Lars Frederiksen

The Core and Cosmopolitans: A Relational View of Innovation in User Communities

Users often interact and help each other solve problems in communities, but few scholars have explored how these relationships provide opportunities to innovate. We analyze the extent to which people positioned within the core of a community as well as people that are cosmopolitans positioned across multiple external communities affect innovation. Using a multimethod approach, including a survey, a complete database of interactions in an online community, content coding of interactions and contributions, and 36 interviews, we specify the types of positions that have the strongest effect on innovation. Our study shows that dispositional explanations for user innovation should be complemented by a relational view that emphasizes how these communities differ from other organizations, the types of behaviors this enables, and the effects on innovation.

Online Communities and Open Innovation

The advent of Internet marked a significant change in how users and customers can be involved in the innovative process. History is rife with examples of how users innovate, but Internet and its associated communication technologies brought radically new means for individuals to interact rapidly and at little cost in communities that spur new innovations. These communities are initiated and governed by people that differ in their motivations for taking part and participate to varying degrees. Such communities are outside the immediate control of companies seeking to develop open innovation strategies aimed at harnessing their work. This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organization theory, innovation studies and marketing in order to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers to an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional wisdoms for how business can be done. This book was published as a special issue of Industry and Innovation.

The open innovation research landscape: Established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholars – having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on ‘Researching Open Innovation’ at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on OI, organised at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study OI – originally an organisational-level phenomenon – across multiple levels of analysis. While our integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting and integrating various perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorising will be needed to advance OI research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research – particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.

Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation

The advent of Internet marked a significant change in how users and customers can be involved in the innovative process. History is rife with examples of how users innovate, but Internet and its associated communication technologies brought radically new means for individuals to interact rapidly and at little cost in communities that spur new innovations. These communities are initiated and governed by people that differ in their motivations for taking part and participate to varying degrees. Such communities are outside the immediate control of companies seeking to develop open innovation strategies aimed at harnessing their work. This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organization theory, innovation studies and marketing in order to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers to an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional wisdoms for how business can be done. This book was published as a special issue of Industry and Innovation.

Learning to deliver service-enhanced public infrastructure: balancing contractual and relational capabilities

Public agencies in construction increasingly involve the private sector in the provision of various public goods and services. With the extension of private sector involvement, public agencies are confronted with the need to acquire new capabilities. The results of two comparative case studies from the UK and the Netherlands show that the level and focus of capability learning change over time. Public agencies follow different learning trajectories and need to address the dynamic character of the learning in order to successfully employ (a) contractual and (b) relational capabilities in their exchange relationships.

Procuring Complex Performance: The Transition Process in Public Infrastructure

Purpose – The paper analyses how public buyers transition from procuring single products and services to procuring complex performance (PCP). The aim is to examine the change in the interactions between buyer and supplier, the emergence of value co-creation and the capability development during the transition process. nnDesign/methodology/approach – A multiple, longitudinal case study method is used to examine the transition towards PCP. The study deploys rich qualitative data sets by combining semi-structured interviews, focus group meetings and organisational reports and documents. nnFindings – The transition towards PCP can be best described as a learning process which cumulates the knowledge and experience in the client-supplier interaction accompanied by changing contractual and relational capabilities. In public infrastructure this process is not initially motivated by the benefits of value co-creation, but is politically driven. nnPractical implications – The study proposes three generic transition stages towards increased performance and infrastructural complexity moderated by contract duration. These stages may help managers of public agencies to identify the current procurement level and the contractual and relational challenges they need to master when facing higher levels of performance and infrastructural complexity. nnOriginality/value – The study adds to the limited empirical and conceptual understanding on the nature of long-term public-private interactions in PCP. It contributes through a rare focus adopting a longitudinal perspective on these interactions in the transition towards PCP

Project-based innovation: The world after Woodward

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to help us position and understand the increasing importance of project-based innovation for industrial organization in the 21st century. It builds on and extends Joan Woodwards (1958 and 1965) pioneering research, which classifies industrial organizations according to the complexity of production technology and volume of output. We suggest that a radical revision of Woodwards framework is required to account for the extensive use of project-based organizations to gain competitive advantage through accelerated innovation and growth in new technologies and markets.

Mobility and Entrepreneurship: Evaluating the Scope of Knowledge‐Based Theories of Entrepreneurship

Knowledge–based theories of entrepreneurship infer transfer of knowledge from the effect of labor mobility on entrepreneurial entry. Yet, simple selection or situational mechanisms that do not imply knowledge transfer may influence entrepreneurial entry in similar ways. We argue that the extent to which such alternative mechanisms operate, labor mobility predicts entry but not subsequent performance for entrepreneurs. Analyses of matched employee–employer data from Sweden suggest that high rates of geographical and industry mobility increase individuals’ likelihood of entrepreneurial entry but have no effects on their entrepreneurial performance. This indicates that the relationship between labor mobility and entrepreneurial entry do not necessarily imply knowledge transfer.

University Knowledge Spillovers & Regional Start-up Rates: Supply and Demand Side Factors

This paper investigates regional start-up rates in the knowledge intensive services and high-tech industries. Integrating insights from economic geography and population ecology into the literature on entrepreneurship, we develop a theoretical framework which captures how both supply- and demand-side factors mold the regional bedrock for start-ups in knowledge intensive industries. Using multi-level data of all knowledge intensive start-ups across 286 Swedish municipalities between 1994 and 2002 we demonstrate how characteristics of the economic and political milieu within each region influence the ratio of firm births. We find that economically affluent regions dominate entrepreneurial activity in terms of firm births, yet a number of much smaller rural regions also revealed high levels of start-ups. Knowledge spillovers from universities and firm R&D strongly affect the start-up rates for both knowledge intensive manufacturing and knowledge intensive services firms. However, the start-up rate of knowledge-intensive service firms is tied more strongly to the supply of highly educated individuals and the political regulatory regime within the municipality. This suggests that knowledge intensive service-start-ups are more susceptible to both demand-side and supply-side context than manufacturing start-ups. Our study contributes to the growing stream of research that explains entrepreneurial activity as shaped by contextual factors, most notably educational institutions that contribute to technology startups.

Call for papers for a special issue on pushing the boundaries of open and user innovation

Open and user innovation activities, such as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, alliance building, selective revealing, and internal and external corporate venturing are used increasingly by incumbent firms and start-ups. Thus, both top managers (e.g., CEOs, CIO, COOs, CTOs, etc.) and innovation professionals are debating how their organisations should best interact with its external environment. These developments take place in parallel to the breath-taking speed of technological advancement and the concomitant need to understand and deploy digital technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence in the context of open and user innovation activities. Finally, these technologies may hold the key for entirely new forms of organising to which user and open innovation are crucial, such as innovation ecosystems, or forms of user-led and user-centred organising, which may potentially function even without the involvement of firms. In parallel with this development, the academic literature on open and user innovation has grown significantly – 2018 will mark the 30th anniversary of Eric von Hippel’s book ‘The Sources of Innovation’. Yet, beyond isolated efforts at consolidating the field (e.g., West & Bogers, 2014; Bogers et al., 2017), we still struggle to clearly identify the core tenets, and in particular, the boundary conditions of open and user innovation. These two elements, however, are crucial for user and open innovation to make the ‘next step’ – to move from a challenger of an existing paradigm to a theoretical approach in its own right. In short – when, where, how and why do user and open innovation ‘apply’, and, in particular apply more or better than potentially related concepts from innovation studies and adjacent fields, including strategy, entrepreneurship, psychology, organisation theory, sociology or marketing, among others? Consequently, we argue that while we have a good notion of the limitations of current theorising on open and user innovation as well as ideas for further research, we need to develop and test both new and established theories. To facilitate this effort, we seek papers that generate new insights into questions including: why internally and externally located individuals voluntarily transfer and generate new knowledge; when, why and how users interact to develop innovation; how companies can enhance this proactive behaviour through network creation, rewards and leadership; how the quality of externally sourced