Ideation Capabilities for Continuous Innovation

This paper explores ideation capabilities in large organizations. Based on the dynamic capabilities framework, it is seen that ideation capabilities are managerial and organizational processes for the stimulation, identification, selection and implementation of ideas. In order to explore how these capabilities are manifested and used in firms, case studies of four Swedish companies have been performed. The results of the study show that there are different approaches to ideation. In terms of the nature of innovative ideas, the observations lead to the suggestion that ideation presents some seemingly paradoxical issues to management. Firms with an explicit focus on building ideation practices experience that there are some negative consequences of the resultant formalization. Furthermore, the extent to which many employees should be involved in ideation is a difficult aspect, even though new technologies make this more viable. Also the degree to which the search for ideas should be directed is a non‐trivial question, as the ideation processes can be facilitated by both freedom and limitations. It is nevertheless seen that firms can benefit from more deliberate approaches to ideation, in particular if these are broad and balanced and focus on both building capabilities that formalize the informal, in terms of establishing explicit processes, roles and systems, and building capabilities needed to manage informal structures in new ways.     

A contemporary view of organizational safety: variability and interactions of organizational processes

Studies of qualitative assessment of organizational processes (e.g., safety audits and performance indicators) and their incorporation into risk models have been based on a ‘normative view’ that decomposes organizations into separate processes that are likely to fail and lead to accidents. This paper discusses a control theoretic framework of organizational safety that views accidents as a result of performance variability of human behaviors and organizational processes whose complex interactions and coincidences lead to adverse events. Safety-related tasks managed by organizational processes are examined from the perspective of complexity and coupling. This allows safety analysts to look deeper into the complex interactions of organizational processes and how these may remain hidden or migrate toward unsafe boundaries. A taxonomy of variability of organizational processes is proposed and challenges in managing adaptability are discussed. The proposed framework can be used for studying interactions between organizational processes, changes of priorities over time, delays in effects, reinforcing influences, and long-term changes of processes. These dynamic organizational interactions are visualized with the use of system dynamics. The framework can provide a new basis for modeling organizational factors in risk analysis, analyzing accidents and designing safety reporting systems.     

A Role Engineering Framework to Support Dynamic Authorizations in Collaborative Environments

ABSTRACT

With the increasing availability of networks and the advancements in their underlying infrastructure of mobile devices, access control and authorization issues will be enablers of future technologies in collaborative environments. Recent works demonstrate efforts to dynamically authorize users without prior knowledge and with no security configuration attributes or roles previously assigned to them. Moreover, current role-based engineering approaches construct role hierarchies without reflecting the organizational structure, since they do not take into account structural organizational characteristics. In this paper we propose an innovative role structure, not solely dependent on naming methods but also that takes into account organizational as well as functional characteristics to provide a practical role assignment methodology between organizations in a collaborative environment. More specifically, we argue that beyond the fact that a role represents a job assignment to perform certain function(s), it is also a composite element representing several organizational characteristics such as organizational function, organizational domain and level of authority. The proposed role structure enables role-to-role assignment as external nonlocal users request access in a particular information system (e.g., people on the move, users logged in from a collaborative organization) and acquire local role(s). A clear advantage in the proposed framework is its flexibility in the role assignment process, since the proposed role decomposition does not require an exact match of predefined credentials. The methodology is autonomous, as no prior trust establishment is required between interactive organizations, expendable as new organizations can join the collaboration without affecting the existing ones, flexible as it does not affect the local access control policy, scalable as the collaboration can increase arbitrary and efficient as the comparison methodology guarantees the selection of the appropriate local role, if such one exists.     

The Role of Knowledge Management in the Innovation Process

We argue that current concepts of knowledge management and organizational learning are, by themselves, limited in their ability to improve organizational effectiveness. We show how these concepts may be usefully integrated with organizational creativity and innovation within a single framework that combines the apprehension of knowledge with the creative utilization of such knowledge. Field research and experience are described showing how this framework has been applied to achieve measurable improvements in effectiveness in a wide range of organizations.     

Creating Ideas for Innovation: Effects of Organizational Distance on Knowledge Creation Processes

Innovation is to a large extent considered a social and communicative process, and input from other individuals potentially improves the generation of novel and valuable ideas also in the early stages of idea creation and development. Both colleagues inside organizations and external parties have frequently been proposed as important sources of information and knowledge within this part of the innovation process. Other contributions addressing social networks and innovation bring into focus the potentially negative effects that certain network structures may have on innovation, pointing to inconsistencies in received theory. In order to address these inconsistencies, an empirical study of ideation in a Swedish multinational firm was performed, taking into account two different knowledge creation processes – combination and in‐depth analysis – and their inter‐relationships with organizational distance between contributing individuals. Data was collected using a survey and was analysed using regression models. It was found that different levels of organizational distance correlate with different knowledge creation processes. In‐depth analysis occurred more often with employees' close colleagues, whereas the combination of existing ideas and information was more frequent in interaction with employees' close colleagues and with external parties. Both these interaction patterns were also found to be positive for the generation of patents, whereas no such relationship could be seen when individuals interacted with colleagues in other departments in the same firm. The findings have implications for theory on cognitive distance, and also suggest that management needs to facilitate different types of collaboration and networking when aiming to facilitate and support ideation, taking into consideration the type of innovation aimed for, as well as its supporting knowledge creation processes.     

A decision support framework for identifying novel ideas in new product development from cross-domain analysis

In current competitive times, product manufacturers need not only to retain their existing customer base, but also to increase their market share. One way they can achieve this is by generating new ideas and developing novel products with new features. As highlighted in the literature, in generating new ideas to develop novel and innovative products, it is important that product designers satisfy the needs of both current customers and new customers. However, despite the large number of existing studies that identify novel features in the ideation phase, product designers do not have a systematic framework that utilises additional information relating to products from either far-field or related domains to generate such new ideas in the ideation phase. This paper presents our proposed framework FEATURE which provides just such a systemic framework for product designers in the ideation phase of new product development. FEATURE has three phases. The first phase identifies and recommends to the product designers novel features that can be added to the next version of a reference product. In order to incorporate the customer's voice into the ideation phase, the second phase ascertains the popularity of the proposed features by using social media. The third phase ranks the proposed features based on the designer's decision criteria to select those that should be considered further in the next phases of new product development. We explain the importance of each phase of FEATURE and show the working of its first module in detail.     

A framework for studying computer support of organizational infrastructure

This paper introduces a framework for studying organizational computing. Its pivotal construct relates technological infrastructure to the purposes for which organizational infrastructure exists and the activities that it enables. Drawing on a diverse body of organization science literature, the framework identifies five purposes. It also involves a progression of five types of activities. From this, we derive a taxonomy for computer-based support of organizations. We also derive research models for guiding empirical research concerned with studying the fit between organizational and technological infrastructure.     

Synergies Between Organizational Learning and Creativity & Innovation

In today’s fast changing business environment, where knowing more and knowing it faster than the competition is often the difference between surviving and not surviving, organizational learning is more and more being recognized as a crucial organizational function. Never mind that the term is over-used, over-hyped and made to mean whatever the writer really wants to talk about. See through the snow and recognize that organizational learning is an organizational function that is here to stay and that will grow in importance. Unending changes in technology and in markets and the removal of logistical and regulatory buffers from competition will make it so. As a consequence of these facts, organizational learning has become a subject of study by management researchers and a subject of considerable interest to corporate leaders – so much so that many large US business organizations are creating positions with the titles like Chief Learning Officer and Chief Knowledge Officer. Certainly organizational learning is a phrase in high fashion. But in what specific ways, if any, does it lead to creativity and innovation? Or, consider the reverse directionality – in what ways do creativity and innovation lead to organizational learning? In this article, I offer some partial answers to these questions, with the intention of giving readers an additional way to frame the processes of creativity and innovation in their organizations.     

A reconfiguration control framework for constrained systems with sensor stuck faults

In this paper, a sensor stuck fault‐tolerant control framework for linear time‐invariant plant models subject to input/state constraints and bounded disturbances is presented. A receding horizon control reconfigurable scheme is proposed to contrast undesired effects due to sensors malfunctioning. The main merit of this strategy relies on its intrinsic capability to quickly identify fault occurrences and to take a decision on the adequate control action. This is formally obtained by jointly exploiting set‐theoretic polyhedral ideas and the certainty equivalence concept. A numerical example is provided and the control performance contrasted with a well‐reputed competitor fault‐tolerant control scheme.     

The technostress trifecta ‐ techno eustress,techno distress and design: Theoretical directions and an agenda for research

Technostress—defined as stress that individuals experience due to their use of Information Systems—represents an emerging phenomenon of scholarly investigation. It examines how and why the use of IS causes individuals to experience various demands that they find stressful. This paper develops a framework for guiding future research in technostress experienced by individuals in organizations. We first review and critically analyse the state of current research on technostress reported in journals from the IS discipline and the non‐IS disciplines that study stress in organizations (eg, organizational behaviour and psychological stress). We then develop our framework in the form of the “technostress trifecta”—techno‐eustress, techno‐distress, and Information Systems design principles for technostress. The paper challenges 3 key ideas imbued in the existing technostress literature. First, it develops the argument that, in contrast to negative outcomes, technostress can lead to positive outcomes such as greater effectiveness and innovation at work. Second, it suggests that instead of limiting the role of IS to that of being a stress creator in the technostress phenomenon, it should be expanded to that of enhancing the positive and mitigating the negative effects of technostress through appropriate design. Third, it lays the groundwork for guiding future research in technostress through an interdisciplinary framing that enriches both the IS and the psychological stress literatures through a potential discourse of disciplinary exchange.     

The design of Cloudworks: Applying social networking practice to foster the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs

This paper describes a new social networking site, Cloudworks, which aims to provide a dynamic environment for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs. The paper begins by discussing the mismatch between the potential application of technologies in education and their actual use in practice. It considers some of the reasons for this and suggests ways in which this gap might be addressed. It goes on to outline the vision behind the development of Cloudworks, the phases of development and findings to date. It then contextualises this work theoretically drawing in particular on the notion of ‘social objects’ and a framework for sociality. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this work and future research plans.     

Intentional and unintentional consequences of substituting face-to-face interaction with e-mail: An employee-based perspective

In this article, we undertake empirical research into e-mail communication in the workplace to provide organizations with practical information about how employees can effectively manage their e-mail interactions. We employ an interpretative, qualitative methodology to examine their views of e-mail. Specifically, we consider the interaction between this and traditional face-to-face (F2F) contact. Theoretical ideas are subject to empirical scrutiny from a database of 29 in-depth interviews with users. The findings suggest that as computer-mediated communication (CMC) intensifies, communication is increasingly characterized by a complex interplay between CMC and F2F, with e-mail affecting communication in positive and negative ways, and also with intended and unintended outcomes. For organizations, the key is to raise employee awareness about their e-mail communications in order to maximize effectiveness and prevent negative outcomes such as back-covering and relationship breakdown. The results inform the development of a conceptual framework for the interpretation and investigation of e-mail communications.     

An Evaluation Model for Electronic Commerce Activities within SMEs

The exponential growth that has recently characterized the diffusion of electronic commerce (EC) applications could lead companies of any size to plan new investments. The first business experiences show that EC should be considered a competitive instrument not simply affecting economic transactions, but significantly influencing the business organizational structure and strategic objectives. Although this issue has recently been object of considerable attention, the research on the evaluation of EC adoption for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is still relatively new. This paper aims at supporting SMEs in choosing the most suitable EC approach according to their peculiarities and strategic goals. This objective has been pursued through the classification of five main EC activities, which are characterized by different requirements and attainable results. The identification of the main business variables involved in an EC project and the resulting classification of SME profiles should help the entrepreneur in becoming aware of his/her organization. Finally, a cross analysis between EC activities and SME profiles allows developing a framework suggesting the most suitable EC approach for each business profile. This framework provides SMEs with a simple and easy to use tool to perform a qualitative evaluation of the EC opportunity.     

Approximate Test Risk Bound Minimization Through Soft Margin Estimation

Inspired by the great success of margin-based classifiers, there is a trend to incorporate the margin concept into hidden Markov modeling for speech recognition. Several attempts based on margin maximization were proposed recently. In this paper, a new discriminative learning framework, called soft margin estimation (SME), is proposed for estimating the parameters of continuous-density hidden Markov models. The proposed method makes direct use of the successful ideas of soft margin in support vector machines to improve generalization capability and decision feedback learning in minimum classification error training to enhance model separation in classifier design. SME is illustrated from a perspective of statistical learning theory. By including a margin in formulating the SME objective function, SME is capable of directly minimizing an approximate test risk bound. Frame selection, utterance selection, and discriminative separation are unified into a single objective function that can be optimized using the generalized probabilistic descent algorithm. Tested on the TIDIGITS connected digit recognition task, the proposed SME approach achieves a string accuracy of 99.43%. On the 5 k-word Wall Street Journal task, SME obtains relative word error rate reductions of about 10% over our best baseline results in different experimental configurations. We believe this is the first attempt to show the effectiveness of margin-based acoustic modeling for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition in a hidden Markov model framework. Further improvements are expected because the approximate test risk bound minimization principle offers a flexible and rigorous framework to facilitate incorporation of new margin-based optimization criteria into hidden Markov model training.     

Organizational Memory as Objects, Processes, and Trajectories: An Examination of Organizational Memory in Use

For proper knowledge management, organizations must consider how knowledge is kept and reused. The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed cognition analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding the calls, and the memory used in the work activity. Drawing on the work of Star, Hutchins, and Strauss, the paper focuses on issues of applying past information for current use. Our work extends Strauss' and Hutchins' trajectories to get at the understanding of potential future use by participants and its role in current information storage. We also note the simultaneously shared provenance and governance of multiple memories – human and technical. This analysis and the theoretical framework we construct should be to be useful in further efforts in describing and analyzing organizational memory within the context of knowledge management efforts.     

A conceptual framework of information systems for organizational creativity support. lessons from empirical investigations

Based on a review of the subject literature, a conceptual framework of information systems for organizational creativity support is proposed. The most important elements in creating such a system are identified and described. Finally, the results of a survey conducted in twenty-five organizations are used to better understand the most important elements and factors determining the development of information systems for organizational creativity support.     

Creativity (Ideas) Management in Industrial R&D Organizations: A Crea‐Political Process Model and an Empirical Illustration of Corus RD&T

Creativity management is a crucial topic to consider in the debate about the innovative research department. Against the background of discussions about individual creativity and organizational commitment, this article argues that the creative process in organizations is a matter of political strategies. The ideator literally has to sell his/her idea. The article therefore comes up with a crea‐political process model in which there is ample room for the thought that ideas emerge and survive within a social‐political context. In addition, the crea‐political process model is used to analyse the way in which the Corus Group Research Development and Technology (RD&T) department has implemented an electronic idea‐management system. The system, called eureka!, has been designed as a straightforward platform to capture, review, evaluate and select creative ideas. The findings challenge the literature on idea management in organizations to consider the political activities of ideators in the whole process of creativity.     

Why aren’t organizations adopting virtual worlds?

The purpose of this study was to understand why organizational adoption of virtual worlds much has been much slower than expected, by empirically identifying factors that influence organizational intent to adopt virtual worlds. To do so, we developed a model of factors that influence organizational adoption of virtual worlds, based on the Technology–Organization–Environment framework. The model was tested using survey data from organizations, as well as secondary data. Interestingly, mimetic pressures and normative pressures exhibit the strongest effects on organizational intent to adopt virtual worlds. Contrary to expectations, none of the technical factors were to be found significant. These findings provide insights into why the organizational adoption rate of virtual worlds is much slower than expected. First, organizations are intended to adopt virtual worlds if other organizations are adopting virtual worlds. However, organizations are not adopting virtual worlds. Second, because respective competitors that have adopted virtual worlds are not benefiting or succeeding, organizations are not induced to adopt. Last, technological factors, such as relative advantage and compatibility, do not currently have a significant impact on an organization’s intent to adopt virtual worlds.     

Evaluating the generalizability of the Organizational Constraints Analysis framework: a hospital bed management case study

Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) provides useful tools for analyzing and modeling work constraints that can inform the development of systems design requirements. However, it does not provide effective tools for analyzing and modeling organizational constraints that can inform the development of organizational design requirements. By integrating organizational theories with the CWA approach, we developed the Organizational Constraints Analysis framework, a formative approach to the analysis, modeling, and design of the organization of work. In this paper, we test the generalizability of the framework by using its two analytical templates—the Organizational Constraints model and Work Possibilities diagram—to analyze the hospital bed management work domain. The research findings suggest that the concepts, investigative probes, and notations from the analytical templates can be applied to complex work domains beyond those in which it was initially developed. We conclude with suggestions for how the Organizational Constraints Analysis framework can complement CWA methods by helping researchers and practitioners develop a broader organizational perspective on the constraints that drive how work can be done in organizations.     

Trust, control and the role of interorganizational systems in electronic partnerships

Abstract. To survive and thrive in today's competitive marketplace, organizations are increasingly migrating to new organizational structures in which partnerships and interorganizational systems (IOSs) are becoming more important. The success of these partnerships depends on both trust and control – complex constructs that act on and shape each other over time. Many organizations assume that high levels of trust are necessary for net-enabled electronic partnerships. We examine this assumption from two perspectives: the initial decision to enter into a partnership or alliance, and its ongoing operation. Our findings suggest that researchers have treated trust simplistically, failing to distinguish the need for trust (which is inversely related to the organization's ability to control its partners) and the level of trust (which is an actual quantity that may change during the lifetime of the partnership). In many organizations, there is a gap between these two trust dimensions, which management attempts to close by changing the level of control. In this process, the IOS is key. To understand the relationship of IOS use to trust and control, we applied structured content analysis and analytic induction to 16 published case studies and used the results to create a framework for relating trust and control. At the heart of the framework is the recognition that trust and control are not simple substitutes for each other. Rather, they form a dialectic, where it makes sense to consider each construct only in relationship to the other. Using the framework, we identify areas for follow-up research and suggestions for practitioners.