| 1. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Knowing too much? : On bias due to domain-specific knowledge in internal crowdsourcing for explorative ideas
- 2021
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Ingår i: R&D Management. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0033-6807 .- 1467-9310.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Internal crowdsourcing utilizes a firm’s employees, of which many have a strong understanding of the domains in which the firm operates, for contributing with, developing and evaluating ideas. On the one hand, these employees can use their domain-specific knowledge to identify the value of what may seem a far-fetched solution to the average employee. On the other hand, previous research has shown that employees typically evaluate ideas in their domains less favorably if they do not align with ongoing exploitation activities. Hence, this study focuses on whether a higher degree of relevant domain-specific knowledge makes employees participating in internal crowdsourcing prefer exploitative solutions when evaluating ideas. An empirical study of an online platform for firm-internal innovation in a multinational engineering company showed that employees who only infrequently participated in internal crowdsourcing mostly contributed to and evaluated ideas within their own domain. Employees who frequently participated also contributed to and evaluated ideas outside their own domains. By statistically analyzing group differences during idea evaluation, we show that employees participating infrequently favor exploitable solutions, whereas employees participating frequently are more uncertain. The former difference is only seen concerning ideas that require domain-specific knowledge to understand, but the latter is observed for all types of ideas. This study makes three substantial contributions. First, employees with domain-specific knowledge, through their preference for exploitative solutions, bias the outcome of internal crowdsourcing when idea evaluation requires domain-specific knowledge. Second, this bias is aggravated by the overall higher level of uncertainty displayed by employees participating frequently in internal crowdsourcing and thereby tend to reach out to other domains. Third, in order to mitigate this, bias management can build engagement in internal crowdsourcing through idea challenges that do not require domain-specific knowledge and consider avoiding employees with a strongly associated domain knowledge for idea evaluation.
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| 2. |
- Asplund, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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The genesis of public-private innovation ecosystems : Bias and challenges
- 2021
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Ingår i: Technological forecasting & social change. - : Elsevier. - 0040-1625 .- 1873-5509. ; 162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The emergence of technology increasingly depends on innovation ecosystems and frequently involves actors from both industry and academia. However, value creation may experience challenges due to bias formed during public-private innovation ecosystem genesis.This empirical study of bias in a new pan-European public-private initiative provides results regarding innovation ecosystems and the individuals typically active during their genesis: value creation is biased towards the selection of incumbent firms and complement challenges, and participation is biased towards engineers with knowledge of exploitation from multiple domains and researchers with knowledge of exploitation from single domains.This suggests that the implications of the loose coupling emphasised by the innovation ecosystems discourse and the knowledge of the different contexts in which firms capture value are more complex than previously acknowledged. The practical implications are that the ability of public innovation ecosystem leadership to act early on novel technology might be offset by the inability of involved firms to commit to bringing the technology to market and that individuals typically active during public-private innovation ecosystems genesis are not ideal for handling this challenge. In fact, increasingly connected public leadership could smother the innovation ecosystem unless well-connected and multidisciplinary researchers are brought in as brokers.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Beretta, M., et al.
(författare)
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Moderating Ideation in Web-Enabled Ideation Systems
- 2018
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Ingår i: The Journal of product innovation management. - : Blackwell Publishing. - 0737-6782 .- 1540-5885. ; 35:3, s. 389-409
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While organizations increasingly implement web-enabled ideation systems to access the collective intelligence of their distributed employees, recent studies show that most attempts to use these systems underperform or fail. This article draws on a qualitative case study of the Ericsson system “Idea Boxes” to explore a novel approach to manage ideation based on the use of the moderator role. The aim of this study is to understand to what extent and how the introduction of moderators can contribute to a better management of web-enabled ideation systems and to overcome the shortcomings commonly associated with their use. The contribution of this study to innovation literature is threefold. First, it develops a conceptual framework that gives insights into the practices implemented by moderators to manage ideation, namely: (1) formulating an ideation strategy, (2) combining means for community building, and (3) formalizing the ideation process. It focuses on unfolding their key complementarities. Second, this study relates these practices to the shortcomings of web-enabled ideation systems with respect to the sourcing, filtering, and handling of employees' ideas. It discusses how the identified practices can help organizations address these shortcomings by stimulating sustained employee participation, increasing the quality and fit of the ideas generated, and ensuring their efficient selection and integration. Third, this article compares moderators to other innovation roles discussed in the new product development literature with the aim of broadening the future research agenda toward an investigation of emerging organizational roles having limited formal authority to manage innovation. The findings of this study provide valuable guidelines to managers to implement more sophisticated approaches for a better management of the ideation process through web-enabled ideation tools.
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| 5. |
- Bergendahl, Magnus
(författare)
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Collaboration and competition in firm-internal ideation management : Two alternatives – and a third way out
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The passive reliance on ideas to spontaneously emerge within companies is today replaced with more active and continuous ideation management that embraces employees from different functions and knowledge-domains within the company to create and develop ideas. A frequently observed feature in the active management of ideation is the reliance on collaboration and competition mechanisms. These mechanisms use the strength of enabling people to working together towards a shared interest (collaboration) and the power of enabling people to outperform each other in submitting the best idea (competition). The existing research on collaboration and competition in ideation is found inconclusive about their effects as collaboration is stated to both enhance and hamper performance, and as competition is claimed to both drive and reduce performance in ideation. This constitutes a limitation to the management of ideation as it reduces the ability to actively and purposefully guide ideation through a deliberate use of the two mechanisms.The aim of this thesis is to investigate collaboration and competition mechanisms in firm-internal ideation. A multi-methodological approach has been deployed using three different studies: a multiple case study, a survey, and an experiment. This has allowed for the phenomenon of ideation to be studied using different perspectives and for the individual results to be triangulated. The empirical data has been acquired from both industry and experiments with university students.The conducted research has revealed that the inconsistencies on the effects from the two mechanisms are possible to understand and resolve by applying a more detailed level of analysis. When competition is decomposed into components of individual- and group competition, it is found that individual competition drives idea quantity and that it hampers collaboration, whereas group competition instead is found to induce collaboration and to nurture idea quality. This indicates that competition can be used to manage levels of collaboration in ideation, thereby bridging the two mechanisms.This thesis further presents that the individual effects from each of the mechanisms are complementary to each other. This implies that the effect from each mechanism is retained when combined with the other mechanisms, and that the combined effect is equal to, or even greater than, the sum of the individual effects. This combined use is found to drive both ideation efficiency and motivation, and is offering management an interesting third alternative, out of the two mechanisms, of how firm-internal ideation can be managed in a more effective and efficient manner.An analytical framework is included, presenting the interrelationships between the mechanisms, motivation, ideation behavior and the ideation performance.
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| 6. |
- Bergendahl, Magnus, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Ideation High Performers : A Study of Motivational Factors
- 2015
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Ingår i: Creativity Research Journal. - : Routledge. - 1040-0419 .- 1532-6934. ; 27:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As innovation today is one of the keys to success for firms, creativity among its employees becomes a key asset and the understanding about what motivates employees in ideation is consequently of high interest. This article addresses differences in motivation among high- and low performers in ideation and contributes to existing theory by enhancing the understanding about what characterizes motivation among ideation high performers. The quantitative analysis used is based on a study performed at a multinational consumer goods company based in Sweden, surveying employees’ performance, motivation and their preferences towards collaboration and competition. Among key findings is the possible combination of collaboration and competition mechanisms as motivating means in firms’ ideation management.
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| 9. |
- Björk, Jennie, 1982
(författare)
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Analyzing and realizing collective ideation in firms
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Analyzing and realizing collective ideation in firmsJennie BjörkDepartment of Technology Management and EconomicsChalmers University of TechnologyAbstractThis thesis investigates collective aspects of ideation. An increasing body of literature has moved away from regarding ideation as solely the act of single individuals to acknowledge the importance of inter-individual relationships. This opens up new opportunities for companies but it also brings about a number of new challenges. For example, it raises the question of how collective ideation contributes to the creation of ideas for innovation and how it can be used in a purposeful way. While previous research has addressed collective ideation in groups, research on ideation networks, comprising individuals and their interactions contributing to the creation of ideas, has been far less researched. The aim of this thesis is to broaden the view of collective ideation by moving beyond the group level. It does so through investigating how individual and collective ideation activities take place within firms, by using a social network perspective. More specifically, the aim is to describe and analyze collective ideation activities in firms, and explore how these can be fruitfully used to nurture innovation efforts.Drawing upon data on all the ideas created within an organization over a number of years, the thesis uses social network analysis to map and analyze the internal networks contributing to idea generation. Several types of analyses have been used to increase our understanding of how various structural properties in an ideation network interrelate with ideation performance by individuals and groups. First, the research shows that individuals who collaborate with larger numbers of different individuals are associated with a higher probability of generating useful and novel ideas themselves. However, this pattern was only seen to a certain extent. Second, the results showed that network structure and ideation performance are interrelated for spontaneously formed groups but not for formal project groups. Formal and informal collective ideation activities are two different kinds that take place in parallel but the results show that they function under different conditions. Third, the thesis explores the lack of agreement in existing theory about the effect of so-called structural holes on organization performance, by focusing explicitly on structural holes in collective ideation. This research adds to an understanding of how the structural properties of interest potentially influence ideation performance, and offers a more nuanced discussion of the potential positive and negative effects of structural holes on ideation.Managing collective ideation addresses the well documented challenges of managing distributed knowledge systems. In order to investigate this further, data from four different case studies have been scrutinized. The results indicate that involvement, focus and formalization stand out as three major dimensions, with implications for how firms use and nurture collective ideation. This thesis argues for that companies can benefit from a deliberate approach to ideation that encompasses the creation of prerequisites for both emergent and planned ideation activities.
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| 10. |
- Björk, Jennie, et al.
(författare)
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Creating Better Innovation Measurement Practices
- 2017
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Ingår i: Mit Sloan Management Review. - : Sloan Management Review Association. - 1532-9194. ; 59:1, s. 45-53
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- For most companies, innovation is a top managerial priority. Many managers look at successful innovators such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. with envy, wishing their companies could be half as innovative. To boost and benchmark innovation, managers often use quantitative performance indicators.1 Some of these indicators measure innovation as results or outcomes such as sales from new products. Others measure innovation as a process, using metrics such as the number of innovation projects in progress. And some track input measures such as the number of ideas generated, while still others focus on the innovation portfolio, by looking at factors such as the percentage of investments in breakthrough projects versus product line extensions.
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