We study how an individual's exposure to external information regulates the evaluation of entrepreneurial opportunities and entrepreneurial action. Combining data from interviews, a survey, and a ...comprehensive web log of an online user community spanning eight years, we find that technical information shaped opportunity evaluation and that social information about user needs drove individuals to entrepreneurial action. Our empirical findings suggest that reducing demand uncertainty is a central factor regulating entrepreneurial action, an insight that received theories of entrepreneurial action have so far overlooked.
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•Most organizations fail to elicit suggestions from external contributors.•Organizations can motivate external contributors by implementing their suggestions.•Organizations can motivate external ...contributors by making their own internal suggestions public.•Organizations’ actions exert more influence in initiatives that lack a history of prior suggestions.•Newcomers are more susceptible to organizations’ actions than established contributors.
This paper analyzes organizations’ attempts to entice external contributors to submit suggestions for future organizational action. While earlier work has elaborated on the advantages of leveraging the knowledge of external contributors, our findings show that organizational attempts to attract such involvement are likely to wither and die. We develop arguments about what increases the likelihood of getting suggestions from externals in the future, namely through (1) proactive attention (submitting internally developed suggestions to externals to stimulate debate) and (2) reactive attention (paying attention to suggestions from externals to signal they are being listened to), particularly when those suggestions are submitted by newcomers. Findings from an analysis of about 24,000 initiatives by organizations to involve external contributors suggest these actions are crucial for receiving suggestions from external contributors. Our results are contingent upon the stage of the initiative because organizations’ actions exert more influence in initiatives that lack a history of prior suggestions. Our work has implications for scholars of open innovation because it highlights the importance of considering failures as well successes: focusing exclusively on initiatives that reach a certain stage can lead to partial or erroneous conclusions about why some organizations engage external contributors while others fail.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Building on a unique, multi-source, and multi-method study of R&D projects in a leading professional services firm, we develop the argument that organizations are more likely to fund projects with ...intermediate levels of novelty. That is, some project novelty increases the share of requested funds received, but too much novelty is difficult to appreciate and is selected against. While prior research has considered the characteristics of the individuals generating project ideas, we shift the focus to the panel of selectors and explore how they shape the evaluation of novelty. We theorize that a high panel workload reduces panel preference for novelty in selection, whereas a diversity of panel expertise and a shared location between panel and applicant increase preference for novelty. We explore the implications of these findings for theories of innovation search, organizational selection, and managerial practice.
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The "variance hypothesis" predicts that external search breadth leads to innovation outcomes, but people have limited attention for search and cultivating breadth consumes attention. How does ...individuals' search breadth affect innovation outcomes? How does individuals' allocation of attention affect the efficacy of search breadth? We matched survey data with complete patent records, to examine the search behaviors of elite boundary spanners at IBM. Surprisingly, individuals who allocated attention to people inside the firm were more innovative. Individuals with high external search breadth were more innovative only when they allocated more attention to those sources. Our research identifies limits to the "variance hypothesis" and reveals two successful approaches to innovation search: "cosmopolitans" who cultivate and attend to external people and "locals" who draw upon internal people.
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Crowdsourcing-asking an undefined group of external contributors to work on tasks-allows organizations to tap into the expertise of people around the world. Crowdsourcing is known to increase ...innovation and loyalty to brands, but many organizations struggle to leverage its potential, as our research shows. Most often this is because organizations fail to properly plan for all the different stages of crowd engagement. In this paper, we use several examples to explain these challenges and offer advice for how organizations can overcome them.
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CEKLJ, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
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.
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The Semiformal Organization Biancani, Susan; McFarland, Daniel A.
Organization science (Providence, R.I.),
09/2014, Volume:
25, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper draws attention to a new dimension of organization, the semiformal organization, and it reveals how the allocation of different membership forms can render knowledge-intensive ...organizations more flexible and exploratory in their knowledge creation efforts without sacrificing the functions stably enacted via the formal organization. Most knowledge-intensive organizations seek to create new spaces for collaborations through formally prescribed departments and divisions or through serendipitous, emergent, informal associations (i.e., the formal and informal organization). However, organizations also strategically manage what we call the “semiformal organization” to guide the creation of new work relations and encourage innovation. These secondary memberships are organizationally sponsored and directly related to the organizations’ core research functions, but they are voluntarily joined. As such, they are distinct from formal and informal memberships. On the basis of extensive longitudinal analyses of research initiatives at Stanford University, we find that the semiformal organization provides a compelling channel through which organizations can shape employees’ collaborations and overall productivity.
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While the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is pervasive, many companies struggle with AI implementation challenges. This article presents results from a survey of 2,525 decision-makers with AI ...experience in China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as well as interviews with 16 AI implementation experts—in order to understand the challenges companies face when implementing AI. The study covers technological, organizational, and cultural factors and identifies key challenges and solutions for AI implementation. This article develops a diagnostic framework to help executives navigate AI challenges as companies gain momentum, manage organization-wide complexities, and curate a network of partners, algorithms, and data sources to create value through AI.
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When organizations crowdsource ideas, they select only a small share of the ideas that contributors submit for implementation. If a contributor submits an idea to an organization for the first time ...(i.e., is a newcomer), and the organization does not select the idea, this may negatively affect the newcomer's relationship with the organization and willingness to submit ideas to the organization in future. We suggest that organizations can increase newcomers' willingness to submit further ideas by providing a thus far understudied form of feedback: rejections. Though counterintuitive, we suggest that rejections encourage newcomers to bond with an organization. Rejections signal contributors that an organization is interested in receiving their ideas and developing relationships with them. To test our theory, we examine the crowdsourcing of 70,159 organizations that received ideas from 1,336,154 contributors. Using text analysis, we examine differences in how rejections are written to disentangle the mechanisms through which rejections affect contributors' willingness to continue to interact with an organization. We find that receiving a rejection positively impacts newcomers' willingness to submit ideas in future. This effect is stronger if the rejection includes an explanation and is particularly pronounced if the explanation matches the original idea in terms of linguistic style.
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