Not so Shore Anymore: The New Imperatives When Sourcing in the Age of Open

Software outsourcing has been the subject of much research in the past 25 years, largely because of potential cost savings envisaged through lower labour costs, ‘follow-the-sun’ development, access to skilled developers, and proximity to new markets. In recent years, the success of the open source phe-nomenon has inspired a number of new forms of sourcing that combine the potential of global sourcing with the elusive and much sought-after possibility of increased innovation. Three of these new forms of sourcing are opensourcing, innersourcing and crowdsourcing. Based on a comparative analysis of a number of case studies of these forms of sourcing, we illustrate how they differ in both significant and subtle ways from outsourcing. We conclude that these emerging sourcing approaches call for conceptual development and refocusing. Specifically, to understand software sourcing in the age of open, the important concept is no longer ‘shoring,’ but rather five identified imperatives (governance sharedness, unknownness, intrinsicness, innovativeness and co-opetitiveness) and their implications for the development situation at hand

IT-Enabled Knowledge Creation for Open Innovation

Open innovation is increasingly important for researchers and practitioners alike. Open innovation is closely linked to knowledge creation in that, with open innovation, knowledge inflows and outflows are exploited for innovation. In the information systems field, open innovation has been closely linked to open source software development teams. However, the literature has not yet identified how open source software development teams use information technologies to create knowledge to bring about open innovation. This study fills in this gap by asking the following research questions: RQ1) How do innovative open source software development teams create knowledge?, and RQ2) What types of information technologies do innovative open source software development teams rely on for enabling knowledge creation? I answer these research questions with a revelatory case study. The findings contribute to the knowledge management theory by identifying how three of the four knowledge creation modes identified by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) manifest through different behaviors in the IT-enabled open innovation setting compared to behaviors observed in the organizational setting. The findings also contribute to information systems theory by identifying the role of information technologies in enabling knowledge creation for open innovation. This study further provides researchers and practitioners with ways of identifying knowledge creation by analyzing information technology artifacts, such as mailing lists, issue trackers, and software versioning tools

R&D strategies and innovation. a qualitative assessment of P&G

Treball Final de Grau en Administració d'Empreses. Codi: AE1049. Curs acadèmic: 2016/2017In a globalised world with ever-changing trends and customers’ needs, organisations must adapt to the new environment and requirements exposed by the market. This situation binds them to keep looking for new ways to meet those needs since the traditional products and methods to do so no longer give value to consumers, who are ready to pay an extra price for a good or service that provides a different experience from the rest of goods in the market. This encourages firms to push their frontiers further, trying to find real and valuable solutions by researching and developing new technology that can define the satisfaction of the new needs that customers have. However, there are products that, for its own nature, don’t have room for much improvement and change, meaning that the product remains stagnant in time, unchanged. Needs keep evolving but these products can’t match them that easily because they have reached maturity and can’t be substituted by another technology, at least, so far. This paper understands and acknowledges the existence of technologies that are traditionally stagnant and mature and tries to give qualitative evidence, based on a real case, on how companies can develop these type of technologies, which have no room for improvement or change, while serving as a descriptive guide about the strategies regarding innovation that can be followed in order to make the development of such technologies and launch them to the market. As a result, the first part of the paper deals with the definition and difference between technology and innovation, followed by the theories that explain the management of innovation strategies and the meaningful repercussions of their implementation. Meanwhile, the second part refers to a real business case, involving the multinational company P&G and the strategies that it uses to complete the innovative projects it embarks on successfully. In other words, this part covers the empirical evidence that sustains the previous theories and gives light on how mature products can still be improved through effort and persistency, by looking for examples on databases, legal court registries and business articles and reviews about its corporate arena and the firm itself

Not so shore anymore: the new imperatives when sourcing in the age of open

Software outsourcing has been the subject of much research in the past 25 years, largely because of potential cost savings envisaged through lower labour costs, ‘follow-the-sun’ development, access to skilled developers, and proximity to new markets. In recent years, the success of the open source phe-nomenon has inspired a number of new forms of sourcing that combine the potential of global sourcing with the elusive and much sought-after possibility of increased innovation. Three of these new forms of sourcing are opensourcing, innersourcing and crowdsourcing. Based on a comparative analysis of a number of case studies of these forms of sourcing, we illustrate how they differ in both significant and subtle ways from outsourcing. We conclude that these emerging sourcing approaches call for conceptual development and refocusing. Specifically, to understand software sourcing in the age of open, the important concept is no longer ‘shoring,’ but rather five identified imperatives (governance sharedness, unknownness, intrinsicness, innovativeness and co-opetitiveness) and their implications for the development situation at hand

EXPLORING INNER SOURCE AS A FORM OF INTRAORGANISATIONAL OPEN INNOVATION

Open Innovation, of which open source software (OSS) is a well-cited example, can be analysed at a number of levels, including the inter- and intra-organisational networking level. However, most research to date on open innovation has focussed on inter-firm level and inter-organisational networking, hence neglecting the implications that open innovation has ‘within’ the organisation. Inner source leverages key open source practices in order to decouple platform and products groups with respect to their release timing. Similar to open source development, inner source applies an open, concurrent model of collaboration and thus could be seen as a good exemplar of open innovation at the intra-organisational level. However there is a paucity of research exploring inner source as a form of open innovation within organisations. Additionally, there is limited research that has examined the influence of inner source development on the creation and management of internal networks. Using a case study approach, we seek to address this gap. The findings are analysed using a theoretical framework of three core open innovation processes as a lens to examine inner source as a form of open innovation inside a company