Four-view analysis of the perceived organisational changes required to implement micro-blogging during product conceptualisation for capturing consumer conversations

Global manufacturing output continues to grow, creating the need for the development of new products and innovative enhancements to existing ranges. With the advancement of consumer social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.com, companies today are able to search for and utilise knowledge shared in online consumer conversations. Product designers may benefit from these discussions, which often focus on concerns, new ideas and/or product enhancements, thereby enriching the innovative process of New Product Development (NPD). The Web 2.0-based activity of micro-blogging has been researched widely, with scholars identifying both benefits and weaknesses for its use in general business activities. However, its application, particularly for capturing online consumer conversations for product conceptualisation and idea generation, is limited and rarely acknowledged. This paper aims to address this deficiency in literature, extending the previous research of Evans et al. [1], by examining how micro-blogging sites may be utilised during the product conceptualisation phase of NPD to capture consumer knowledge from micro-blogged conversations. Through the conduction of a face-to-face dual-moderated focus group, with fifteen employees of a small UK-based sports equipment manufacturer, we create a four-view model to identify the perceived organisational, process, personnel and technological changes required to embed micro-blogging into the product conceptualisation phase. Findings suggest that manufacturing companies would welcome the introduction of micro-blogging into NPD and view it as an opportunity to engage on a more personal level with current and potential customers and capture consumer feedback typically uncaptured by formal methods. Certain questions were raised, however, relating to interoperability with current systems, automated processes for content analysis and over reliance on manual engagement by staff members

Exploring Barriers and Opportunities in Adopting Crowdsourcing Based New Product Development in Manufacturing SMEs

Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (the ‘Crowd’). The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in new product development (NPD) of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business

A Framework for Adoption of Challenges and Prizes in US Federal Agencies: A Study of Early Adopters

In recent years we have witnessed a shift in the innovation landscape of organizations from closed to more open models embracing solutions from the outside. Widespread use of the internet and web 2.0 technologies have made it easier for organizations to connect with their clients, service providers, and the public at large for more collaborative problem solving and innovation. Introduction of the Open Government initiative accompanied by the America Competes Reauthorization Act signaled an unprecedented commitment by the US Federal Government to stimulating more innovation and creativity in problem solving. The policy and legislation empowered agencies to open up their problem solving space beyond their regular pool of contractors in finding solutions to the nation\u27s most complex problems. This is an exploratory study of the adoption of challenges as an organizational innovation in public sector organizations. The main objective is to understand and explain how, and under what conditions challenges are being used by federal agencies and departments as a tool to promote innovation. The organizational innovation literature provides the main theoretical foundation for this study, but does not directly address contextual aspects regarding the type of innovation and the type of organization. The guiding framework uses concepts drawn from three literature streams: organizational innovation, open innovation, and public sector innovation. Research was conducted using a qualitative case study of challenge.gov. Data was collected from multiple adopting agencies using two primary sources: interviews with challenge managers and administrators and, archival data from the challenge.gov web platform. Related documentation was used to supplement and corroborate the main data. Analysis of the platform archival data revealed four types of challenges falling along a continuum of increasing innovation. The sequence of events, activities and conditions leading to adoption and implementation were represented as a challenge adoption model. Variations among components of the model resulted in three distinct agency groupings represented as a typology of enactments characterized as inertia, application, and change. Thus challenge adoption among agencies with varying missions, operations and conditions leads to varying enactment types and different levels of change

Morphological Approach in Creative Requirements Elicitation from Crowdsourcing

Creativity is a subject that gained increasing interest in requirements engineering field. Creative-based requirements elicitation helps in generating requirements in original and innovative ways. Lately, crowdsourcing has been emerged in requirements elicitation after realizing the benefits of crowd. Crowdsourcing allows a wide diversity of stakeholders able to express their perceptions about product. However, to analyze the large amount of ideas from crowd would be a great challenge. This work focuses on how ideas gathered from the crowd and then analyzed using morphological approach in deriving requirements for the software product. Furthermore, the involvement of crowd in the approach helps in eliciting creative ideas for producing an innovative software product

Sustainability Standards and Stakeholder Engagement: Lessons From Carbon Markets

Stakeholders play an increasingly active role in private governance, including development of standards for measuring sustainability. Building on prior studies focused on standards and stakeholder engagement, we use an innovation management theoretical lens to compare stakeholder engagement and standards developed in two carbon markets: the Climate Action Reserve and the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism. We develop and test hypotheses regarding how different processes of stakeholder engagement in standard development affect the number, identity, and age of stakeholders involved, as well as the variation and quality of the resulting standards. In doing so, we contribute to the growing literature on stakeholder engagement in developing sustainability standards

Divergent Innovation: Directing the Wisdom of Crowd to Tackle Societal Challenges

Crowdsourcing is acknowledged as a promising avenue for addressing societal challenges by drawing on the wisdom of the crowd to offer diverse solutions to complex problems. Advancing a new conceptual framework of ‘divergent innovation’ which delineates between topic and quality divergence as focal metrics of performance when crowdsourcing for solutions to societal challenges, this study investigates the impacts of four ideation stimuli on divergent innovation. These four stimuli include task description concreteness, resource richness, topic entropy, and judging criteria comprehensiveness. Empirical analysis based on data sourced from an online crowd-ideation platform reveals that task description concreteness negatively affects topic divergence but positively influences quality divergence, whereas resource richness positively affects topic divergence but negatively influences quality divergence. Additionally, the relationship between topic entropy and topic divergence is U-shaped, with no significant impact on quality divergence. These findings contribute to extant literature on crowdsourcing and offer invaluable insights for practitioners

Media, Information and Communication Contests: An Analysis

Reviews the implementation and design of the Knight News Challenge and other information communication technology contests to promote innovation. Examines goals, marketing, application process, criteria, judging process, winners, and supplemental support

Leveraging the power of creative crowds for innovative brands: the eYeka crowdsourcing initiatives

The thesis tried to move beyond the Crowdsourcing phenomenon intended as a mere micro-task production outlining key features of the main typologies of contest which a firm could select in pursuing this Business Model. The dissertation thus advice companies on what kind of contests format is more suitable to be implemented in order to reach the desired objective, by tailoring not only challenges but also incentive mechanisms to engage the right crowd even in terms of motivational aspectsope

Idea Contests: How to Design Feedback for an Efficient Contest

Inviting the public or a targeted group of individuals to submit their ideas or solutions to a specific problem or challenge within a predefined period of time is called an “idea contest.” Idea contests are the straightforward mechanism to solicit and leverage the innovation and the intelligence of thousands of individuals. With the advent of the Internet, companies can easily organize idea contests with an easy access for anyone to participate from anywhere around the world. A contest organizer needs to design a contest so that more individuals are encouraged to participate, generate more innovative ideas/solutions, and to remain active throughout the contest. In my dissertation, I explore the effects of idea contest parameters –such as award size and structure, contest duration, the visibility of submissions, and the feedback- on the participation, motivation, and performance of individuals before and after joining a contest. Feedback, as the primary focus of my dissertation, is a less studied parameter in the context of idea contests. In my first essay, I investigate the relative importance of each contest design parameter, particularly feedback, with each other in motivating individuals to participate in a contest. In this regard, I both ran a conjoint study among real designers and collected online data from 99designs website. Feedback plays an important role in increasing the likelihood of participation and the participation rate for an idea contest. In the second essay, I explore the effect of two different types of feedback –absolute vs. relative- on the performance of participants during an idea contest. By running a real contest with participants from a major public university, I measured how participants in an idea contest react to different types of feedback. The likelihood of revising ideas as well as the quality of ideas submitted were the primary dependent variables in this field experiment.Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Department o

Towards Ontology-Based Design Science Research for Knowledge Accumulation and Evolution

The potential of design science research (DSR) to contribute to real-world problems solving and innovation has been considered as an opportunity for IS researchers to demonstrate the relevance and significance of DSR paradigm. While most DSR studies have been informed on single design and development projects, future research needs to consider knowledge sharing and accumulation across multiple projects. This paper argues for combining the forces of design science research and ontology studies to foster knowledge creation and evolution. We propose a new approach to DSR by adopting ontology engineering as a knowledge sharing mechanism in which researchers assemble knowledge parts throughout the study. We develop a framework for understanding, conducting and evaluating ontology-based design science research, then present the roadmap and guidelines for its conduct and evaluation. This paper concludes with a call for a more collaborative endeavor to design studies in IS research