Search results

Firms increasingly integrate a wide range of actors in the early ideation and concept creation phases of innovation processes leading to the collection of a large number of ideas. This creates the challenge of filtering the most promising ideas from a large number of submissions. The use of external stakeholders into the evaluation and selection of submissions (i.e. open evaluation (OE)) might be a viable alternative. The purpose of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art analysis on how such OE systems are designed and structured.

Since OE is a new phenomenon, an exploratory qualitative research approach is adopted. In all, 122 instances of OE in 90 innovation contest cases are examined for their design elements.

This research reveals that OE systems are configured in many different ways. In total, 32 design elements and their respective parameters are identified and described along the six socio-technical system components of an OE system. This study allows for a comprehensive understanding of what OE is and what factors need to be taken into consideration when designing an OE system.

Scholars and professionals may draw insights on what design choices to make when implementing OE.

The comprehensive analysis performed in this study contributes to research on open and user innovation by examining the concept of OE. In particular, it extends knowledge on design elements of OE systems.

This program is directed to everyone, no matter the scholar level. However, each team must have at least one student or former student that must be part of one of the project partners (Polytechnic Institutes and non-integrated high schools).

The Poliempreende is a program focused on the promotion and development of the entrepreneurship among the polytechnics’ academic community. It consists of an ideas contest based in a great program of training sessions included on the activities plan. These sessions are oriented for ideation and construction of business plans. Considering the contest, it has a regional and a national phase. In both regional and national levels, the best three projects are chosen and earn prizes.

The project focuses on the cross-fertilization of knowledge area with the consequent enrichment of experiences, practices, and results, in particular by encouraging the setting up of multidisciplinary teams, with the goal to instill the spirit of initiative in the participants, the entrepreneurial willingness to create their own businesses and generate jobs, exploring the practical and professional character of their training.

The Poliempreende is also a project with a great regional impact, not only because the Polytechnics have a strong influence in the region where they are implemented, involving several entities, individualities, and local sponsors, but also because this program is open to any business idea, from engineering to hospitality, passing from health and culture, which permits a closer application and answer to local needs, anticipating the legacy that Carnegie Mellon/Portugal Program wants to leave to us (Foundation for Science and Technology (2009)).

This program intends to provide participants with the necessary skills for the creation of business initiatives, to promote, and to encourage the entrepreneurship, in an approach of economic and social action through self-employment.

Power-point presentations and support documents are available only for the participants in the training sessions.

The purpose of this study is to identify the problems and possibilities for development of innovative start-ups in Latvia.

To achieve the aim of this study, a survey of Latvia’s high school students in 2015 (n = 5,910) was undertaken by an online questionnaire within a financial skill built-up contest “New Financial Expert 2016” held by the Financial Institute of Swedbank (Swedbank survey, 2016). Further, Latvia University of Agriculture master students (n = 97) were interviewed in the year 2016 to identify master students opinion about necessary support for entrepreneurship, future services or goods with potentially high added value and find out their readiness for innovative action.

A comparative analysis of data of the master student interviews and the survey of Latvia’s high school students showed that most of the youth associated their entrepreneurship prospects with innovative ideas, new technologies and new skills. The results of the research indicated that the foundation of start-up enterprises in Latvia led to positive results and gave an impulse to increasing economic activities as there were the necessary preconditions for their development.

The studies are mostly dedicated to start-ups that are less likely to innovate and have linked the concept of the start-up with business incubation. Unlike other studies, this is a specific research that provides insights into the situation in Latvia and is directed toward building innovative start-up enterprises that should be linked with the growth-oriented new technology, globalization and global market with a focus on innovation. Thus, research findings contribute to extant research on the possibilities of development of innovative start-up enterprises in Latvia and advance the present understanding of the main problems in the creation of new innovative start-ups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how important technology transfer offices (TTOs) – which in Portuguese are called “industrial property support offices” or GAPIs – are in terms of fostering patent applications and technology transfer in countries characterized by low performance records in these activities.

Among the existing 23 Portuguese GAPIs, only eight agreed to provide answers to a semi-structured questionnaire survey. Content analysis was performed on the data collected using NVivo software.

The results show that GAPIs play an important role in the innovation life-cycle, speeding up the transfer of knowledge and technology to society. The regulation of intellectual property (IP) ownership and royalty sharing with inventors was identified as a major result, strengthening entrepreneurial universities’ role. In addition, after the GAPIs were created, networks were formed that facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience and promote the development of further collaborative partnerships.

This study’s results offer new insights into how GAPIs contribute to socio-economic growth by fostering more entrepreneurial universities and increasing the transfer of technology to society. In addition, these offices promote the creation of networks between GAPIs, enabling them to leverage universities’ potential for participation in socio-economic development.

No previous research has focused on GAPIs/TTOs’ point of view regarding policies that enhance IP and technology/knowledge transfer.

Our aim is to better understand access to finance and financial inclusion and how this impacts the development of female-run enterprises in Nigeria. In such a way, we can better understand the gendered context of entrepreneurship and the implications for business growth. This chapter adopts an interpretivist paradigm to explore the social reality within which entrepreneurship is enacted. Qualitative data are interpreted from semi-structured interviews of 10 Nigerian entrepreneurs, five males and five females. Findings reveal that, though structural support may be apparent, the entrepreneurial process of financing a business is characterised, in part, by social expectations of gender. It is through this social view of entrepreneurship that we provide an understanding of what it is to be entrepreneurial in practice. This chapter makes recommendations that in practice while financial institutions and policy makers may assume a ‘one size fits all’ approach to financial inclusion through different programmes currently available for entrepreneurs by the various governmental and non-governmental institutions in Nigeria, the context of gender has implications for the nature of business activity, particularly in a society characterised by patriarchy. This study also makes practical contributions for research and for practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore consequences of the use of social media for idea generation.

The paper analyzes over 600 ideas submitted to a Slate‐Twitter contest to find the best short characterization of the American Declaration of Independence. These findings are then compared with those of Kornish and Ulrich, who analyzed idea‐contests in classroom settings.

In the Slate‐Twitter contest, repetition of ideas was rare while recombination was frequent. The evolution in the total number of unique ideas suggests that the contest became more focused over time. It also appears that ideas that are recognized as valuable attract similar ideas in turn.

Further checks will be needed with regard to the robustness of the findings. Furthermore, while the current analysis relies on peer review by participants to the contest to value submissions, results might be different if it were done on the basis of independent external reviews. Conceptually, the findings suggest that idea generation via social media has a more iterative character than previously analyzed forms of broadcast search. Future research could investigate what triggers more exploration and exploitation of ideas in this process.

For businesses, which are more and more encouraged to engage in open innovation, the analysis can serve as guide on the use of social media for information collection.

The paper provides a simple and effective method to monitor social media, which firms can use to their advantage.

This study aims to demonstrate how destination management organizations can fruitfully harvest users’ ideas by facilitating an online idea contest to enhance value creation and innovation processes. The structure of the idea quality, contest-related factors and user-related factors are investigated in relation to the overall quality of the ideas submitted by users.

A total of 489 ideas were assessed based on the overall quality and effects of various factors. A structural model was tested to analyze the dimensions contributing to quality of the submissions that influence the overall idea quality. Furthermore, non-parametric tests were performed to reveal how specific user traits as well as contest-related traits relate to overall idea quality. Lastly, post-hoc analyses were performed to reveal if mean values differ among users who are grouped according to age, overall idea quality, place of residence and age at time of submission.

The study demonstrates that novelty, feasibility, relevance and elaboration explain overall idea quality. Only the age of the idea submitter exhibits an impact on the level of idea quality, wherein younger users tend to submit higher quality ideas. The areas of innovation significantly differ depending on the users’ place of residence and age. Moreover, none of the contest-related traits that were analyzed have an impact on the level of overall idea quality.

Marketing managers and destination management organizations are given a set of recommendations on how to facilitate internet-based participation tools, such as idea contests, to collect high-quality input from various user segments and, subsequently, to feed their value creation and innovation processes.

Within the field of tourism, the open tourism paradigm is relatively new. New insights into the role of online tools, and how they can be leveraged to harvest users’ ideas, as well as users’ capabilities for enhancing tourism firms’ value creation and innovation processes, are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the different heuristics adopted by a crowd and a management committee to evaluate new product proposals, and whether, in assessing the value of proposals, they emphasize different features.

The study takes a quantitative analysis approach to study an internal innovation contest held by the biotechnology company Novozymes. The contest generated 201 proposals that were evaluated by 109 research and development professionals by means of a virtual preference market, and by a management committee.

The crowd and the committees’ assessments of the value of the proposals were based on different features. The committee emphasized experience and inventors’ seniority; the crowd set more store on informative idea descriptions but penalized overly complex and lengthy proposals.

The design of the innovation contest does not allow full comparison of the preference functions of crowd and committee. The findings from this case study cannot be generalized. The early stage of new product development seems fruitful for investigating crowdsourcing and knowledge management.

Firms should consider adopting preference markets for idea screening and evaluation since they appraise ideas from different angles compared to managers. However, they complement, rather than substitute managerial evaluation, especially in the case of more detailed proposals.

This is one of the first attempts to identify differences in the decision-making processes of crowds and committees. The paper identifies their strengths as evaluators of new product ideas and finds that the “wisdom of crowds” has some limitations in relation to the ability to process complex information.

There are still many different theoretical approaches and practical interpretations about what an integrated report is. Starting from this premise, the overall purpose of this chapter is to critically analyze the relationship between integrated reporting (IR) and social/sustainability disclosure. Indeed, although some scholars considered IR as a tool to improve the sustainability approach of the companies allowing to disclose more relevant social information, others are more critical about the potentiality of IR to improve social disclosure. Therefore, the general research question is: Is there a natural link between IR and social disclosure (true love) or is the IR a practice to “normalize” the social disclosure and accounting (forced marriage)?

In the attempt to provide a preliminary answer to the research question, the chapter analyzes what is the approach of three categories: (1) academics; (2) soft-regulators; and (3) companies. From the methodological point of view, a mixed method of analysis has been adopted.

From the analysis of the three different points of view, IR can be considered as a “contested concept” because of the heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting interpretations and implementation that are done on this type of report. This leads to relevant theoretical and practical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevant factors that influence the implementation of innovation contests, an open innovation (OI) practice that has been extensively reported in the literature as a managerial tool for external knowledge search. The authors focus the study on the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The approach is a retrospective case study. This methodology allows an in-depth view into a Spanish SME that successfully undertook two new product development processes thanks to the deployment of innovation contests.

The main context factors influencing innovation contests as managerial tool are ambidexterity, technological and marketing turbulence and intermediaries, among others. Regarding design factors, this work highlights the role of attraction and facilitation. Additionally, the repetitive implementation of innovation contests creates a corporate culture that promotes OI activities.

Managers will understand that they can use innovation contests as a managerial tool, and knowing the factors that need to be taken into account when implementing an innovation contest will help SMEs managers to make better use of this practice.

This case study enriches the literature of both innovation contests and topics relevant to SMEs. Based on a theoretical framework of the design factors that influence the implementation of innovation contests, the authors propose a research framework that incorporates those context factors in association with an SME.