Suchergebnisse

Studies of the sources of innovations have recognized that many innovations are developed by users. However, the fact that firms employ communities of users to strengthen their innovation process has not yet received much attention. In online firm-hosted user communities, users freely reveal innovations to a firm's product platform, which can put the firm in a favorable position (a) because these new product features become available to all users through sharing on a user-to-user basis, or (b) because it allows the firm to pick up the innovations and integrate them in future products and then benefit by selling them to all users. We study the key personal attributes of the individuals responsible for innovations, namely the innovative users, to explain creation of value in this organizational context. The main question is why such users contribute to firm-hosted user communities. Analyzing data derived from multiple sources (interviews, a Web-log, and questionnaires), we find that innovative users are likely to be (i) hobbyists, an attribute that can be assumed to (positively) affect innovators' willingness to share innovations, and (ii) responsive to "firm recognition" as a motivating factor for undertaking innovation, which explains their decision to join the firm's domain. In agreement with earlier studies, we also find that innovative users are likely to be "lead users," an attribute that we assume to affect the quality of user innovation. Whether or not a firm-hosted user community can be turned into an asset for the firm is to a great extent conditional on the issues studied in this paper.

We examine who the winners are in science problem-solving contests characterized by open broadcast of problem information, self-selection of external solvers to discrete problems from the laboratories of large research and development intensive companies, and blind review of solution submissions. Analyzing a unique data set of 166 science challenges involving over 12,000 scientists revealed that technical and social marginality, being a source of different perspectives and heuristics, plays an important role in explaining individual success in problem solving. The provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solver's field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem. Female solvers—known to be in the "outer circle" of the scientific establishment—performed significantly better than men in developing successful solutions. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on open and distributed innovation by demonstrating the value of openness, at least narrowly defined by disclosing problems, in removing barriers to entry to nonobvious individuals. We also contribute to the knowledge-based theory of the firm by showing the effectiveness of a market mechanism to draw out knowledge from diverse external sources to solve internal problems.