Unbundling dynamic capabilities for inter-organizational collaboration

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore two distinct subsets of dynamic capabilities that need to be deployed when pursuing innovation through inter-organizational activities, respectively, in the contexts of broad networks and specific alliances. The authors draw distinctions and explore potential interdependencies between these two dynamic capability reservoirs, by integrating concepts from the theoretical perspectives they are derived from, but which have until now largely ignored each other – the social network perspective and the dynamic capabilities view. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigate nanotechnology-driven R&D activities in the 1995–2005 period for 76 publicly traded firms in the electronics and electrical equipment industry and in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industry, that applied for 580 nanotechnology-related patents and engaged in 2,459 alliances during the observation period. The authors used zero-truncated Poisson regression as the estimation method. Findings The findings support conceptualizing dynamic capabilities as four distinct subsets, deployed for sensing or seizing purposes, and across the two different inter-organizational contexts. The findings also suggest potential synergies between these subsets of dynamic capabilities, with two subsets being more macro-oriented (i.e. sensing and seizing opportunities within networks) and the two other ones more micro-oriented (i.e. sensing and seizing opportunities within specific alliances). Practical implications The authors show that firms differ in their subsets of dynamic capabilities for pursuing different types of inter-organizational, boundary-spanning relationships (such as alliances vs broader network relationships), which ultimately affects their innovation performance. Originality/value The authors contribute to the growing body of work on dynamic capabilities and firm-specific advantages by unbundling the dynamic capability subsets, and investigating their complex interdependencies for managing different types of inter-organizational linkages. The main new insight is that the “linear model” of generating more innovations through higher inter-firm collaboration in an emerging field paints an erroneous picture of how high innovation performance is actually achieved

Idea Management: Enhancing External Innovation Capabilities within Front-End Activities

This study examines and verifies the factors influencing idea management in enhancing external innovation capabilities within front-end activities in large organisations. Previous studies have identified idea management as being in serious need of better management. This research aims to address this need by adding new knowledge and understanding to how organisations generate, search and select ideas internally and externally. Innovation is rapidly becoming a strategic priority, but there is a large gap between the perceived importance of innovation and the effectiveness of approaches used to support innovation. Idea management works under the premise that the innovation process is too important to be left to chance. Ideas are the starting point to every innovation. This research examines the concept of idea management, which acknowledges the importance of external ideas within the innovation process. External sources offer a huge amount of knowledge and ideas, much of which is unexpected and can therefore promote disruptive innovation. Idea management is characterised by a high degree of complexity and must be organised efficiently in order to work in the long-term. It is well established that there is a general lack of clarity, definition and understanding within the front-end of innovation in terms of language, processes and activities. This is why it is also referred to as the fuzzy front-end, occurring prior to when an idea receives formal funding. Several key activities include opportunity identification, problem definition, environmental scanning, and idea generation and evaluation. These activities involve leveraging internal and external innovation capabilities and is one of the reasons why this research focuses on better understanding and visualising this interaction by improving idea management practices. This iCase award was funded by the EPSRC and the multinational consumer goods company, Procter & Gamble (P&G). The research outcomes are of interest to large organisations looking to enhance how they manage their internal and external ideas. On a smaller scale, effective practices for internal idea generation are identified which could be of use to SMEs. The thesis will add to the field of front-end innovation literature regarding idea management effective practices, supported by quantitative data on a global scale. A blended methods approach was used where insights were verified through iteration between a systematic literature review, front-end model comparison, global industrial interviews, and a main survey conducted within P&G. This organisation is well known for their success with external search practices for innovation. The industrial interviews were conducted with P&G’s ‘Connect + Develop’ practitioners and were vital to gain an understanding of language and challenges related to the research questions. This guided the development of an industrial survey which assessed the effectiveness of an idea sourcing tool adopted by P&G. The findings from the survey provide further insight into how innovation landscaping tools are used in practice and ways in which to increase levels of tool adoption. This research finds that organisations do want to find and leverage high quality ideas but are unsure of how to best search for and select them. The proposed ‘Idea Infinity Framework’ helps to visualise, orientate and kick-start search and select processes in organisations. It argues that visualising the sources, interactions and issues to be aware of for idea quality will improve the effectiveness of front-end activities, as well as make better use of practitioner time, effort and funds. This study argues that idea management should take a proactive approach rather than a passive approach to the management of ideas (i.e. search and select) and become more integrated

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

Crowdsourcing as a way to access external knowledge for innovation

This paper focuses on “crowdsourcing” as a significant trend in the new paradigm of open innovation (Chesbrough 2006; Chesbrough & Appleyard 2007). Crowdsourcing conveys the idea of opening the R&D processes to “the crowd” through a web 2.0 infrastructure. Based on two cases studies of crowdsourcing webstartups (Wilogo and CrowdSpirit), the paper aims to build a framework to characterize and interpret the tension between value creation by a community and value capture by a private economic actor. Contributing to the discussions on “hybrid organizational forms” in organizational studies (Bruce & Jordan 2007), the analysis examines how theses new models combine various forms of relationships and exchanges (market or non market). It describes how crowdsourcing conveys new patterns of control, incentives and co-ordination mechanisms.communauté ; crowdsourcing ; innovation ; formes organisationnelles hybrides ; plateforme ; web 2.0

The analysis and presentation of patents to support engineering design

This paper explores the role of patents in engineering design, and how the extraction and presentation of patent data could be improved for designers. We propose the use of crowdsourcing as a means to post tasks online for a crowd of people to participate and complete. The is-sues of assessment, searching, clustering and knowledge transfer are evaluated with respect to the literature. Opportunities for potential crowd intervention are then discussed, before the presentation of two initial studies. These related to the categorization and interpretation of patents respectively using an online platform. The initial results establish basic crowd capabilities in understanding patent text and interpreting patent drawings. This has shown that reasonable results can be achieved if tasks of appropriate duration and complexity are set, and if test questions are incorporated to ensure a basic level of understanding exists in the workers