Victor P. Seidel

Managing the Repertoire: Stories, Metaphors, Prototypes, and Concept Coherence in Product Innovation

Arecognized challenge in innovation scholarship is how to coordinate the efforts of many minds contributing to the design of a single artifact. Much research shows that product concept representations can help coordinate design tasks, but we know little about the practices that make representations more or less effective. We used an inductive approach to examine how six teams in three industries used concept representations when creating novel products. All six teams crafted three types of representations: stories, metaphors, and prototypes. However, merely using representations did not ensure a shared repertoire and concept coherence—a common understanding of desired product attributes. Teams that failed to consistently engage in three practices—(1) collective scrutiny of representations, (2) linking representations to design constraints, and (3) active editing of representations—produced concept disunity, with disparate understandings of desired product attributes. Teams that maintained concept coherence were better able to coordinate design tasks than teams that experienced concept disunity. Our research explains how the ultimate effect of concept representations on the coordination of innovation is contingent on the practices used to manage a repertoire of representations in use.

Dominant Communities and Dominant Designs: Community-Based Innovation in the Context of the Technology Life Cycle

Online community–based innovation—whether through self-organized communities, firm–community collaborations, or innovation contests and crowdsourcing—is increasingly used as a source of technological advances, yet studies in this domain are often detached from considering the dynamics of technological evolution itself. Where technological advances reside (knowledge distribution), the degree to which innovation tasks can be specified (task decomposition) and the rate of technological progress (performance trajectory) all vary dramatically over the technology life cycle. These factors have implications for what forms of online crowds and communities are most likely to contribute technological advances. We provide a dynamic model of the expected “dominant communities” for technological advances at each phase of the life cycle, and we draw on examples from open-source software and consumer three-dimensional printing to illustrate the model. Our objectives are to determine how different forms of community-based innovation dominate at different times, to ground innovation models more firmly in material technological advances, and to provide focus for future research in this domain.

Help Me Do it on My Own: How Entrepreneurs Manage Autonomy and Constraint within Incubator Organizations

Scholars have studied how entrepreneurs acquire resources but have not examined how resources may be bundled with constraints, which can threaten entrepreneurial autonomy. Organizational sponsors, such as incubators and accelerators, provide entrepreneurs with resources, but how do entrepreneurs sustain autonomy while seeking resources and support? We studied five entrepreneurial firms in a business incubator over a six-month period. While benefiting from incubator resources, entrepreneurs also experienced unexpected constraints, including mentor role conflict, gatekeeper control, and affiliation dissonance. By showing how entrepreneurs unbundled the incubator’s resources from constraints, we explain how entrepreneurs manage the tension between acquiring resources and preserving autonomy.