Kimmo Karhu

From closed to open to what?: an exploration on community innovation principles

This paper introduces a set of community innovation principles relevant for social media design. By drawing on the comparison between Closed and Open Innovation introduced by Chesbrough, we develop a set of hypotheses that explore the nature of community innovation practices and their related principles. Furthermore we test those principles against two real world cases.

An internationally distributed ubiquitous living lab innovation platform for digital ecosystem research

There are an increasing number of information sources and services around us enabling new ways of interacting with our everyday environment. Examples include intelligent devices, sensors embedded in the environment and the emerging Internet-of-Things. Simultaneously users are becoming increasingly involved as information providers and consumers by means of Web 2.0 and social media. While these areas have gained a lot of attention recently and while the research on Digital Ecosystems has also dealt with these phenomena separately there seems to be need for research on the rich and complex ecosystem combining the sensor-based information sources with Web 2.0 and mobile services. In this paper, we propose a digital ecosystem architecture for ubiquitous campus Living Lab innovation platform which combines sensor based embedded system and social media based on the international collaboration between two long-term university Living Lab research projects in Finland and China. The paper focuses on the architecture design and implementation of the platform, and also discusses its implications to digital ecosystem research.

A digital ecosystem for boosting user-driven service business

In recent years, we have seen the rise of Web 2.0, where users become co-creators and software turns into services. While Web 2.0 technologies and concepts have been studied separately, we suggest that the digital ecosystem they form together and the ways in which users interact with it in social contexts have not been made explicit. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of a community and a digital ecosystem for boosting user-driven service business. To construct such a model, we first identify the key actors and their interactions by applying use case modelling. Based on that, conceptual modelling is used to sketch an illustrative model of the overall ecosystem. Finally, we use the field of bioinformatics to evaluate the model and to propose ideas for boosting user-driven service business in that field as well.

Exploiting and Defending Open Digital Platforms with Boundary Resources: Android’s Five Platform Forks

Digital platforms can be opened in two ways to promote innovation and value generation. A platform owner can open access for third-party participants by establishing boundary resources, such as APIs and an app store, to allow complements to be developed and shared for the platform. Furthermore, to foster cooperation with the complementors, the platform owner can use an open-source license boundary resource to open and share the platform’s core resources. However, openness that is too wide renders the platform and its shared resources vulnerable to strategic exploitation. To our knowledge, platform strategies that promote such negative outcomes have remained unexplored in past research. We identify and analyze a prominent form of strategic exploitation called platform forking in which a hostile firm, i.e., a forker, bypasses the host’s controlling boundary resources and exploits the platform’s shared resources, core and complements, to create a competing platform business. We investigate platform forking o...