Using open innovation to identify the best ideas

MIT Sloan Management Review

Volumn 55, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 41-48

  King, Andrew ^a   Lakhani, Karim R ^b,c  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

^b HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United States)

^c NASA Tournament Lab   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84890373838     PISSN: 15329194     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. Eric von Hippel has written extensively about the democratization of the innovation process, starting with users and now encompassing open communities. See E. von Hippel, "Democratizing Innovation" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005)
2. "Open innovation" has come to imply two distinct models for organizing innovation. The first perspective considers markets for intellectual property, in which companies trade patents and other assets in a bilateral fashion. The second perspective is focused on the rise of distributed innovation systems that allow individuals from around the world to participate in innovation processes through voluntary self-selection and decentralized knowledge flows. In this paper, we refer to the second perspective. For the first perspective, see H. Chesbrough, "Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting From Technology" (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003)
3. K.J. Boudreau and K.R. Lakhani, "The Confederacy of Heterogeneous Software Organizations and Heterogeneous Developers: Field Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Worker Effort" in "The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited," ed. J. Lerner and S. Stern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012): 483-505
4. E. Guinan, K.J. Boudreau and K.R. Lakhani, "Experiments in Open Innovation at Harvard Medical School," MIT Sloan Management Review 54, no. 3 (spring 2013): 45-52
5. For an evolutionary perspective on organizational change involving the generation and selection of concepts, see D.C. Campbell, "Variation and Selective Retention in Socio- Cultural Evolution,'' in "Social Change in Developing Areas: A Reinterpretation of Evolutionary Theory," ed. H.R. Barringer, G.I. Blanksten and R.W. Mack (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing, 1965)
6. For a statistical view of innovation based on finding extreme-value outcomes (innovations with very high payoffs) through a process that generates lots of varying ideas, see E. Dahan and H. Mendelson, "An Extreme- Value Model of Concept Testing," Management Science 47, no. 1 (January 2001):102-116
7. For a compelling analytical approach and case study of users as innovators, including generation and selection of ideas, see C.Y. Baldwin, C. Hienerth and E. von Hippel, "How User Innovations Become Commercial Products: A Theoretical Investigation and a Case Study," Research Policy 35, no. 9 (December 2006)
8. K.J. Boudreau, N. Lacetera and K.R. Lakhani, "Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests: An Empirical Analysis," Management Science 57, no. 5 (May 2011): 843-863
9. L.B. Jeppesen and K.R. Lakhani, "Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search," Organization Science 21, no. 5 (September 2010): 1016-1033
10. Guinan et al., "Experiments in Open Innovation
11. Please see A. Winston, "GE's Eco-Innovation Platform," October 26, 2011, http://blogs.hbr.org
12. K.J. Arrow, "Essays in the Theory of Risk-Bearing" (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1971), 152
13. Eric von Hippel and colleagues have discussed tool kits for innovation. E. von Hippel and R. Katz, "Shifting Innovation to Users Via Toolkits," Management Science 48, no. 7 (July 2002): 821-833
14. N. Franke and E. von Hippel, "Satisfying Heterogeneous User Needs via Innovation Toolkits: The Case of Apache Security Software," Research Policy 32, no. 7 (July 2003): 1199-1215
15. K.R. Lakhani, H. Lifshitz-Assaf and M. Tushman, "Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: Task Decomposition, Knowledge Distribution and the Locus of Innovation," in "Handbook of Economic Organization: Integrating Economic and Organization Theory," ed. A. Grandori (Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013), 355-382
16. The term "spillover" is used in the social sciences to denote that some of the benefits of an activity may accrue to additional actors beyond those pursuing the activity. For example, one company's R&D investment may help other organizations as well.