A comparison of verbal and numerical judgments in the analytic hierarchy process

In the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), decision makers make pairwise comparisons of alternatives and criteria. The AHP allows to make these pairwise comparisons verbally or numerically. Although verbal statements are intuitively attractive for preference elicitation, there is overwhelming evidence that people have very different numerical interpretations of the same verbal expressions. This study explores the consequences of these differences for the quality of the AHP analysis. The results of the laboratory study with 180 participants confirm that the 1-to-9 conversion table, as is often used in the AHP, tends to overestimate differences in preference. Concerning the outcome of the AHP analysis the numerical mode shows slightly better results (not significant). Given the preference of many people for the verbal mode we conclude that if accuracy is not of the highest importance, the ease and comfort of verbal expressions may be worth the small loss in decision quality. (C) 1997 Academic Press

Open Innovation Contests for Improving Healthcare - An Explorative Case Study Focusing on Challenges in a Testbed Initiative

Working with innovation is important in several sectors and industries. One emerging arena for innovation is the arrangements of innovation contests. The aim of the paper is to describe and characterize an open innovation contest for improving healthcare, and to address the challenges involved. The research is a qualitative, explorative and interpretive case study of a Swedish region providing publicly funded healthcare. The conclusions show the need to generate and analyze data from actors with several perspectives in the contest. Challenges identified include defining and precisely expressing the problem, separating and delimiting the different problems and achieving a joint view. Other challenges were identifying and attracting knowledgeable participants, to consider incentives, and communicating the contest. In the collaboration stage, challenges involved the contest design, enabling knowledge sharing, managing various agendas, and being open-minded to new ideas; and finally, assessing whether the problem is suitable for open innovation contests at all

Understanding the main drivers of value creation in an open innovation program

Innovation has been identified as the single most relevant element in fuelling corporations' competitive advantage and ultimate value creation. Corporations no longer rely on a single, linear structure of innovation; the new paradigm of open innovation opens up new possibilities of organizing innovation within the ecosystem, thus giving rise to new drivers for value creation. These value drivers have an impact on the strategic position of the firm and have the ability to create superior financial performance. In this paper we explore the close relationship between open innovation and value creation and propose a framework to analyze this process as well as the most critical elements involved. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York