The Limits of Open Innovation: A Case Study of a Social Product Development Platform

Proponents of open innovation have long argued that essential resources for sustained innovation lie beyond an organization’s boundaries with its customers and value chain partners and that organizations must work collaboratively with internal and external stakeholders to build creative solutions. Unlike the traditional internal Research and Development model, open innovation practices are implemented differently (e.g., crowdsourcing, innovation marketplace, user innovation, and open-source community). Previous studies have articulated the general logic of these models, described the workings of some well-known examples, and examined the logic of engaging external actors in new product development. While open innovation can potentially facilitate and enhance the innovation process and outcomes, the downside and the limits of this openness remain understudied. Further research on the limitations of open innovation is more needed than ever since in the last few years many companies closed down their customer innovation communities, open innovation marketplaces were abandoned, and innovation intermediaries filed for bankruptcies. Open innovation can fade due to many reasons. Open innovation models such as crowdsourcing and innovation marketplace usually hold tight control over the innovation process and activities that require external actors. These platforms still set structurally defined requirements and standard procedures for the actors to ideate based upon. Meanwhile, they often predefine the innovation scope with narrowly defined tasks for the innovative actors to complete. With the sponsors’ tight control, external actors often cannot freely ideate and become motivated to deliver a creative solution. Even with incentives, the traditional open innovation models sometimes cannot reach the most effective innovation results. For example, the cost of implementing and running open innovation model sometimes does not justify its benefits. Research also showed that open innovation does not necessarily reduce the risk or failure rate of new products. Unpredictability in the innovation results and uncertainty in the environment, including sociotechnical factors, can also become a part of why open innovation fails. Hence, it is crucial to understand the open innovation process and its interplay with success or failure in new product or service development. In this study, we used the case of Social Product Development (SPD) as an open innovation model to investigate and document the limitations of open innovation in consumer product development. The SPD model encompasses many key and common features of open innovation models while being more dynamic and less restrictive. The SPD model also has a high failure rate. Examining the SPD process model thus helped us identify the limitations in the open innovation with some generalizability to other open innovation models. We first identified key activities in the SPD model, including social engagement, ideation, experiential communication, social validation, co-development, and co-commercialization, at three different levels: innovation activities, innovation projects, and innovation community. Then we examined when and how the identified activities at each level may fail to deliver the expected outcomes. We categorized the results (open innovation failure factors) into three phases associated with invention initiation, development, and commercialization. For each group, we identified contributing groups namely Innovation sponsor, innovation partners, and problem-solver. Lastly, we proposed a 3 by 3 activity-phase matrix that includes open innovation success/failure factors such as technology affordances, reward systems, mass-screening, community culture, collaboration support, social validation, social selling, osmotic communication, manufacturing agility, and intellectual property right. For each group, we also identified the responsible actors namely innovation sponsors, innovation partners, and problem-solver. Our findings provide a richer picture of SPD failure factors that holds relevance for the design of open innovation platforms. Our results also provide practical recommendations on open innovation platform governance including rules and policies concerning reward systems, partnerships, and manufacturing

RHEA: an open-source Reproducible Hybrid-architecture flow solver Engineered for Academia

The study of complex multiscale flows (Groen et al., 2014), like for example the motion of small-scale turbulent eddies over large aerodynamic structures (Jofre & Doostan, 2022), microconfined high-pressure supercritical fluids for enhanced energy transfer (Bernades & Jofre, 2022), or hydrodynamic focusing of microorganisms in wall-bounded flows (Palacios et al., 2022), greatly benefits from the combination of interconnected theoretical, computational and experimental approaches. This manifold methodology provides a robust framework tocorroborate the phenomena observed, validate the modeling assumptions utilized, and facilitatesthe exploration of wider parameter spaces and extraction of more sophisticated insights. These analyses are typically encompassed within the field of Predictive Science & Engineering (Njam, 2009), which has attracted attention in the Fluid Mechanics community and is expected to exponentially grow as computational studies transition from (mostly) physics simulations to active vectors for scientific discovery and technological innovation with the advent of Exascale computing (Alowayyed et al., 2017). In this regard, the computational flow solver presented aims at bridging the gap between studying complex multiscale flow problems and utilizing present and future state-of-the-art supercomputing systems in academic environments.The solver presented is named RHEA, which stands for open-source Reproducible Hybrid-architecture flow solver Engineered for Academia, and is available as an open-source Git repository at https://gitlab.com/ProjectRHEA/flowsolverrheaPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Finding co-solvers on Twitter, with a little help from Linked Data

In this paper we propose a method for suggesting potential collaborators for solving innovation challenges online, based on their competence, similarity of interests and social proximity with the user. We rely on Linked Data to derive a measure of semantic relatedness that we use to enrich both user profiles and innovation problems with additional relevant topics, thereby improving the performance of co-solver recommendation. We evaluate this approach against state of the art methods for query enrichment based on the distribution of topics in user profiles, and demonstrate its usefulness in recommending collaborators that are both complementary in competence and compatible with the user. Our experiments are grounded using data from the social networking service Twitter.com

Using virtual worlds as collaborative environments for innovation and design: lessons learned and observations from case studies in architectural projects

In this paper we discuss observations and lessons learned in conducting architectural design projects in virtual worlds. By integrating a community of users in virtual worlds into a collaborative architectural design process, organisations can tap the community's creativity and intelligence through immersive technology. The paper provides an overview of the latest advances of information and communication technologies in immersive virtual environments and discusses some of the observations and lessons learned which should be taken into account in developing collaboration models for such activities. Here we propose four modes of collaboration, based on the choices for degree of openness and governance structure, which are illustrated by four case studies

How innovation intermediaries are shaping the technology market? An analysis of their business model

In an era with abundant and widely distributed knowledge across the globe, technology markets became prominent. As technology transactions suffer from several market imperfections, a rapidly increasing number of various innovation intermediaries are facilitating these transactions. We analyse how a subset of these intermediaries create value in a two-sided market and how they can capture part of the value. A detailed analysis of the business model of 12 innovation intermediaries clarifies how these organizations improve the effectiveness of technology markets providing benefits for both sides of the market. We also look at managerial trade-offs between the use of intermediaries’ services and in-house innovation platforms.innovation intermediaries; open innovation; business model; two-sided markets

OpenJML: Software verification for Java 7 using JML, OpenJDK, and Eclipse

OpenJML is a tool for checking code and specifications of Java programs. We describe our experience building the tool on the foundation of JML, OpenJDK and Eclipse, as well as on many advances in specification-based software verification. The implementation demonstrates the value of integrating specification tools directly in the software development IDE and in automating as many tasks as possible. The tool, though still in progress, has now been used for several college-level courses on software specification and verification and for small-scale studies on existing Java programs.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578

Project OASIS: Optimizing Aquaponic Systems to Improve Sustainability

Started in Fall 2015, Project OASIS (Optimizing Aquaponic Systems to Improve Sustainability) is an interdisciplinary capstone project with the goal of designing a sustainable and affordable small-scale aquaponic system for use in developing nations to tackle the problems of malnutrition and food insecurity. Aquaponics is a symbiotic relationship between fish and vegetables growing together in a recirculating system. The project’s goals were to minimize energy consumption and construction costs while using universally available materials. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software OpenFOAM was used to create transient and steady-state models of fish tanks to visualize velocity profiles, streamlines, and particle movement. CFD and small scale experiments showed vertical manifolds were more efficient than horizontal inlets. The components’ layout was analyzed to minimize head losses and airlifts were used instead of traditional water pumps. Full-scale research and traditional systems were constructed for side-by-side comparison of biological and energy factors. Flow improvements and use of air-lift pumps dropped energy consumption 40% when compared to a traditional system of the same size. Using local and recycled materials where possible decreased the cost of the UNH pilot system by 27%. The team also partnered with Forjando Alas, a non-profit in Uvita, Costa Rica. During a January 2016 assessment trip, four members spent a week gathering data and building relationships with the community to develop a user-centered design. Project OASIS also successfully competed in two entrepreneurship competitions this year