Innovation jams as vehicles for innovation

This thesis investigates the emerging phenomenon of the innovation jam, and its use by large firms. Innovation jams allow firms to engage with new actors (e.g. employees, customers, lead users) across company and geographical boundaries, and to direct innovative activity in novel ways. Despite the increasing use and popularity of innovation jams by firms, they have received relatively little scholarly attention compared to other, similar collective practices to promote innovation. Moreover, the previous literature focuses primarily on innovation jams as a vehicle for idea generation and knowledge creation while in order to realize an innovation, the firm needs to integrate the knowledge which calls for an extended perspective on this topic. While innovation jams offer many opportunities to firms, their use also challenges the firm’s established development practices. Previous studies rarely link them to firms’ established development practices and other business activities. There is a need to understand an innovation jam as a situated practice, in order to better understand how it interacts with the surrounding organization. The aim of this thesis is to explore the innovation jam as a potential vehicle for innovation in large, established firms. To do so, the thesis draws on data from four exploratory case studies: three in-depth, single case studies, and one multiple case study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and observations over the period 2011 to 2016. This thesis proposes to view an innovation jam as a dual search process: on the one hand, a series of knowledge search and knowledge creation activities, and on the other hand, a series of activities to achieve commitment from the firm's employees and managers. The thesis points also to a feedback loop which emerges between innovation jams which shapes further search for knowledge, and how problems for local search are formulated and defined. As a result of this feedback loop, innovation jam problems will tend to converge towards well-known problem definitions. In order for an innovation jam to become a vehicle for innovation, firms could benefit from considering how well the knowledge attributes required to solve a problem corresponds with the firms’ existing knowledge base, on the one hand, and with the firms’ established coordination mechanisms, on the other hand. This thesis points also to that firms implementing and using an innovation jam, can benefit from reframing problems to ‘fit’ with the firm’s established language, the development of new evaluation criteria, and adjustments to a firm’s strategy

Learning from various labeling strategies for suicide-related messages on social media: An experimental study

Suicide is an important but often misunderstood problem, one that researchers are now seeking to better understand through social media. Due in large part to the fuzzy nature of what constitutes suicidal risks, most supervised approaches for learning to automatically detect suicide-related activity in social media require a great deal of human labor to train. However, humans themselves have diverse or conflicting views on what constitutes suicidal thoughts. So how to obtain reliable gold standard labels is fundamentally challenging and, we hypothesize, depends largely on what is asked of the annotators and what slice of the data they label. We conducted multiple rounds of data labelling and collected annotations from crowdsourcing workers and domain experts. We aggregated the resulting labels in various ways to train a series of supervised models. Our preliminary evaluations show that using unanimously agreed labels from multiple annotators is helpful to achieve robust machine models.postprin

Learning from various labeling strategies for suicide-related messages on social media: An experimental study

Suicide is an important but often misunderstood problem, one that researchers are now seeking to better understand through social media. Due in large part to the fuzzy nature of what constitutes suicidal risks, most supervised approaches for learning to automatically detect suicide-related activity in social media require a great deal of human labor to train. However, humans themselves have diverse or conflicting views on what constitutes suicidal thoughts. So how to obtain reliable gold standard labels is fundamentally challenging and, we hypothesize, depends largely on what is asked of the annotators and what slice of the data they label. We conducted multiple rounds of data labelling and collected annotations from crowdsourcing workers and domain experts. We aggregated the resulting labels in various ways to train a series of supervised models. Our preliminary evaluations show that using unanimously agreed labels from multiple annotators is helpful to achieve robust machine models.postprin

A research framework of crowdfunding platform usage

In this paper, we define the crowdfunding platform (CFP) a virtual place where project creators document their projects for gaining awareness or social support for making the project proceed. By doing so, project teams can voice the propositions they have worked on or they may also speak out on one party’s behalf for seeking advices. This paper proposes a research framework that targets the issue of CFP in investigating usage behavior in the project teams’ perspectives. It aims at filling the research gap as there is no clear link has been made in understanding how project teams keep up with the usage of CFP in terms of making progresses of proposed projects. In doing so, we believe the power of enormous crowds as project teams can be probably gathered and managed. Moreover, the administrations of CFP can be correctly directed for opening up opportunities for new start-ups

Interactive Ideation: Online Team-Based Idea Generation versus Traditional Brainstorming

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2019. Major: Human Factors/Ergonomics. Advisors: Barry Kudrowitz, Stephen Engel. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 92 pages.Social media and social collaborative platforms are becoming ever more integrated into our lives at all levels. Past research has shown electronic brainstorming and idea generation can be viable options when compared to traditional methods. Building on existing research into the benefits and challenges of ideating through online environments, this study asks if an established collaborative planning platform can be more conducive to generating a high quantity of ideas and high-quality ideas than traditional methods. In this context, the number of ideas generated, the quality of ideas as rated by participants and experts, and group success building upon ideas are evaluated as metrics. The two conditions are compared on performance in an idea generation session. The analysis demonstrated that idea generation through the digital platform Slack, compared to traditional brainstorming, produced more ideas, approximately twice as many high-quality ideas as rated by experts, and nearly twice as much building upon ideas. The results of the study suggest existing online social platforms are viable options for conducting idea generation in small groups and provide an option for collaboration without meeting in person

Quality Control in Crowdsourcing: A Survey of Quality Attributes, Assessment Techniques and Assurance Actions

Crowdsourcing enables one to leverage on the intelligence and wisdom of potentially large groups of individuals toward solving problems. Common problems approached with crowdsourcing are labeling images, translating or transcribing text, providing opinions or ideas, and similar - all tasks that computers are not good at or where they may even fail altogether. The introduction of humans into computations and/or everyday work, however, also poses critical, novel challenges in terms of quality control, as the crowd is typically composed of people with unknown and very diverse abilities, skills, interests, personal objectives and technological resources. This survey studies quality in the context of crowdsourcing along several dimensions, so as to define and characterize it and to understand the current state of the art. Specifically, this survey derives a quality model for crowdsourcing tasks, identifies the methods and techniques that can be used to assess the attributes of the model, and the actions and strategies that help prevent and mitigate quality problems. An analysis of how these features are supported by the state of the art further identifies open issues and informs an outlook on hot future research directions.Comment: 40 pages main paper, 5 pages appendi

Essays on Creative Ideation and New Product Design

Creative ideation, i.e., the generation of novel ideas, represents the terminus-a-quo in the design and development of innovative products. In my dissertation essays, I examine two approaches employed by firms for creative ideation, (1) channeled ideation, a closed approach, which involves applying replicable patterns or properties observed in historical innovations and (2) idea crowdsourcing, an open approach where firms invite crowds to contribute ideas to solve a specific challenge. In my studies, I clarify how firms can incorporate market-related information in the channeled ideation process and examine how the selection of ideas in crowdsourcing challenges relates to local and global novelty. In Essay 1, “Attribute Auto-dynamics and New Product Ideation,” I introduce a replicable property – attribute auto-dynamics, observed in several novel products, where a product possesses the ability to modify its attributes automatically in response to changing customer, product-system, or environmental conditions. I propose a typology of attribute auto-dynamics, based on an analysis of U.S. utility patents. Based on this typology, I specify a procedural framework for new product ideation that integrates market-pull relevant knowledge and technology-push relevant knowledge. I also illustrate how managers and product designers can apply the framework to identify new product ideas for specific target markets using a channeled ideation approach. In Essay 2, “Selection in Crowdsourced Ideation: Role of Local and Global Novelty,” I examine how the selection of ideas in crowdsourced challenges depends on the form of novelty – local or global. Firms often turn to idea crowdsourcing challenges to obtain novel ideas. Yet prior research cautions that ideators and seeker firms may not select novel ideas. To reexamine the links between idea novelty and selection, I propose a bi-faceted notion of idea novelty that may be local or global. Examining data on OpenIDEO, I find that the selection of novel ideas differs according to the selector, the form of novelty, and the challenge task structure. I also specify a predictive model that seeker firms can leverage when ideator selection metrics such as likes are unavailable.Doctor of Philosoph

Pro-socially motivated interaction for knowledge integration in crowd-based open innovation

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study how the online temporary crowd shares knowledge in a way that fosters the integration of their diverse knowledge. Having the crowd integrate its knowledge to offer solution-ideas to ill-structured problems posed by organizations is one of the desired outcomes of crowd-based open innovation because, by integrating others’ knowledge, the ideas are more likely to consider the many divergent issues related to solving the ill-structured problem. Unfortunately, the diversity of knowledge content offered by heterogeneous specialists in the online temporary crowd makes integration difficult, and the lean social context of the crowd makes extensive dialogue to resolve integration issues impractical. The authors address this issue by exploring theoretically how the manner in which interaction is organically conducted during open innovation challenges enables the generation of integrative ideas. The authors hypothesize that, as online crowds organically share knowledge based upon successful pro-socially motivated interaction, they become more productive in generating integrative ideas. Design/methodology/approach: Using a multilevel mixed-effects model, this paper analyzed 2,244 posts embedded in 747 threads with 214 integrative ideas taken from 10 open innovation challenges. Findings: Integrative ideas were more likely to occur after pro-socially motivated interactions. Research limitations/implications: Ideas that integrate knowledge about the variety of issues that relate to solving an ill-structured problem are desired outcomes of crowd-based open innovation challenges. Given that members of the crowd in open innovation challenges rarely engage in dialogue, a new theory is needed to explain why integrative ideas emerge at all. The authors’ adaptation of pro-social motivation interaction theory helps to provide such a theoretical explanation. Practitioners of crowd-based open innovation should endeavor to implement systems that encourage the crowd members to maintain a high level of activeness in pro-socially motivated interaction to ensure that their knowledge is integrated as solutions are generated. Originality/value: The present study extends the crowd-based open innovation literature by identifying new forms of social interaction that foster more integrated ideas from the crowd, suggesting the mitigating role of pro-socially motivated interaction in the negative relationship between knowledge diversity and knowledge integration. This study fills in the research gap in knowledge management research describing a need for conceptual frameworks explaining how to manage the increasing complexity of knowledge in the context of crowd-based collaboration for innovation

Crowd of oz : A crowd-powered social robotics system for stress management

Coping with stress is crucial for a healthy lifestyle. In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to use socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems. However, building a fully autonomous social robot which can deliver psycho-therapeutic solutions is a very challenging endeavor due to limitations in artificial intelligence (AI). To overcome AI’s limitations, researchers have previously introduced crowdsourcing-based teleoperation methods, which summon the crowd’s input to control a robot’s functions. However, in the context of robotics, such methods have only been used to support the object manipulation, navigational, and training tasks. It is not yet known how to leverage real-time crowdsourcing (RTC) to process complex therapeutic conversational tasks for social robotics. To fill this gap, we developed Crowd of Oz (CoZ), an open-source system that allows Softbank’s Pepper robot to support such conversational tasks. To demonstrate the potential implications of this crowd-powered approach, we investigated how effectively, crowd workers recruited in real-time can teleoperate the robot’s speech, in situations when the robot needs to act as a life coach. We systematically varied the number of workers who simultaneously handle the speech of the robot (N = 1, 2, 4, 8) and investigated the concomitant effects for enabling RTC for social robotics. Additionally, we present Pavilion, a novel and open-source algorithm for managing the workers’ queue so that a required number of workers are engaged or waiting. Based on our findings, we discuss salient parameters that such crowd-powered systems must adhere to, so as to enhance their performance in response latency and dialogue quality. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Does Thinking in Opposites in Order to Think Differently Improve Creativity?

In this paper, we focus on the link between thinking in opposites and creativity. Thinking in opposites requires an intuitive, productive strategy, which may enhance creativity. Given the importance of creativity for the well-being of individuals and society, finding new ways to enhance it represents a valuable goal in both professional and personal contexts. We discuss the body of evidence that exists concerning the importance of the first representation of the structure of a problem to be solved, which determines the baseline representation and sets limits on the area within which a problem solver will explore. We then review a variety of interventions described in the literature on creativity and insight problem solving that were designed to overcome fixedness and encourage people to move away from stereotypical solutions. Special attention is paid to the research carried out in the context of problem solving, which provides evidence that prompting people to "think in opposites" is beneficial. We suggest that an extended investigation of the effects of this strategy in various types of tasks related to creativity is an interesting line of research to follow. We discuss the rationale supporting this claim and identify specific questions, both theoretical and methodological, for future research to address