and processes (fast, good and at low costs), and the internal pressure for increased efficiency and effectiveness. Under these circumstances ‘learning’ is an important issue and the increased interest for topics such as knowledge management, organizational learning and continuous improvement illustrates its relevance. Within the CIMA (Continuous Improvement in Global Product Innovation Management) research project (CIMA‐ESPRIT 26056) a methodology has been developed to help companies to stimulate learning behaviour of individuals and teams in product innovation processes. By studying learning behaviour in 140 product innovation projects in 70 companies in six countries, a seemingly valid and reliable scale for measuring learning behaviour has been developed. In addition, managerial activities and decisions that are predictive for improving learning behaviour have been identified.     

Organizational Slack and Knowledge Creation in Product Development Projects: The Role of Project Deliverables

Our concern is with how changes in organizational slack affect knowledge creation in product development projects. We operationalize a change in organizational slack as changed possibilities to depart from project deliverables in NPD projects. Through case research in high velocity industries we identify the effect a change in organizational slack has on knowledge creation processes inside product development projects. In particular we highlight the effects on tacit and explicit knowledge. More specifically we find that reduced slack creates a focus on explicit knowledge rather than tacit knowledge, which may reduce the ability to create knowledge creation and ultimately to innovate.     

Temporal Context of Organizational Learning in New Product Development Projects

Faced with the evolution of the competitive environment, firms have to find the delicate balance between two goals that are sometimes contradictory: accelerate the time spent on product development and leave time to the personnel implicated in these projects to develop collective learning. This research shows that the project ‘time’ has an important influence on the realization of collective learning during new product development projects. The commitment of the project team in activities like experimentation, detection and correction of errors, and research of new combinations which constitute organizational learning depends on the two conceptions of the project ‘time’. If the duration of the project and the time spent by the functional personnel on the project constitute the objective time of the project (first conception of time), the project ‘time’ is also a subjective time which corresponds to the project team’s shared vision of the project’s deadlines (second conception of time).     

Organizing Pharmaceutical Innovation: From Science‐based Knowledge Creators to Drug‐oriented Knowledge Brokers

The pharmaceutical industry is exposed to severe conditions: while a typical R&D process lasts up to 13 years, only one out of 10,000 substances becomes a marketable product. In addition, markets for pharmaceutical products tend to become more fragmented, leading to an increased risk of market failure. At the same time, R&D productivity has been deteriorating for several years. The number of new drug approvals is constantly declining, while R&D expenditures are escalating as a result of high investments in new drug discovery technologies and more complex clinical studies. As a response, pharmaceutical firms have started to focus on balancing the right size and structure of their R&D activities. This leads to several organizational trends: (1) novel management of technologies; (2) R&D internationalization; and (3) open innovation modes.     

Networking Beyond Organizational Boundaries: The Case of Project Organizations

Project organizations operate in environments where innovation depends significantly on the ability to integrate different but interrelated knowledge bases. These knowledge bases include individuals who are located outside organizational boundaries and have no formal relationship with the organization, but are connected socially to project workers. Organizational researchers have generally recognized the importance of external social relations for knowledge search. However there is some debate on the question of whether social networks are more useful for innovation if they provide social cohesion through close interaction or access to diverse and novel sources of knowledge through more distant relationships. This study explores the configuration of project workers’ external social networks and their effects on innovative behaviour, using data on the network ties of workers in 17 project organizations in the new‐media industry. The findings are more consistent with the social embeddedness view of close social relations providing an important source of continuity in markets where intermittent projects are common. Project workers embedded in cohesive work‐related social structures outside the organization tend to be more innovative in their project work than workers lacking such networks.     

The Dynamics and Functions of Self‐Organization in the Fuzzy Front End: Empirical Evidence from the Austrian Semiconductor Industry

This paper studies the functions, impacts and dynamics of self‐organization in the fuzzy front end of innovation. Based on a case study approach, the new product development processes of five Austrian semiconductor companies are analysed. We adopt a complexity science perspective which stresses that self‐organization and emergence are key elements of the new product development process. We found that self‐organization mechanisms occur in two ways. First, self‐organizational activities support formal and top‐down managed new product development processes. In this way, they contribute to the acceleration and adaptation of the new product development process and are also a way to overcome bureaucratic structures. Second, we found evidence for the existence of purely emergent bottom‐up processes in many cases. In this context, employees intrinsically and without any explicit order or strategy took initiatives to innovate. Such activities run in parallel to or precede formal new product development processes and employees deliberately bypass and even ignore formal processes such as financial incentive systems, suggestion schemes and patenting rules in order to promote their ideas. These activities are often secret until they are mature enough to be presented to the management, when they are then, if evaluated positively, incorporated as official projects in the new product development process.     

Role Models for Radical Innovations in Times of Open Innovation

In this paper, we study the influence of innovator roles in highly innovative ventures. In order to obtain a differentiated picture we take into account the degree of innovativeness as a moderating variable. To test our hypotheses we use a sample of 146 highly innovative new product development projects. We choose a rigorous sampling design and apply state‐of‐the‐art measures for the degree of innovativeness. Furthermore, we apply multi‐trait‐multi‐method methodology (MTMM) to enhance the validity of our study. The results show that innovator roles have a strong influence on innovation success but these influences are positively and negatively moderated by innovativeness. The moderating influences depend on the type of innovativeness. Remarkably, with increasing technological innovativeness innovator roles which create inter‐organizational links with the outside world appear to be more important than intra‐organizational linker roles, and support from high‐ranked organizational members turns out to have a significant negative effect on project success with higher degrees of technological innovativeness. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed and consequences for innovation research and innovation management are shown.     

Entrepreneurial Innovation: Beyond Schumpeter

Entrepreneurial innovation is generally understood as product innovation not only by the layman but by entrepreneurs themselves, even though in practice the latter are innovative in several other areas. Researchers and scholars have attempted to capture the essence of the concept of entrepreneurial innovation. In a study of 138 Indian entrepreneurs, the author found that entrepreneurs acquire competitive advantage for their ventures through innovations in other areas also such as finance, personnel, organization structure, culture, R&D management, and government relations. A factor analysis of these different types of innovation brought out four major categories of innovation, namely (i) operations innovation, (ii) market/marketing innovation, (iii) organizational innovation and (iv) boundary management innovation. This broader perspective compares with, and extends a view of innovation originally suggested by Schumpeter.     

Organizational culture and radical innovation: Does innovative behavior mediate this relationship?

Product innovation, in particular radical product innovation, is considered to have a positive effect on company success. As a consequence, there is growing interest in the literature on how to foster radical product innovation. Organizational culture is frequently cited as an antecedent. The underlying assumption is that the culture facilitates radical innovation by encouraging employees' innovative behavior. However, empirical research on the mediating role of employees' innovative behavior in the relation between organizational culture and radical product innovation is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this mediating role using a sample of Spanish firms. Findings show that adhocracy and market cultures are positively related with the degree of radicalness of product innovation and that employees' innovative behavior mediates that relation, but only in the case of the adhocracy culture.     

Low‐Cost versus Innovation: Contrasting Outsourcing and Integration Strategies in Manufacturing

This paper analyses how two different outsourcing manufacturing strategies relate to plant performance and innovation capability when taking into account the organizational integration of design and manufacturing as well as product complexity. The study discriminates between low‐cost‐oriented outsourcing and innovation‐oriented outsourcing. The empirical data used is based on a survey of 267 engineering firms, of which half have outsourced manufacturing. We found that the two outsourcing strategies do have different effects, which illustrates that outsourcing represents a trade‐off between improving innovation capability and lowering costs. The study furthermore shows that manufacturing and supplier integration in product design processes is mainly beneficial when applying innovation‐oriented outsourcing, and in particular when products and manufacturing processes are complex.     

Digital product innovation within four classes of innovation networks

The increased digitization of organizational processes and products poses new challenges for understanding product innovation. It also opens new horizons for information systems research. We analyse how ongoing pervasive digitization of product innovation reshapes knowledge creation and sharing in innovation networks. We argue that advances in digital technologies (1) increase innovation network connectivity by reducing communication costs and increasing its reach and scope and (2) increase the speed and scope of digital convergence, which increases network knowledge heterogeneity and need for integration. These developments, in turn, stretch existing innovation networks by redistributing control and increasing the demand for knowledge coordination across time and space presenting novel challenges for knowledge creation, assimilation and integration. Based on this foundation, we distinguish four types of emerging innovation networks supported by digitalization: (1) project innovation networks; (2) clan innovation networks; (3) federated innovation networks; and (4) anarchic innovation networks. Each network involves different cognitive and social translations – or ways of identifying, sharing and assimilating knowledge. We describe the role of five novel properties of digital infrastructures in supporting each type of innovation network: representational flexibility, semantic coherence, temporal and spatial traceability, knowledge brokering and linguistic calibration. We identify several implications for future innovation research. In particular, we focus on the emergence of anarchic network forms that follow full‐fledged digital convergence founded on richer innovation ontologies and epistemologies calling to critically re‐examine the nature and impact of modularization for innovation.     

The Learning Organization as Facilitator of Complex NPD Projects

With rapid technological and market changes, new product development (NPD) complexity is a significant issue that organizations continually face in their development projects. The inability to recognize and/or manage complexity can cause the best‐intentioned projects to fail. By creating a learning organization attuned to complexity and its management, however, companies are more likely to have the knowledge and skills essential to respond competently to the complexity frequently encountered in NPD projects. In this paper, we first define complexity in NPD and then examine organizational learning as it can assist in dealing with development complexity. Next, we report findings from an exploratory research study on organizational learning and its relationship to product development complexity. The study is based on 32 field interviews with NPD participants regarding their learning experiences in dealing with complexity; the transfer of project learning to other projects; and the factors that minimize/block the transfer of learning among projects. Based on our research, we advance several suggestions for implementing a learning organization designed specifically to capitalize on the experiences of development firms' efforts in dealing with complexity and its consequences.     

Product Marketing and Channel Management in Electronic Commerce

Marketing managers developing strategies to market products on the Internet are faced with important issues. We suggest that the use of Web advertising, virtual store-fronts and virtual communities provides innovative opportunities for marketers to communicate with consumers, understand their preferences and personalize the marketing offers at far lesser costs and far more effectively than through traditional means. The Web can also extend to fulfill the transaction and distribution needs of the consumers through new consumer processes, and thus becomes a new marketing channel. Considering the unique characteristics of the Web and traditional channels, we suggest the use of product and market characteristics in identifying the right channel for the right product. Further, we present a new framework of channel management strategies to help organizations effectively integrate the Web channel into their marketing strategy.     

Making Decisions on Innovation: Meetings or Networks?

Within some streams of thinking in the management of innovation and product development, the crux is the manager's active engagement in the evaluation, selection and control of the various activities through gate and portfolio meetings in which information is presented and decisions are made that manage innovation projects at a distance. This traditional managerial perspective regards the meetings as (important) ‘obligatory passage points’ but cannot explain a number of observations that reveal few decisions being made at those meetings. A network process perspective on the management of innovation is derived as an alternative to the normative linear view. This alternative perspective makes it possible to explain how innovation projects actually consist of myriad actions, negotiations, and micro‐decisions in the effort to create strong networks, leaving few decisions for the official gate and portfolio meetings. Through the analysis of two cases, this paper demonstrates how project managers work to stabilize the network in order to involve numerous human and non‐human actors and to encourage more and more of them into joining the network. Successfully establishing stable networks and successfully filling the templates for their projects leaves little room – and requires little intervention – for decision makers at portfolio meetings, where approvals are sought rather than decisions made. This study explains how gate and portfolio management meetings are, in some instances, better viewed as checkpoints rather than as decision meetings, how decision making is displaced from the meetings, and how the use of gate and portfolio management systems have created a number of mandatory templates which must be dealt with by the project managers. These mandatory documents function as boundary objects between and among the different worlds of the actors involved and establish new obligatory passage points in the management process; thus boundary objects become transformed into obligatory passage points. Implications for managers and research are outlined, including methods of dealing with the management of product innovation projects when the focus shifts from planning, preparations and decision making toward the co‐creation of technology and markets and involves interessement of human and non‐human actors.     

Managing Ambiguity in New Product Development Projects

Ambiguity, defined in this study as the existence of two or more interpretations of the same cue, is an essential component of ‘fuzziness’ in new product development (NPD) projects. In this paper, we present a model by which ambiguity in NPD projects can be classified and managed. The model has been developed grounded in case data from four NPD projects in companies making medical devices. Ambiguity is classified according to two axes: subjects of ambiguity and sources of ambiguity. Subjects of ambiguity include product, market, process and organizational resources. Sources of ambiguity include multiplicity, novelty, validity and reliability. Ambiguity can be managed by two means: reducing or sustaining it. If clarity is a main priority in the NPD project, reducing ambiguity is necessary and can be effectively achieved by applying the hypothetical‐deductive method. If novelty and flexibility are high project priorities, sustaining certain ambiguities can be useful. Managing ambiguity requires a constant harmonizing of the need for clarity and the need for novelty and flexibility.     

Visualizing market segmentation using self-organizing maps and Fuzzy Delphi method – ADSL market of a telecommunication company

A common problem for marketing strategists is how to appropriately segment the market and select segment-specific marketing strategies. This paper presents a novel approach which integrates Fuzzy Delphi method, self-organizing maps (SOM) and a visualization technique to cluster customers according to their various characteristic variables and visualize segments by producing colorful market maps. These market maps not only help the managers to see fully visualized clusters of market but also reveal mutual non-linear correlations between different customers’ characteristic variables. In this research we studied ADSL service market of an Iranian Telecommunication Company. SOM algorithm and visualizing technique were implemented in MATLAB environment to produce market maps of data set.     

Exploring the Tension between Clarity and Ambiguity in Goal Setting for Innovation

In this article we analyse the role of goal setting for innovation in an R&D context. The literature on goal setting for innovation is inconclusive; some scholars claim that goals should be ambiguous in order to inspire novel ideas, but others claim that clear project goals are important in order to undertake innovation projects in an efficient manner. We aim to explain this inconsistency by taking a more fine‐grained view of innovation where we study goal setting in relation to exploratory aspects such as idea generation separately from exploitatory aspects such as idea implementation. The results from an empirical survey study in the R&D department of an automotive company reveal that a general ambition to be innovative is positively related to all phases of innovation, but the effects of clear project goals are more complex. We found that idea novelty increases under conditions of either high or low levels of goal clarity, whereas mid‐range levels of goal clarity are related to fewer novel ideas. These findings inform existing knowledge about goal setting and innovation, and in particular challenge the body of literature showing that only high levels of ambiguity in goal setting are a fruitful means for innovation.     

Quality assessment in competition-based software crowdsourcing

Quality assessment is a critical component in crowdsourcing-based software engineering (CBSE) as software products are developed by the crowd with unknown or varied skills and motivations. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called the project score to measure the performance of projects and the quality of products for competitionbased software crowdsourcing development (CBSCD) activities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to deal with the quality issue of CBSE in the perspective of projects instead of contests. In particular, we develop a hierarchical quality evaluation framework for CBSCD projects and come up with two metric aggregation models for project scores. The first model is a modified squale model that can locate the software modules of poor quality, and the second one is a clustering-based aggregationmodel, which takes different impacts of phases into account. To test the effectiveness of the proposed metrics, we conduct an empirical study on TopCoder, which is a famous CBSCD platform. Results show that the proposed project score is a strong indicator of the performance and product quality of CBSCD projects.We also find that the clustering-based aggregation model outperforms the Squale one by increasing the percentage of the performance evaluation criterion of aggregation models by an additional 29%. Our approach to quality assessment for CBSCD projects could potentially facilitate software managers to assess the overall quality of a crowdsourced project consisting of programming contests.