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Interorganizational Governance and Trilateral Trust Building in R&D Crowdsourcing
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Author: Wenbo Guo, Shanghai Jiao Tong U.
Author: Jing Betty Feng, Farmingdale State College
Author: Brad McKenna, U. of Portsmouth
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China has stepped into the Internet era with the emergence of a large number of e- commerce players. However, Internet crowdsourcing of research and development projects, a form of open innovation, is lacking. Through an inductive case study of a Chinese crowdsourcing intermediary (CI) managing a crowdsourcing task, we show how Chinese CI failed to utilize inter-organizational governance to manage trilateral trust building. We suggest that CI can utilize the formal control mechanisms to build trust swiftly and the relational mechanisms to build knowledge-based trust. We also observe that CI continues to use guanxi (informal personal connection) as a relational and contingent mechanism to maintain Chinese contextual trust, which can be a major barrier to increasing Internet-based R&D crowdsourcing in China.
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Search Terms: Crowdsourcing | interorganizational governance | Open Innovation
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Learning By Contributing: Gaining Competitive Advantage Through Contribution to Open Source Software
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Author: Frank Nagle, U. of Southern California
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As the economy increasingly becomes more information-based, firms must enhance their capability to productively use public information goods. Counterintuitively, some firms pay their employees to contribute to the creation of these goods, which can be used freely by their competitors. One possible explanation for this behavior is that contributing to public goods allows the firm to learn how to better capture value from them. This study explores this mechanism using data on firm contributions to open source software (OSS), an important public information good. Using matching and dynamic panel analysis to address endogeneity concerns, this study shows that contributing firms capture 11% more productive value from usage of OSS than their free-riding peers. Further, the learning obtained through this process has a spillover effect that allows contributors to capture more productive value from not only OSS, but also all internal IT assets.
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Search Terms: organizational learning | open source software | co-opetition
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Needs and Technologies: Combining Knowledge for Innovation
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Author: Mark Packard, U. of Missouri
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Innovation has been understood as “New Combinations” of knowledge since Schumpeter. How that knowledge is combined and what types of knowledge are combined, however, have remained obfuscated as individual-level studies of creativity and innovation have focused instead on personal characteristics of the innovators as primary factors in determining innovativeness. This study examines knowledge itself as a key factor in the innovation process. I propose that innovative ideas are the result of a cognitive process by which two types of knowledge intersect: knowledge of consumers’ needs (the problem) and a knowledge of certain resources or technologies and their affordances (the solution). I hypothesize that only where both of these types of knowledge are present can innovation emerge. I further posit that the knowledge combination process is moderated by other key factors, namely personality, cognitive accessibility, and engagement. Testing these hypotheses in an experimental setting, I find general support for the knowledge interaction model, showing that innovativeness increases where both needs knowledge and technical knowledge are high. I also find “Einstellung” effects, i.e. where innovativeness decreases for experts, where the expert innovator is high in one type of knowledge only. Of the proposed moderators, only accessibility was supported.
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Search Terms: Innovation | Knowledge | Demand-side
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Firms’ Innovation Objectives and Knowledge Acquisition Strategies: A Comparative Analysis
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Author: Stephen Roper, Warwick Business School
Author: James Love, Warwick Business School
Author: Bettina Becker, Aston Business School
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External partnerships play an important role in firms’ acquisition of the knowledge inputs to innovation. Such partnerships may be interactive – involving exploration and mutual learning by both parties – or non-interactive – involving exploitative activity and learning by only one party. Examples of non-interactive partnerships are copying or imitation. Here, we consider how firms’ innovation objectives influence their choice of interactive and/or non-interactive connections. We conduct a comparative analysis for the economies of Spain and the UK, which have contrasting innovation eco-systems and regulation burdens. Four empirical results emerge. First, we find strong and consistent support for complementarity between non-interactive and interactive connections across firms in all sectors and sizebands for both economies. Second, we find that innovation objectives related to new products and services are linked to both interactive and non-interactive connections in Spain, with mixed evidence for the UK. Third, we find that the need to meet regulatory requirements has no effect on firms’ knowledge acquisition strategies in the UK, but a strong impact on non-interactive connections in Spain. Fourth, the extent of firms’ interactive connections is strongly related to firms’ human capital endowments in both economies. This latter result suggests interesting second-order innovation effects from human capital improvements.
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Search Terms: Knowledge | innovation | regulation
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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