Christiane Rau

Innovation without me: why employees do (not) participate in organizational innovation communities

A key issue in community research is the set of motivations stimulating individuals to participate and contribute voluntarily to communities. This article examines the motivations of employees, who are traditionally not involved in the innovation process, to (not) participate in organizational innovation communities. Building on an in‐depth single case study, we aim to answer the following research questions: (1) What motivates participants of organizational innovation communities to participate? and (2) What motivates nonparticipants of organizational innovation communities to not participate? We find and categorize multiple factors that motivate non‐research and development employees to participate and to not participate. Moreover, we find an overlap as well as differences in the set of motivations of participants and nonparticipants. With nonparticipants normally being a large but barely explicitly recognized group, we argue that the found deviations contribute to the understanding of motivations in the context of organizational innovation communities and allow for direct design implications for innovation managers.

Innovation practices and their boundary-crossing mechanisms: a review and proposals for the future

In response to the increased complexity of innovation projects, tools and methods applied in the innovation process need to be able to support knowledge sharing across semantic and pragmatic boundaries. Despite evidence of the importance of these tools and methods – referred to as innovation practices – for the success of innovation projects, significant gaps exist in our understanding of the nature of innovation practices. It is not clear yet, how innovation practices address the challenges of knowledge sharing across semantic and pragmatic boundaries. This article therefore advances knowledge in this area by offering a systematic analysis of innovation practices. Existing streams of innovation practices literature across different domains are reviewed. Comparing the knowledge sharing processes when innovation practices are applied, it has been found that innovation practices comprise four distinct mechanisms to cross semantic boundaries and three to cross pragmatic boundaries. Moreover, we integrate these findings with perspectives from other research areas so as to stimulate fruitful avenues for future research. In sum, rather than viewing innovation practices as ‘add-ons’, we submit that they are important variances to assess, model, and understand in order to overcome semantic and pragmatic knowledge boundaries in innovation projects.

Creating Competitive Advantage from Services

OVERVIEW: In commodities markets, companies struggle to develop and communicate solutions for customer needs that provide competitive advantage. Service design thinking can provide the tools to help redesign value propositions to incorporate solutions that meet customer needs and sustain competitive advantage. However, in order to apply service design thinking effectively in organizational settings characterized by product thinking, some specific issues must be addressed. Based on a case study of a local gas supplier, redgas, we offer three key lessons from applying service design thinking to create new value propositions in the commodity industry: 1) see the bigger picture, 2) select suitable prototyping methods to support a collaborative ideation process, and 3) communicate narratives to and solicit feedback from customers.

“Fake It or Make It” – Selfies in Corporate Social Media Campaigns

The usage of selfies has become increasingly popular as a central element in social media campaigns. This study interviewed 9 professionals from marketing agencies to explore the role of selfies in corporate social media campaigns. We identified three distinct types of selfies, i.e. “classic selfies”, “polished selfies”, and “faked selfies”. We found that professionals strive for perceived authenticity of user communication (which is best conveyed by “classic selfies”), while they want to maintain control over the campaigns (e.g. to ensure the aesthetic value and the ad authenticity) leading to the use of “polished selfies” or “faked selfies”. As a result of this tension, we identified three distinct approaches agencies and their clients adopt balancing this tension. Our research offers insights how to design and manage selfie campaigns.

A long way home: How an intra-organizational innovation network overcomes its political boundaries

This article focuses on the still understudied link among political boundaries and innovation practices and its inherent boundary-crossing mechanisms in intra-organizational innovation networks. Our single case study at the sports company adidas derives two particular combinations of boundaries and boundary-crossing mechanisms to overcome political boundaries in intra-organizational innovation networks. These are the ‘open-closed (minded) boundaries’ and ‘everybody-is-an-innovator boundaries’. They have been addressed with distinct innovation practices that comprise the boundary-crossing mechanisms ‘reframe interests’ and ‘negotiate interests’. We find that these boundary-crossing mechanisms to be crucial in the process of managing the intra-organizational innovation network. Our findings have implications for the organizational anchoring of innovation practices given its importance as enabler or barrier to overcome political boundaries in intra-organizational innovation networks.

Open Service Prototyping

Service prototyping on one hand and the integration of co-creating customers or further stakeholders on the other hand, have proven to be highly beneficial for the quality, the speed-to-market, and the success of new service offerings. Prototypes support stakeholders to articulate their latent needs and thus support them to provide vital input for new service development. Service prototyping is not limited to real world simulations any more. Recent advances in IT opened up new possibilities of enhancing service development. The given cases show which potential benefits IT-enabled prototypes as well as virtual prototypes can offer companies in the tourism industries that are striving to open up their service development approaches. In particular, we distinguish between three types of prototypes that enable open service innovation: (1) real world prototypes, (2) IT-supported prototypes, and (3) virtual reality prototypes. The presented approaches for open service prototyping are valuable ways to develop, try, and test out services together with team members, customers or an unknown crowd. Their use is demonstrated through an analysis of three cases within the tourism industry.