The open academic: Why and how business academics should use social media to be more ‘open’ and impactful

The mission of Business Horizons is to publish research that practitioners can understand to help them change how they think and act. However, this mission remains an elusive ideal for many business school academics because they struggle to design and produce research capable of overcoming the “research-practice gap.” To help scholars address this gap, we explain why and how they should use social media to be more ‘open’ to connecting with, learning from, and working with academics and other stakeholders outside their field. We describe how social media can be used as a boundary-spanning technology to help bridge the research-practice gap. To do this, we present a process model of five research activities: networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing. Using research published in Business Horizons as an illustrative example, we describe how social media was used to make each activity more open. We present a framework of four social media enabled open academic approaches (connector, observer, promoter, and influencer) and outline some dos and don’ts for engaging in each approach. We also discuss the potential ‘dark side’ of openness through social media and offer some coping strategies. As per the mission and scope of Business Horizons, this paper aims to help business academics rethink and change their practices so that our profession is more widely regarded for how our research positively impacts business practice and society in general

Ecosystem effectuation: Creating new value through open innovation during a pandemic

The severity of the COVID-19 pandemic confronts us with a global grand challenge representing an unprecedented crisis for health, economies, and societies. While digital champions are thriving, a large number of businesses and industries have been facing radical uncertainty, pushing some to the edge of collapse. This emergency calls for new ways to look at organizational ambidexterity and business model innovation. In this paper, we present and discuss a unique case study of a low-cost airline, AirAsia. With their fleet of aircraft grounded, and unable to pursue any incremental innovation opportunities, AirAsia decided to follow a radical ambidexterity path – focusing on exploration by building an innovation ecosystem. This case not only offers insights on a novel way to create value through open innovation but also extends the body of knowledge on entrepreneurial effectuation by introducing the concept of an ecosystem effectuation. AirAsia’s case shows that, in financially distressed times, business model reconfiguration may not be enough, and instead of selecting means to attain goals, the goals may be created upon available means

Open innovation in the public sector:A literature review on actors and boundaries

Open innovation (OI) is increasingly being adopted by city administrations and municipalities. However, the extent to which the public sector applies OI is yet unclear. Furthermore, studies in OI in public organizations has primarily focused on citizen inclusion and the barriers and drivers of attracting and engaging citizens and seldom considered other external actors, such as academia and other public organizations. Consequently, this study reviews the literature on OI in public organizations and applies the concept of organizational boundary to interpret the relationships among OI actors in the public sector. The review identifies that the maturity of OI in public organizations are low between all actors and these organizations differ to a great extent in terms of which aspects of organizational boundary are open. However, grand challenges and social innovation are exceptions demonstrating a high level of maturity. Furthermore, the use of intermediaries has the potential of opening all aspect of boundaries and hence achieving a high level of success. Finally, the framework presented in this review is used to suggest future research

Focusing the ecosystem lens on innovation studies

For nearly a century, the key role of innovation in economic growth has been acknowledged and studied. Today, innovations are increasingly understood as being embedded in ecosystems of autonomous actors, whether firms, other organizations, or individuals. These actors contribute in complementary ways to create a value proposition that is greater than the sum of the parts, with the integration of their products and processes made possible by modular interfaces between actors. Here we review the emergence of the ecosystem lens within innovation studies in the context of the Special Issue on Innovation Ecosystems and Ecosystem Innovation. After summarizing the history of the special issue, we review the nine articles in the special issue and show how they relate to defining the actors, joint value creation by the actors, coordinating the actors, value capture by the actors, and then the large issue of analyzing ecosystems as the unit of analysis. From this, we offer suggestions for future ecosystem research, including opportunities to combine the ecosystem lens with other lenses used in innovation studies, and new methods for studying ecosystem phenomena

Digital innovation: transforming research and practice

There is no doubt that digital technologies are spawning ongoing innovation across most if not all sectors of the economy and society. In this essay, we take stock of the characteristics of digital technologies that give rise to this new reality and introduce the papers in this special issue. In addition, we also highlight the unprecedent opportunities that digital innovation provides to study innovation processes more generally. Overall, we conclude that the speed, observability, and relative ease in investigating relationships between multiple analytical levels, mean that digital innovation is both a ‘model of’ that also provides a ‘model for’ the study of innovation processes more broadly in non-digital and hybrid contexts

The S-shaped relationship between open innovation and financial performance: A longitudinal perspective using a novel text-based measure

Research on the financial performance outcomes of open innovation has been equivocal and often relies on cross-sectional data and problematic assumptions about the role of the external context. A longitudinal perspective is crucial for gaining a better understanding of the potential of decreasing innovation utility as well as the conditions under which the costs of open innovation may counteract its benefits. Additionally, much of the research largely ignores the potential role and benefits of closed innovation. In this study, we address these issues by developing a theory related to how the benefits and costs of open innovation lead to an S-shaped relationship between the degree of openness – ranging from closed to low, medium, and high levels of open innovation – and a firm's financial performance. Furthermore, we investigate two possible contingencies in which this relationship is more pronounced: in industries with high appropriability, optimizing firms' ability to extract value from innovation and in dynamic industries, where coordinating high open innovation activities amid rapid changes is exceedingly costly. To test our hypotheses, we create a longitudinal measure for firms' degree of open innovation by using machine-learning content analyses to build an open innovation dictionary and then applying this dictionary to analyze the 10-K annual reports of >9000 publicly listed firms in the U.S. between 1994 and 2017. The results support our theorizing that the relationship between the degree of open innovation and firm financial performance is S-shaped and that industries' appropriability regimes and environmental dynamism are critical boundary conditions for this relationship

The S-shaped relationship between open innovation and financial performance:A longitudinal perspective using a novel text-based measure

Research on the financial performance outcomes of open innovation has been equivocal and often relies on cross-sectional data and problematic assumptions about the role of the external context. A longitudinal perspective is crucial for gaining a better understanding of the potential of decreasing innovation utility as well as the conditions under which the costs of open innovation may counteract its benefits. Additionally, much of the research largely ignores the potential role and benefits of closed innovation. In this study, we address these issues by developing a theory related to how the benefits and costs of open innovation lead to an S-shaped relationship between the degree of openness – ranging from closed to low, medium, and high levels of open innovation – and a firm's financial performance. Furthermore, we investigate two possible contingencies in which this relationship is more pronounced: in industries with high appropriability, optimizing firms' ability to extract value from innovation and in dynamic industries, where coordinating high open innovation activities amid rapid changes is exceedingly costly. To test our hypotheses, we create a longitudinal measure for firms' degree of open innovation by using machine-learning content analyses to build an open innovation dictionary and then applying this dictionary to analyze the 10-K annual reports of &gt;9000 publicly listed firms in the U.S. between 1994 and 2017. The results support our theorizing that the relationship between the degree of open innovation and firm financial performance is S-shaped and that industries' appropriability regimes and environmental dynamism are critical boundary conditions for this relationship.<br/

De vierde generatie universiteit: het nieuwe tijdperk van open innovatie en ecosysteemdenken

Staan universiteiten aan de rand van een nieuw tijdperk? Terwijl het academische landschap zich ontvouwt van gesloten kennishuizen naar open innovatiehubs, duikt dit artikel diep in de opkomst van de vierde generatie universiteit. Ontdek hoe deze nieuwe benadering niet alleen de manier waarop kennis wordt gecreëerd en gedeeld verandert, maar ook hoe het de relaties tussen universiteiten, industrie, overheid en maatschappij opnieuw definieer