Female Speakers Benefit More Than Male Speakers From Prosodic Charisma Training—A Before-After Analysis of 12-Weeks and 4-h Courses

Perceived charisma is an important success factor in professional life. However, women are worse than men in conveying physical charisma signals while at the same time having to perform better than men in order to be perceived equally charismatic. Speech prosody probably contains the most influential charisma signals. We have developed a system called “Pascal” that analyzes and assesses on objective acoustic grounds how well-speakers employ their prosodic charisma parameters. Pascal is used for charismatic-speech training in 12-weeks and 4-h courses on entrepreneurship and leadership. Comparing the prosodic-charisma scores for a total of 72 participants at the beginning and end of these two course types showed that female speakers start with significantly lower prosodic-charisma scores than male speakers. However, at the end of the 4-h course, female speakers can catch up with their male counterparts in terms of prosodic charisma. At the end of the 12-weeks courses, male speakers keep their lead, but female speakers are able to significantly reduce the prosodic charisma gap to male speakers. Since leadership and entrepreneurship are still male-dominated domains, our results can be seen as an encouragement for women to attend prosodic charisma training. Furthermore, these courses require a gender-specific design as we found men to improve mainly in F0 parameters and women in duration and phonation parameters

Distributed decision-making in the shadow of hierarchy:How hierarchical similarity biases idea evaluation

Research Summary: Companies are increasingly opening up decision-making, involving employees on all levels in distributed—and purportedly “hierarchy-free”—decision processes. We examine how hierarchy reaches into such “democratized” systems, arguing that it is a source of homophily that biases idea evaluation decisions. Using a data set from internal crowdfunding at one of the world's largest industrial manufacturers, we show that idea evaluators overvalue hierarchically similar others' ideas. Competition in the form of lateral closeness dampens this bias, whereas uncertainty in the form of novelty amplifies this bias. We contribute to the literatures on decision biases in centralized versus distributed innovation and on structural similarity as a driver of employee behaviors. Managerial Summary: Many companies are starting to involve employees on all levels in strategic decisions, so as to curb hierarchical rigidities and integrate multiple perspectives. However, such distributed decision-making opens the door to new biases and, ultimately, suboptimal strategic decisions. In the context of internal crowdfunding at a large industrial manufacturer, we show that employees evaluate hierarchically similar others' ideas overly favorably. Thus, hierarchy is not just a source of rivalry, but also of identification, leading to favoritism among hierarchical peers. Further, employees are particularly likely to assess ideas based on hierarchical similarity rather than content if the ideas are novel and therefore hard to evaluate. We provide suggestions for the design of distributed decision-making systems.</p

Reviewing excellence

Creativity and Innovation Management has grown substantially over the last couple of years, both quantitatively and qualitatively. From 2016 to 2021, the number of submissions has grown from 287 to 395. Most of the growth was realized in Asia: The number of submissions from that continent increased from 72 in 2016 to 193 in 2021. The rest of the world remained (close to) stable: 215 in 2016 and 203 in 2021. Equally important, the Thomson ISI Impact Factor increased from 1.423 in 2015 to 3.051 in 2021 and further to 3.644 in 2022. This is not where our ambitions end, though. We want to be the ever-better outlet for authors researching, and practitioners working in, the fields we cover. Editing a journal with the ambition to continuously increase its quality while dealing with a substantial growth requires teamwork—teamwork among the editors and the editorial office, teamwork between the editors and their reviewers and, as surprising as this may sound, teamwork between the authors and their reviewers in a top-quality reviewing process. The purpose of this piece is to present and discuss some reviewing standards. In particular, we aim to share with our reviewers what we think is an excellent reviewing process. Furthermore, we formulate our ideas about what it is that makes a review an excellent one. The title of this piece is deliberately ambiguous. It denotes that Creativity and Innovation Management strives for reviewing excellence—as in an excellent reviewing process. It also denotes that we reach for the stars and hope to one day receive and, hence, review only excellent submissions.</p

Familiarity and idea evaluation

Dataset for Does familiarity with an idea bias its evaluation?</p

Data and analyses

Familiarity and idea evaluation. Data and analyses.</p

How “internal” lead users contribute to corporate product innovation: the case of embedded users

Harnessing tacit knowledge rooted in use experience and exploiting it for innovation is a major challenge for firms. This paper explores ‘embedded users’ as a mechanism to extract and utilize such knowledge for innovation. Embedded users are firm employees, who are also users of the firm's products. They are embedded into the firm and into the use context outside the firm, and also integrate need and solution‐related knowledge. Owing to these characteristics, embedded users are very capable of innovating. We shed light on this hitherto under‐researched phenomenon and explore how embedded users contribute to corporate innovation. More specifically, we explore the resources and capabilities that they deploy during the innovation process. We use interview data from 23 firms (35 interviews) in the sporting, leisure, and individual healthcare industries. Our findings show that embedded users draw on knowledge resources (use knowledge, solution knowledge, and organizational knowledge) and social resources (structural, relational, and cognitive capital) relevant for innovation. They deploy specific capabilities during all phases of the innovation process, that is, during ideation (idea generation, external information absorption, and competitive intelligence), development (specification setting and testing), and marketing (company representation and opinion leadership). We contribute to the literature by showing that user activities are not only relevant outside, but also within the organization. We also show that employees can access use‐related resources for innovation and that they act as boundary spanners for need knowledge

Exploring the coevolution of design and technology

The importance of design for the success of product innovations has caught increasing attention of scholars lately (Rindova and Petkova, 2007, Verganti, 2008). Previous research is related to user-centered design (Brown, 2008, Veryzer and Borja de Mozota, 2005a), design contribution to NPD (Gemser and Leenders, 2001, Talke et al., 2009), or design-driven innovation (Dell'Era and erganti, 2009, Verganti, 2009). Apart from few seminal contributions (Clark, 1985, Dell'Era and Verganti, 2007a, Walsh, 1996) research on product innovations has yet insufficiently investigated the relationship of functional (i.e. technology) and design dimensions (i.e. aesthetics, product language). Drawing on the literature of dominant design (Abernathy and Utterback, 1978, Murmann and Frenken, 2006, Suárez and Utterback, 1995), technological evolution (Dosi, 1982, Iansiti and Khanna, 1995, Saviotti, 1996) and innovation in design (Borja de Mozota, 2003, Verganti, 2008) we suggest that product design innovations are related to technical innovation patterns and characteristics of technology trajectories. Hence, we explore the relationship of design and technological innovations throughout the evolution of product categories. We argue that periods of incremental technical change trigger the cumulative development of design innovations, where both technology and design continue to develop along previously established trajectories. Contrarily, after periods of disruptive technical change that transform previously established product architectures into new industry standards, design innovation becomes increasingly important. Emerging dominant technological designs open opportunities for innovation in design and hence trigger periods where design features become essential for product diversification. Our explorative study builds on two pairs of meso-level case studies. Both, the technical developments of loudspeakers (Borwick, 2001) and bicycles (Dowell, 2006, Dowell and Swaminathan, 2006) are characterized by incremental improvements where the products’ architecture remained largely unchanged and thus product designs evolved along established paths. For instance, bicycles became stepwise equipped with increasingly complex suspension forks, gear systems and more efficient brakes but always maintained the ‘original’ product architecture. Similarly, the quality of loudspeakers has increased continuously while they became cheaper to manufacture due to stepwise enhanced membrane materials and constantly improved bandpass filters. On the contrary, technical developments of watches (Glasmeier, 1991) and cameras (Carranza, 2010, Chandy and Tellis, 2000) are characterized by major, disruptive technological changes altering the products’ architecture that opened new design spaces for a variety of new product types. For instance, quartz watches allowed new designs due the replacement of mechanical clockworks. Also, the novel technical architecture of digital cameras enabled a range of new product designs (e.g. ultra compact or prosumer cameras). For our analysis we employ US patent data from 1970 onwards, using utility patents as proxy for technological and design patents as proxy for design innovations. To validate our findings we deepen our analysis with expert interviews from each industry and archival data. We contribute to previous research by deriving propositions on relationship of technology and design innovations. We propose that design innovation is stationary during eras of ferment, after technological discontinuities. Then, our findings suggest that the importance of design innovations increases strongly after the emergence of a dominant design, during the early stages of incremental change. In the later era of incremental change, we propose that incremental (cumulative) technology developments positively coevolve with continuous design developments

Hierarchical Distance and Idea Evaluation in Enterprise Crowdfunding

In order to innovate, organizations need to select the best ideas for implementation. Research shows that idea selection suffers from biases, but fails to consider hierarchy as a potential source of bias. We examine how the hierarchical distance between