Mats Edenius

A Review of Technologies for Open Innovation: Characteristics and Future Trends

Fuelled by increased interest among organizations to team up with their customers, technologies for supporting open innovation are emerging. In this paper, we explore how current technologies are designed to support open innovation, in order to envision future developments and research challenges. A sample of 51 systems has been classified. Surprisingly, we found that most technologies for open innovation are not very innovative because they provide similar features. Typically, users are asked to suggest ideas or solve predefined problems in collaboration with others. By drawing on our review, we identified four types of open innovation systems: idea management system, problem solving system, marketplace system and innovation analysis system. In conclusion, we noted that a key challenge for research and practice is to gain a deeper understanding of how collaboration technologies can be connected with more sophisticated opportunities for reflection and analysis.

Designing for complex innovations in health care: design theory and realist evaluation combined

Innovations in health care are often characterized by complexity and fuzzy boundaries, involving both the elements of the innovation and the organizational structure required for a full implementation. Evaluation in health care is traditionally based on the collection and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge stating the randomized controlled trial, and the quasi-experimental study design as the most rigorous and ideal approaches. These evaluation approaches capture neither the complexity of innovations in health care, nor the characteristics of the organizational structure of the innovation. As a result, the reasons for innovations in health care not being disseminated are not fully explained. The aim of the paper is to present a design - evaluation framework for complex innovations in health care in order to understand what works for whom under what circumstances by combining design theory and realist evaluation. The framework is based on research findings of a case study of a complex innovation, a health care quality register, in order to understand underlying assumptions behind the design of the innovation, as well as the characteristics of the implementation process. The design - evaluation cycle is hypothesized to improve the design and implementation of complex innovation by using program/kernel theories to develop design propositions, which are evaluated by realistic evaluation, resulting in further refinement of program/kernel theories. The goal of the design - evaluation cycle is to provide support to implementers and practitioners in designing and implementing complex innovations in health care. As a result, the design - evaluation cycle could provide opportunities of improving dissemination of complex innovations in health care.

Open Service Innovation in Health Care: What Can We Learn from Open Innovation Communities?

The purpose of the chapter is to describe and discuss how principles from open innovation, which are primarily derived from commercial product development, could be applied to open service innovation in non-profit health care organisations. To evaluate the drivers, barriers and prerequisites of such innovation, we performed an explorative study consisting of interviews with two rheumatologists, engaged in a Swedish research project on open innovation in health care. According to the interviews, the main driver was considered to be “the empowered patient”, holding a good knowledge of his or her disease. Barriers to open innovation were the lack of meeting places for patients, a strong local variation in how health care services are delivered and an organisational culture which does not promote learning and innovations. It is necessary for health care organisations to change their current culture of closed innovation, implying that only physicians have valid knowledge about patients’ diseases. Other necessary prerequisites for implementing open innovation principles are support from management and structures of financial control which encourage innovations. This explorative study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to combine principles of open innovation and health care services.

Managing Open Innovation Technologies

Open innovation increases the profit of companies and organizations via the input and the adoption of new ideas that are transformed into new processes, products, and services. Yet, how do we ensure that adopters of such innovations focus on relevant problems and use appropriate methods? How should we manage open innovation technologies? How can we exploit distributed knowledge and inventions? And how can we promote them successfully on the market? With valuable lessons to be learned from academic research and industrial experiences of e.g. Intel, Nokia, Philips Healthcare, small municipalities, e-learning platforms and user communities, this book focuses on some of the key dimensions of open innovation and open innovation technologies. It is divided into three themes: theme 1 deals with open innovation as it is in use today, including theoretical underpinnings and lessons from related research fields. Theme 2 analyzes the use of open innovation in organizations today in order to extract best practices. Theme 3 presents forward-looking theoretical research as well as practical future uses of open innovation. Each chapter addresses the particular topics by presenting experiences and results gained in real life projects and/or by empirical research, and clearly states its purpose and how readers are supposed to benefit from it. Overall, the objectives of this book are to advance and disseminate research on systematic open innovation, and to make its results available to practitioners. Thus, the intended target audience includes the international academic community, industrial enterprises, and public authorities.

How can software support open innovation? Extending community and marketplace perspectives

Fuelled by increased interest among organisations to team up with customers and partners, software for supporting open innovation is emerging. In this paper, we explore how current open innovation software are designed, by whom they are used and reflect on their potential to support open innovation processes. We classified a sample of 51 systems and found, based on a correlation analysis, that most open innovation software focus on supporting online communities of innovation and some software support online marketplaces of innovation. A vast majority of open innovation software focuses on the front end of open innovation through an emphasis on the collection of ideas or problem solutions requested by authorities in technology industries. In the end of the paper, we suggest key questions that need to be addressed in order to design the next wave of open innovation software.

An Office on the Go: Professional Workers, Smartphones and the Return of Place

In this paper, the authors examine how senior managers, as professional workers, in a leading ICT company use smartphones, according to new configurations of time and space. Of special interest is how smartphones act as comforting handheld consoles without being rooted in physical location. Three non-physical places, as spatial nodes, are presented: pause in the temporal current, place as a function of the intensity of communication, and place in terms of becoming rooted by felt value. The authors argue that highlighting non-physical places as structures emanating from the use of smartphones is an important variable to account for when studying how professionals use smartphones, both in instrumental and non-instrumental terms.

The hipster’s dilemma

This article sets out to explore the phenomenon of willing digital disconnect by reconsidering and reworking some of the central ideas that currently fall under the umbrella of technological non-use. The presupposition of binary divisions between the dichotomies ‘users’–‘non-users’ and ‘analogue’–‘digital’ is put into question as the article explores the taking up of predigital technologies and the explicit and implicit disengagement from contemporary digital technologies. In short, this article asks: What does the contemporary revival of analogue technologies reveal about the social and material processes that constitute ‘use’, and what are the implications for the conceptual division of the terms analogue and digital? To answer these questions, the article draws on assemblage theory to describe the material and expressive performativity of social structure – that is, how individuals interact with technology. Empirical evidence comes from three illustrative cases where predigital technologies have replaced an existing digital alternative. Results emphasize the importance of understanding the material and expressive reconfigurations that underline technological use in a post-digital society in order to move beyond binary concepts such as analogue/digital or use/non-use as well as concepts such as the digital divide.

Governing Is in the Details—The Longitudinal Impact of IT-related Policy Management for Public Boards

Decision makers increasingly enforce policies of digitalization of everyday activities. The aim of this study is to examine, at the micro level, the practices and their impact of people transforming the way they conduct their public board work due to an IT-related policy decision. We argue for analysis of the seemingly small, slow, yet fundamental interactions with which humans shape and reinvent organizational life. Our approach provides insights into the impact of implementation of policy decisions and how change of seemingly mundane activities creates the evolution of new structures and practices of importance. Our study highlights a reconstitution of routines and change of anchoring practices of a public board that (a) anchors new material to a board member’s responsibilities without utilizing its inherent advantages, (b) anchors new conflicting routines while abandoning well established ones, and (c) results in new routines that weaken fundamental goals of the board member’s role and work counterproductive to human cognition.

On Sustaining Sustainability: The Case of Implementing Decisions Based on Policies for a Sustainable Future via Tablets in a Board of a Swedish Housing Corporation

Catering for sustainability concerns and enterprise mobility for administrations, handheld artifacts of Information and Communication Technology (e.g., tablets and smartphones) are making their way into organizational administration. Often such change is the result of decisions aimed at implementing policies for a more sustainable future, intending to support a shift from paper to digital. For this reason, a deeper understanding of tablets as the means to enable robust and efficient implementation of policies for sustainability is essential. This chapter examines how a decision made by one of the largest municipal boards in Sweden on reducing the use of paper in the municipality was implemented as an introduction of tablets in one of the municipal sub-boards, the board of one of the municipally owned housing corporations (HC), and how the decision prompted changes in the board work setup, raised issues concerning security and privacy of data while yet failing to implement most of the targeted sustainability policies. We adopt the Belief-Action-Outcome framework of Melville (MIS Q 31: 1–21, 2010) as our theoretical lens on how the actual use of the tablets emanates from the social practices of the board, and how the implementation of the sustainability policy of the municipality thus affected the alignment of the board work and the organization’s policies on sustainability. The empirical material consists of interviews and observations in the board of one of the municipally owned housing corporations. The contribution includes an account as to how a decision to implement policies for sustainability via new technology serve as a catalyst to establish and reproduce new setups and practices. However, in order to adopt the new technology, it may also partly or completely reinvent well-established practices without aligning it to the intended policies. Key highlights are the importance for decision makers to consider a broader context and to see the complexity of the practices of the organization, and the role this plays for the implications of making policies on organizational changes sustainable.

To trust upon that someone trusts upon yourself influences of trust and other factors on an intranet based leader strategy

In this paper we explore the theoretical concept of trust by putting it in to play empirically. Influences of trust on an Intranet based leader strategy in a big organisation are investigated. We also discuss other significant features that affect success or no success of such approach. The presentation builds on an interview study in one district of Stockholm, Norrmalm, and a survey committed in two districts of this city (Spanga-Tensta and Skarholmen). This paper is conducted in the field of Human Computer Interaction.