Distributed Innovation Processes Research Articles

Distributed Innovation Processes. Key Concepts, Case Studies, Current Developments

Distributed Innovation Processes. Key Concepts, Case Studies, Current Developments

Governance and Quintuple Helix innovation model: Insights from the local government of East Luwu Regency, Indonesia

Climate change issues pose complex social and ecological challenges to rural communities in East Luwu Regency, Indonesia. This can be overcome through a collaborative, sustainable, and distributed innovation process for regional resilience and independence in each innovation sector. This study examines the concept of rural living as an inter-organizational interaction design and the process of developing sustainable rural innovation, where multi-stakeholder interaction forms the Quintuple Helix innovation model through a multidimensional case study design that focuses on the concept of innovation participation, knowledge production, innovation ecosystem as a social subsystem system, and socioecological transition toward developing independent rural areas, sustainability of rural innovation programs, and disaster preparedness in East Luwu Regency. This research method is qualitative-explorative with a case study approach exploring the social and ecological systems of rural communities in East Luwu Regency, Indonesia to provide a deeper understanding of the rural innovation process to address socio-ecological challenges through the importance of government-public-private-university synergy and its context in the Magani and Sorowako Villages, East Luwu Regency. The results of this study indicate that the strength of the innovation driver resulting from the cooperation between the East Luwu Government and PT Vale Tbk is the key to the sustainability of village innovations that encourage village innovation and village community participation in the village innovation process so that it has an impact on village community independence and environmental sustainability in East Luwu Regency. However, village innovation in East Luwu Regency still needs to be improved in terms of communication and coordination between actors and sectors.

The role of digital artefacts in early stages of distributed innovation processes

This paper offers insights on how digital artefacts foster coordination of individuals in distributed innovation projects by limiting the divergence of team members’ representations of the project. This role is particularly important when coordination mechanisms such as leadership and modularity show some limits. Using distributed innovation in open-source software as a setting, we develop and test the hypotheses that (1) the release of initial code in open-source software projects limits the divergence of team members’ representations and (2) limiting divergence of team members’ representations triggered by initial code release implies a higher probability of project survival, a non-trivial goal in such a setting. To test our hypotheses, we draw on a dataset of 5,703 open-source software projects registered on SourceForge.net. Both our hypotheses are supported, pointing towards fruitful directions for expanding research on the way distributed innovation processes are carried out when digital artefacts are involved.

Towards a Theoretical Framework for Social Impact Bonds

Abstract Governments in some of the world’s richest nations appear to be caught in a double challenge of declining social budgets even as social needs are increasing. In this context, Outcomes Based Commissioning (OBC), has been suggested as one way in which ‘more’ social services can be provided for ‘less’ public resources. This form of commissioning is often linked with a new financing tool for social services, referred to in the US as ‘Pay for Success and Payment by Results in the UK or as a ‘Social Impact Bond’ (SIB). However, to date, this approach is under-theorised and this is a limiting factor both for shaping a research and evaluation agenda around SIBs and in understanding how such instruments might develop in future. Without a theoretical rationale for SIBs, it is not straightforward to assess whether, and how well, they have achieved their goals, and how they might be developed further. In this paper we consider two broad approaches to theorising SIBs. One draws on public administration theories, the other on innovation theories. To date, SIBs have often been theorised as the logical next step in the New Public Management (NPM). But NPM itself is a contested theory and recent theoretical innovations in public administration, particularly the concept of New Public Governance might provide a more useful theoretical framework. A second broad approach through which to understand SIBs is their potential to improve the rate and dissemination of innovation. There are many different innovation models that might be applied to better understanding of SIBs. We look first at the concept of Open Innovation with its focus on distributed innovation processes in which knowledge flows across organisational boundaries and more recent articulations – Open Innovation 2.0 – which place greater emphasis on mixed economy collabarations involving: industry; government; universities; and communities and users (the so-called ‘quadruple helix’) to solve societal challenges. We go on to consider social innovation, with its clearer focus on using social means to deliver social outcomes and whether SIBs can be theorised through this lens. No one model is entirely satisfactory as an explanatory framework for SIBs and we conclude by suggesting that a supporting theory combining NPG with elements of Open Innovation 2.0 and social innovation might be a productive approach for shaping future research and, in addition, might suggest some future directions for the next generation of SIBs.

Section 1.b Introduction

Open innovation has been described as a means of assisting firms utilising ideas and knowledge from inside and outside the firm. It has been defined as “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organisational boundaries, using pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms in line with the organisations business model” (Chesbrough et al, 2014, p vi). Open innovation strategies may lead to better financial performance by reducing costs related to innovation, increasing commercialisation and financial gain.
 Understanding open innovation in some way explains how sharing knowledge with internal and external stakeholders can promote innovation. Understanding processes can reinforce the importance of engaging with customers early in concept development and design stages of new products and services. Also openness can promote co-creation between firms, customers, suppliers, academia and government. The essence of such cooperation by internal and external stakeholders creates relationships to explore common interests and goals.
 From an open innovation perspective, value creation and capture is accomplished by (i) outside-in open innovation, i.e. ideas drawn into the organisation from the external environment. This involves opening up organisation’s innovation processes to external inputs and contributions, (ii) Inside-out open innovation utilises unused or underused ideas and assets gathered from outside the organisation and (iii) Coupled open innovation links outside-in and inside-out open innovation processes combining knowledge inflows and outflows to collaboratively develop and commercialise an innovation.
 Traditionally, knowledge is considered as being held by the firm as core competences and it is assumed that this is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Accordingly knowledge used in, and resulting from, innovation and the knowledge resulting from the innovation remains within boundaries of the firm. Open innovation opposes this view as it integrates diverse knowledge from the wider environment into the business ecosystem and creates new knowledge for multiple stakeholders.
 Due to the inter-disciplinary nature of open innovation it can be discussed and theorised from many viewpoints, such as strategy, value chain, business models, core competencies, knowledge creation and more recently in design management. Levels of analysis vary with considerable research frequently conducted at organisational level, while more is needed in areas such as inter-organisational value networks. To date, large organisation have been at the focus of open innovation research, primarily because they are able implement open innovation to some degree without strategic change. More recently, open innovation practices in SMEs have become important, as these small firms have insufficient resources to cover all innovation activities and must look beyond firm boundaries for growth opportunities. Thus, inter-organisational networks are important drivers of innovation in SMEs as they often struggle to make the best use of strong network ties. Exploring open innovation in SMEs can provide insight into how best to utilise their networks.

Smart Cities as Organizational Fields: A Framework for Mapping Sustainability-Enabling Configurations

Despite the impressive growth of smart city initiatives worldwide, an organizational theory of smart city has yet to be developed, and we lack models addressing the unprecedented organizational and management challenges that emerge in smart city contexts. Traditional models are often of little use, because smart cities pursue different goals than traditional organizations, are based on networked, cross-boundary activity systems, rely on distributed innovation processes, and imply adaptive policy-making. Complex combinations of factors may lead to vicious or virtuous cycles in smart city initiatives, but we know very little about how these factors may be identified and mapped. Based on an inductive study of a set of primary and secondary sources, we develop a framework for the configurational analysis of smart cities viewed as place-specific organizational fields. This framework identifies five key dimensions in the configurations of smart city fields; these five dimensions are mapped through five sub-frameworks, which can be used both separately as well as for an integrated analysis. Our contribution is conceived to support longitudinal studies, natural experiments and comparative analyses on smart city fields, and to improve our understanding of how different combinations of factors affect the capability of smart innovations to translate into city resilience, sustainability and quality of life. In addition, our results suggest that new forms of place-based entrepreneurship constitute the engine that allows for the dynamic collaboration between government, citizens and research centers in successful smart city organizational fields.

Extending community management to industry‐university‐government organizations

There has been an emergence of collaborative research networks of industry‐university‐government relationships, or so‐called Triple Helix (TH) organizations. Many TH organizations strive for research and innovation community management. In the innovation and knowledge management literature, community management offers open, participatory, and distributed innovation processes. How community management elements manifest, how they evolve, and what are related contingencies remain poorly understood, especially in the case of TH organizations. Our study examines how two TH organizations in Finland have adopted community management elements, how these elements have evolved, and the contingencies that have affected adoption and evolution. We report on the first 6 years of operations in two different TH organizations. Community‐management elements have accommodated divergent interests in TH organizations, but they have also been subject to considerable degrees of conflict and tension. We extend the innovation community management literature by explicating community management elements in a TH context, we illustrate how TH organizations adopt and evolve these elements, and we identify two contingencies for community management elements in a TH context.

Usability Framework for E-Government Services in Developing Countries

Lack of usability frameworks for developing countries has contributed to designing and deploying systems that fails at a high rate. This paper discusses a research effort on how rejuvenated Living Lab concept can contribute to designing usability frameworks for developing countries. Living Lab is a user centric innovative setting that involves everyday practices and research that facilitates user influence approach in an open and distributed innovation processes. The concept enables engaging relevant partners in a real life context for addressing usability issues.

Opening Government

Open government initiatives in the U.S. government focus on three main aspects: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Especially the collaboration mandate is relatively unexplored in the literature. In practice, government organizations recognize the need to include external problem solvers into their internal innovation creation processes. This is partly derived from a sense of urgency to improve the efficiency and quality of government service delivery. Another formal driver is the America Competes Act that instructs agencies to search for opportunities to meaningfully promote excellence in technology, education, and science. Government agencies are responding to these requirements by using open innovation (OI) approaches to invite citizens to crowdsource and peer produce solutions to public management problems. These distributed innovation processes occur at all levels of the U.S. government and it is important to understand what design elements are used to create innovative public management ideas. This article systematically reviews existing government crowdsourcing and peer production initiatives and shows that after agencies have defined their public management problem, they go through four different phases of the OI process: (1) idea generation through crowdsourcing, (2) incubation of submitted ideas with peer voting and collaborative improvements of favorite solutions, (3) validation with a proof of concept of implementation possibilities, and (4) reveal of the selected solution and the (internal) implementation of the winning idea. Participation and engagement are incentivized both with monetary and nonmonetary rewards, which lead to tangible solutions as well as intangible innovation outcomes, such as increased public awareness.

Coordination of Joint Search in Distributed Innovation Processes: Lessons from the Effects of Initial Code Release in Open Source Software Development

This paper casts light on the role of initial code release for providing coordination of joint search processes, i.e., search processes that involve several agents who search together. We develop hypotheses about the role of initial code release for providing coordination, and for whether development projects remain active. We test these hypotheses on a dataset of 5703 open source software projects registered on SourceForge during a two-year period. We find that initial code release is indeed associated with improved coordination, and a higher chance that software development projects will actually release further code subsequently. We contribute to theory on coordination in joint search, common in distributed innovation settings.

Open innovation, gender and the infiltration of masculine discourses

Purpose – This paper aims to illustrate how open innovation is implemented in practice in a large multinational corporation and to discuss how masculine discourses of rational control and competition are reinforced during such a process. Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory single case study approach has been employed. Qualitative empirical data (interviews and documents) are derived from a four year longitudinal research project on open and distributed innovation processes in the automotive industry. Findings – Masculinity enters the discourse of open innovation through prescribed classical management ideals in line with auditing and bureaucratisation. The paper illustrates how these masculine discourses are reproduced rather than challenged by open innovation. It also highlights how the preoccupation with control and conquest tends to silence alternative (feminine) discourses which could otherwise enrich the radical and creative features of the open innovation paradigm. Research limitations/impl...

BEFORE STABILIZATION

Developments within 3D digital modelling are often heralded as a much needed solution to problems of information loss and communication difficulties within the building industry. Despite the abundance of technical possibilities for innovation, however, there is currently no standardized, widely used digital model that solves these problems. Rather, actors in the building industry are assembling technological and other elements in various ways, trying to configure a stable innovation. This article sets out to describe the innovation communication involved in different emerging assemblages by focusing on the articulation of different expectations to their promises. We identify three different sets of expectations, namely visions related to building information modelling, Virtual Worlds and interactive simulation platforms. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how visions are a crucial part of the communication about innovations in information and communication technology (ICT), and to contribute to an understanding of how different visions promise particular future configurations of workflows, communication processes, politics, economic models and social relations. Hereby, the paper adds to the literature on the relationship between ICTs and organizing, but with a distinct focus on innovation communication and distributed innovation processes taking place before ICTs are stabilized, issues which cannot be captured by studies of diffusion and adaptation of new ICTs within single organizations.

Improving distributed innovation processes in virtual organisations through the evaluation of collaboration intensities

Distributed innovation processes (DIPs) are considered a new option to handle both the growing complexity of new products and services and the speed in which they need to be brought to the market. Apparently, DIPs – if conducted in a complementary way – have a positive influence on the innovation cycle regarding quality and development times. However, research has paid little attention to DIPs in collaborative networks (CNs) in the past. CNs, one of them being highly dynamic virtual organisations, could provide an ideal foundation for such DIPs. With the presentation of the collaborative network relationship analysis and the analysis of collaboration intensities, this research gap will be addressed. It is shown that a qualitative planning of collaboration intensities can support the management of innovation networks. Case studies from the business sector demonstrate the applicability. Finally, an example illustrates the underlying mechanisms. This article is an extended version of the paper ‘Managing distributed innovation processes in virtual organizations by applying the collaborative network relationship analysis’ presented at PRO-VE’09 (Eschenbächer, J., Seifert, M., and Thoben, K.-D., 2009. Managing distributed innovation processes in virtual organizations by applying the collaborative network relationship analysis. In: L.M. Camarinha-Matos, I. Paraskakis, and H. Afsamarnesh, eds. Leveraging knowledge for innovation in collaborative networks. Chennai: IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 13–21).

OPEN INNOVATION, GENERATIVITY AND THE SUPPLIER AS PEER: THE CASE OF IPHONE AND ANDROID

The diffusion of various forms of digital technologies has acted as a disrupting force in several industries, promoting open and distributed innovation processes. In this paper we argue that the supplier in open innovation networks tends to get a more active role as a creative peer producer, rather than merely a contractual deliverer. A comparative case study of the mobile phone platforms iPhone and Android is used to analyze this shift in innovative value creation. The notion of generative capacity is introduced to the research on open innovation, suggesting that it is generativity rather than openness that drives the platforms' aggregated wealth. The two cases from the mobile phone industry illustrate that innovation initiatives can successfully approach generativity in different ways and that both openness and control are important to facilitate supplier contributions.

About Authors

About Authors

Distributed Innovation Processes (DIPs) and the Dynamics of Knowledge Tradability

This paper draws on two extensive case studies to explore how the co-production and exchange of knowledge is organised during innovative activity. In the empirical cases multiple, transient innovation systems emerge, and self organise, around a particular problem. The emergence and evolution of these innovation systems involves the mutual intrapenetration of market and non-market forms of exchange. The cases suggest that economic markets and knowledge acquisition networks are not alternative forms of economic organisation but are co-dependent and mutually embedded

Exploring the relationships between knowledge sources in the innovation process: evidence from Finnish innovators

Innovation is a costly, risky, and uncertain process, and one of its most central components is knowledge as has been emphasised in the innovation literature. Notably, such knowledge tends to be distributed across different internal and external sources. That is, innovation processes involve diverse relationships between knowledge that originates from a myriad of different sources such as customers, suppliers and universities. While such relationships are distinctive to modern – distributed – innovation processes, little is still known about their implications on the search for new knowledge. This paper proposes that since the innovation process is inherently an uncertain and costly activity, a deeper understanding on the relationships between knowledge sources can help firms to better master the risks and costs related to their search activities. In other words, given that not all knowledge is equally combinable with each other, it claims that complementarities among knowledge sources increase the likelihood (over non-complementarities and substitutes) that such sources encompass mutually combinable knowledge, and hence decrease the uncertainties, risks and costs involved in distributed innovation processes.

The sourcing of technological knowledge: distributed innovation processes and dynamic change

This paper outlines the knowledge and technology sourcing practices of a range of key firms and organisations across the UK based on primary research, and analyses the key factors related to managing the technological knowledge boundaries of the firm. In particular, the paper considers the dynamic dimension considerations to such issues. As such it outlines important differences between short and long time horizons, before analysing in more detail some of the implications for firms of technological change over the long term. The paper seeks to highlight the importance of the time dimension in helping to explain why and how firms source technological knowledge externally and how they align their sourcing activities to their strategies associated with developing current and future capabilities.

Benefits of co‐operation on innovative performance: evidence from integrated circuits and biotechnology firms in the UK and Taiwan

The increase of strategic alliance and national or pan‐national government collaborative programmes has highlighted the shifting management and policy focus from inducing in‐house R&D to promoting a joint partnership between firms and knowledge‐generating organisations in the increasingly complex and costly innovation process. Both the ‘dynamic capability’ school and the ‘innovation network’ theorists demonstrate that inter‐organisational co‐operation has become a crucial mechanism for ‘collective innovation’. However, little attempt has been undertaken to examine the relationship between inter‐organisational co‐operation and innovative performance at the firm level. The innovative activities and inter‐organisational co‐operation of integrated circuits and biotechnology sectors across Taiwan and the UK are investigated via a postal questionnaire survey. Multiple logistic regression models are deployed. The result reveals that the types of inter‐organisational co‐operation enhancing a firm's innovative performance vary across sectors and countries. Despite the variation, this paper argues that a firm's networking ability to co‐operate with buyer firms, supplier firms and external organisations is becoming imperative for enhancing innovation in the increasingly distributed innovation process.

Adaptive distributed filtering in multicoordinated systems

The direct estimation of optimal steady-state gain in the single filtering process introduced by B. Carew et al. (1973) is extended to multicoordinated systems, and the distributed optimal steady-state gains are directly estimated for adaptive distributed filtering. The correlation method using distributed innovation processes is used. The algorithm assumes little prior information about the unknown covariances and adaptively changes the weights to best integrate the distributed estimates obtained in local filtering processes. The term best is used in the sense that the result of the adaptive distributed filtering is as close to that of the optimal distributed filtering as possible. >