Guest editorial

Citation

Kautz, K. (2009), "Guest editorial", Information Technology & People, Vol. 22 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2009.16122daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Information Technology & People, Volume 22, Issue 4

Many organisations have the attitude that innovative work and the generation of new ideas is an internal affair that should be closed for the surrounding world. This has changed during recent years and more and more organisations see benefits in opening up their innovation process. Open innovation means that valuable ideas can come from both inside or outside the company and can go to the market from inside and outside the company. Organisations committing to open innovation view the outside world as a source of inspiration and accept the strategic potential of letting other organisations contribute to the innovation process. Chesbrough (2003) argues that with open innovation organisations recognise that:

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  not all the smart people work for us; we need to work with smart people inside and outside our company;

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  external R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value;

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  we don’t have to originate the research to profit from it;

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  building a better business model is better than getting to market first;

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  if we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win; and

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  we should profit from others’ use of our intellectual properties, and we should buy others’ intellectual properties whenever it advances our own business model.

He also distinguishes innovative processes in research and development. In the research processes initial analysis and design tasks are performed, while the construction of the product takes place in the development phase. This allows for a clear distinction of the processes, but also leads to coordination and communication problems when creating new products as it does not consider their mutual dependency. This problem is solved through continuous mutual adjustment which is a much more complex task when performed across organisational boundaries compared to closed innovation. However the advantages of letting other organisations contribute to the development of new products often outweigh the difficulties of coordinating inter-organisational processes. In contrast to closed innovation where the organisational boundaries lock out any participation of external organisations there are different ways how external organisations can contribute to the open innovation process (see Figure 1). They can participate in the research and development of the product, resell the product, promote the product, or build upon the existing product (Chesbrough, 2006).

Figure 1 Innovative processes in closed and open innovation

This is also true for the IT industry where even the most innovative firms cannot possess all the knowledge and business assets they need to be competitive. They must frequently rely on formal and informal agreements with partners not only in order to cooperate in technology/product development or system integration, but also to complete their capabilities in the associated technology transfer or diffusion activities. As a consequence, technology based innovation processes are changing to adapt themselves to deep changes in organisational contexts and they are becoming more open. To analyse this changing and challenging situation, the 11th IFIP Working Group 8.6 – a working group devoted to the diffusion, transfer and implementation of information technology – Working Conference was dedicated to IT-based Open Innovation and provided a forum where practitioners and researchers were able to interact and exchange experiences about how to foster innovation using open IT-based strategies of collaboration and knowledge diffusion.

From the wealth of conference papers we chose five that demonstrate the breadth and depth of research on open IT-based innovation.

In “Institutionalising information asymmetry: governance structures for open innovation” Feller, Finnegan, Hayes and O’Reilly explore the ways in which firms utilise hierarchical relationships and the market to supply and acquire intellectual property (IP) and/or innovation capabilities from sources external to the firm. They conducted a field study to explore emerging governance structures for open innovation. Their analysis of seven exemplars of open innovation reveals that inter-organisational relationships that facilitate open innovation can be categorised based on whether they are mediated or direct, and seek to exchange intellectual property or innovation capability. They present an analysis that reveals four governance structures along ten dimensions, and discuss the influence of knowledge dispersion, uncertainty and transaction costs on the emergence of such structures. They conclude that the appropriateness of hierarchical and market relationships or intermediaries to source IP and/or innovation capability is dependent on the information asymmetry in relation to:

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  the existence and availability of potential solutions or solvers;

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  the suitability of potential innovation partners, solution providers and solvers; and

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  the acquisition process for external innovations including problem specifications and solution evaluations.

Ponte, Rossi and Zamarian investigate in “Cooperative design efforts for the development of complex IT-artefacts”. The factors and relationships that influence cooperative IT-artefact design, in particular the early phases of such design process. This work studies whether and to what extent the design of an IT-artefact is driven by the interests of a number of heterogeneous actors and how these are able to affect the artefact’s evolution. The research presents a case study analysis, which focuses on a consortium of heterogeneous actors, firms, the public sector, research institutes that work within the green energy industry. It focuses on a workgroup that attempted to develop an innovative IT-artefact: an innovative electronic metering system. The study’s main results are:

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  the relevance of each actor’s interests as a prevalent rationale for explaining the technical features of the IT-artefact;

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  the role of negotiation and consensus in determining the final shape of the IT-artefact in terms of its features; and

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  the bundling/unbundling of IT-artefact features as a result of changes in the alignment of actors.

The findings indicate that in an open and collaborative environment, the conceptualisation and evolution of an IT-artefact are influenced more by the political agendas of the various actors rather than by pure technical problems and concerns.

Wastell, Sauer and Schmeink present with “Time for a ‘design turn’ in IS innovation research? A practice report from the home front” design science study which also deals with energy savings. Two experiments conducted as a medium-fidelity laboratory simulations are reported, both concerning the design of the user interface for domestic heating systems. The authors found that:

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  ecologically designed feedback, embodying a strong mapping between task goals and system status, produced superior task performance; and

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  predictive decision aids provided clear benefits over other forms of user support, such as advisory systems.

Whilst arguing the general case for design science and demonstrating the benefits of “microworld” experiments as contributors to open innovation, the study shows that there are major challenges of constructing realistic meta-artefacts, compounded by the complex, nature of design theory.

In another study of a heterogeneous innovation network Cho, Mathiassen and Gallivan, in “Crossing the diffusion chasm: from invention to penetration of a telehealth innovation” explain the paradox between the high potential of telehealth innovations and their slow diffusion by investigating the challenges involved in a successful case. Their longitudinal study of a telestroke program from 2003-2007 takes the viewpoint of the inventors, which quite unusual for the study the diffusion and adoption of (IT) innovation. The innovation, which was initially used by a network of hospitals, faced several challenges when the inventors sought to diffuse it to a broader marketplace. But, the inventors eventually succeeded to create a viable technology and business model. The study provides a process model of the telehealth innovation consisting of four phases: invention, pilot test, commercialisation, and penetration – with each phase demarcated by specific actors and activities. It also identifies a chasm between the pilot test within a network of hospitals and the subsequent commercialisation of a product aimed for the market. Finally, it reveals how key actors negotiated the chasm to successfully diffuse the innovation beyond the initial hospital setting.

Finally Grøtnes in “Standardisation as open innovation: two cases from the mobile industry” introduces standardisation as a neutral arena for open innovation. He shows that different policies towards open membership in standardisation initiatives lead to different open innovation processes. Two cases are used to illustrate the differences in open innovation processes to create standards. Open membership leads to a coupled process, while a more restricted membership gives separate inside-out and outside-in processes. The case lead by established firms in the industry has a process where radical innovations are introduced early in the process, while the case lead by newcomers has a process where radical innovations are introduced late in the process. The two cases have different approaches towards commercialisation of the products. One relies on third-party developers, while the other on their own members.

Karlheinz Kautz, Gonzalo León Serrano, Ana Bernardos Barbolla, José Ramón Casar CorrederaGuest Editors