Caroline Dombrowski

Customer-Driven Innovation

OVERVIEW: Involving customers in the innovation process entails a host of new concerns, concepts and managerial decisions. Transitioning from older models of no or low customer involvement requires attention to the different types of customer innovation, organizational mission and organizational structure. This article provides a typology for customer innovation, describes how to involve customers in the innovation process, and offers guidelines for shifting organizational structure and emphasis toward customer-driven innovation in order to enable continual, sustainable innovation.

Crafting Organizational Innovation Processes

Abstract Innovation is a crucial component of business strategy, but the process of innovation may seem dif ficult to manage. To plan organizational initiatives around innovation or to bolster innovation requires a firm grasp of the innovation process. Few organizations have transparently defined such a process. Based on the findings of an exploratory study of over 30 US and European companies that have robust innovation processes, this paper breaks down the innovation process into discrete stages: idea generation and mobilization, screening and advocacy, experimentation, commercialization, and diffusion and implementation. For each stage, context, outputs and critical ingredients are discussed. There are several common tensions and concerns at each stage, which are enumerated; industry examples are also given. Finally, strategies for and indicators of organizational success around innovation are discussed for each stage. Successful organizations will use an outlined innovation process to create a common framework for discussion and initiatives around the innovation process, and to establish metrics and goals for each stage of the innovation process.

Designing the future of collaborative workplace systems: lessons learned from a comparison with alternate reality games

Alternate reality games (ARGs) represent a unique form of group collaboration. A careful comparison of ARGs to more traditional collaborative systems reveals areas for innovation in tools to support ad-hoc teaming. This comparison specifically focuses on processes of group formation, task management, information discovery and collective storytelling. Opportunities for innovation are highlighted, as are future research questions.

Telling the story in big data

opinion, and many other areas. Yet conclusions are still sparse. When researchers consider ocean acidification, or the changing pH of the ocean induced by human effects, data extends almost as far back as the earth. Ocean pH data is inferred for some samples, directly measured in others, and differs depending on geography, time, and local effects. There is no single pH of the ocean, and scientists do not measure every part of the ocean. However, despite the lack of completeness of data, an overwhelming quantity of data still exists. In many ways, ocean data epitomizes the challenges of big data for all researchers: Data is incomplete and evolving, quality varies, and metadata is often non-standard. Yet this continually growing stream of data can inform some of the biggest policy, business, and scientific decisions and discoveries. Current big data is just the tip of the iceberg. New technologies and increased accessibility are creating yet another wave of big data input: user-generated and sensor-created transient data. Transient data provides bursts of new data—lots and lots of bursts of data. Rather than being exponential in a single data stream (like blogs), it will provide temporally localized, short-term, specific data. Examples include personal health data from applications like FitBit or cardiac defibrillators, as well as new potential data sources from dissolving, temporary datacollection units [2] and online game players’ data [3]. Sensors in carpets that detect gait, CCTV footage, constant heart-rate monitors, localized temperature measurements, and other continuous data-collection methods are becoming common.

Exploring infrastructure assemblage in volunteer virtual organizations

This ongoing research project investigates ad-hoc infrastructure development in volunteer virtual organizations (VVOs). A comparative analysis of the tool appropriation of VVO activity among alternate reality game (ARG) players in three cities yielded insight for future research into underlying principles of infrastructure assemblage, types of ad-hoc resource provisioning, and potential means of design support.