Innovation Contests – Where are we?

Innovation contests in their basic structure have a long-standing tradition and can be attributed to continuously gain in importance as a corporate practice. A deep understanding of this online instrument, however, is still lacking. Contrary to other methods used to realize open innovation, research in the field of online innovation contests displays a growing, but only rudimentarily intertwined body of publications. This paper provides the essential systematization of the field, integrating both, academic knowledge and business deployment. Juxtaposing 33 relevant journal and conference publications with empirical basis and an analysis of 57 real-world innovation contests, we highlight interesting disruptions and distill six pathways for future research. These cover the optimal degree of elaboration, the interplay of competition and community, the importance of community applications, the trajectory towards open evaluation, and the identification of additional design elements

Design and Management of Web-Based Innovation Communities: A Lifecycle Approach

Nowadays, web-based communities are a popular means to integrate external innovators into the innovation process of organizations. Combining extant research in innovation management and IS management, we integrate open innovation and application lifecycle management (ALM) to present an integrated understanding of the design and management of innovation communities. Therefore, the paper draws on an in-depth explorative case study. We describe the process of community design and management along the phases of ALM. From a socio-technical systems perspective, the manager of an innovation community has to specialize in designing and managing the social subsystem rather than the technical subsystem of an innovation community. Accordingly, we reveal that the community manager’s core asset is a specialized backend that supports these management tasks

Understanding online collaboration technology adoption by researchers – a model and empirical study

Collaboration in research continuously gains importance. Recent developments in online collaboration technology, namely social research network sites (SRNS), specifically aim to support research collaboration. SRNS allow researchers to present themselves, to network, to communicate, and to collaborate. Acceptance of this technology by researchers has received little academic attention, a void this research-in-progress addresses. Building on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and its recent extension for collaboration technology we present a study design and a theory-based research model to investigate acceptance of online collaboration technology by researchers. As technology adoption research is still dominated by quantitative studies, our study design combines qualitative and quantitative elements and thus makes a methodological contribution. Analyzing qualitative results of 11 focus group sessions, we extend the theory-based model to integrate User Resistance. Additionally, three constructs are identified as antecedents of Performance Expectancy (communication benefits and noise) and Effort Expectancy (privacy concerns)

THE NEXT STEP – OPEN PROTOTYPING

Software applications in the car are gaining in importance as a driver for innovation and value creation for the car manufacturers and their suppliers. These novel software functions, e.g., mobile services or car-to-car enabled applications, are increasingly designed and developed using early prototypes. Building on open innovation literature, this paper goes beyond extant knowledge on prototyping and proposes a novel paradigm of ‘open prototyping’. It assumes that organizations can and should use external input as well as internal input in form of prototypes, as the firms look to advance their technology. Set in the empirical field of the automotive industry, we follow a design-oriented research approach to design, develop and evaluate an open prototyping approach consisting of a toolkit and process. The open prototyping toolkit, HIMEPP, has a component-oriented architecture. Combined with the open prototyping process, it supports the development of diagonal high-fidelity prototypes together with persons from outside the R&D department. The study allows for generalizations to other industries and points to significant managerial as well as academic implications, which can be expected from opening the next step of the innovation process

Innovation Mobs - Unlocking the Innovation Potential of Virtual Communities

This paper investigates design elements for innovation contests in order to unlock the innovation potential of temporary virtual communities. Open innovation in general and particularly innovation contests have recently received considerable attention in research. Still, there has been mostly generic theorizing on the design of innovation contests to foster innovative output. Findings from an in-depth case studies in the shoe industry reveal a design with two players, the organizer and the potential participants, a temporarily very active virtual community which we denote ‘innovation mob’. With our paper, we contribute to the fields of virtual communities and open innovation by proposing a systematic approach, structured along five stages, from preparation to follow-up

Knowing is Silver, Listening is Gold: On the importance and impact of feedback in IT-based innovation contests

IT-based innovation contests are making use of distributed knowledge of users and other external stakeholders to collect ideas or to let them develop innovations for new products and services. In addition, IT-based innovation contests increasingly offer functionalities to evaluate and comment the submissions of other participants. Whether this feedback proves to be useful to enhance the quality of submissions is examined in a field experiment. We use the theoretical perspective of absorptive capacity for a cluster analysis to identify relevance of feedback in form of comments, in comparison to relevance of participants‟ individual knowledge. The most important result indicates that listening to comments by other users can even overcome a lack of individual knowledge. The study strengthens first assumptions that the design element „community functionality‟ needs to be carefully designed and implemented when setting up an IT-based innovation contest

Adoption, Anpassung oder Abkehr? - Eine Studie zur Nutzung von kollaborativen Web 2.0-Anwendungen durch Studierende

1 EINLEITUNG Nachdem in den vergangenen Jahren die Bedeutung von Web 2.0-Anwendungen neben dem privaten vor allem auch für den unternehmerischen Bereich untersucht wurde [18], werden seit einiger Zeit auch Einsatzmöglichkeiten in Forschung und Lehre berücksichtigt. Wagner und Schroeder zufolge ermöglicht die Nutzung von Web 2.0-Anwendungen die gemeinsame Schaffung von Inhalten im Internet, die häufigen und unvorhergesehenen Änderungen unterliegen [24]. Viele dieser Anwendungen sind hedonistisch [10] und im privaten Internetnutzungsverhalten von Studenten weit verbreitet [27]. Bereits 2009 hatten Kane und Fichman gefordert, die Möglichkeiten, die die neuen webbasierten Technologien als IT-basierte Kooperationswerkzeuge für den Umgang von Studierenden, Lehrenden und Forschern unter- und miteinander bieten, stärker zu untersuchen [14]. Erste Studien haben sich seitdem mit dem studentischen Arbeitsalltag, in dem Web 2.0 eingesetzt wird, um Kursinhalte unter Kommilitonen zu besprechen und zu verarbeiten [17] oder um gemeinschaftliches Lernen besser zu gestalten [15,16] beschäftigt. Weitere Untersuchungen widmen sich sozialpsychologischen Aspekten, wie z.B. der Frage, wie sich Studierende durch Web 2.0 schneller an das Universitätsleben gewöhnen können [4] oder welche Rolle soziale Netzwerkseiten, wie z.B. Facebook, bei der Formung der studentischen Identität spielen [22]. Die Frage, wie Unterrichtende Web 2.0-Anwendungen nutzen können, um ihre Lehrinhalte zu unterstützen, wurde ebenfalls adressiert [7], wobei insbesondere die Anpassung bestehender Anwendungen auf Unterrichtsbedürfnisse im Mittelpunkt stand [9]. [...

SUPPORTING RESEARCH COLLABORATION – ON THE NEEDS OF VIRTUAL RESEARCH TEAMS

Virtual teams are increasingly common in research as in corporate reality. While collaborative work in enterprises has received considerable attention, detailed understanding of collaborative work in virtual research teams is missing. To close this gap, we develop a model of the collaborative research process from idea generation to communication. We illustrate that the research phases require different support functions on the individual as well as on the team level. We explain that software tools, in particular social software, can provide support for collaborative work in virtual research teams