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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.

The purpose of this paper is to explore when, why and to what extent firms should intervene in firm-hosted idea-generation communities, and to develop a framework for firm-intervention.

A single case-study is conducted in a highly successful firm-hosted idea-generation community called Dell IdeaStorm, whereby the netnographic approach is applied.

The findings indicate that, overall, firm-participation is minimal and passive, and varies according to the three stages of the idea lifecycle in the community, such as ideation stage – here firm-participation is limited to acknowledgement of new ideas, checking for redundancy, managing search tool and profanity filtering; discussion and development stage – here firm-participation is more active by providing feedback and clarification when needed, troubleshooting, asking for additional input on an idea, etc.; and completion stage – here a firm intervenes to screen and select the most promising ideas for implementation and also provides status updates on ideas.

This study contributes by developing a new framework for firm-participation, which is useful for the early diagnosis of community issues in idea generation. The framework is also a tactical tool which can be used to guide community managers in selecting the correct moderation approach, depending on the specific stage in the idea lifecycle.

Over the past years, many studies have explored the role of knowledge management (KM) in companies. KM is concerned with the measurement of knowledge to manage knowledge efficiently. On the other hand, the intangible nature of knowledge makes its measurement challenging. Furthermore, there is no standardized method to measure knowledge, and it is chiefly measured based on the subjective judgment of researchers. Moreover, New Product Development (NPD) departments in many companies strive to assess their knowledge in terms of company products and knowledge workers. Hence, this study aims to propose a product-based two-phase technique that measures the company knowledge inventory.

In the first phase, the value of knowledge is quantified relative to products, knowledge workers and the entire company using two concepts of knowledge width and depth. Then, a three-dimensional knowledge asset map (knowledge, products and knowledge worker dimensions) is designed to assess and audit knowledge workers. Finally, this technique recruits an integer linear programming model with a cost minimization objective function to optimize the supply of NPD knowledge requirements in the second phase.

This model enables managers to determine what type of knowledge can be supplied by existing knowledge workers, whether within the company or by other external sources.

Among existing knowledge measurement methods, only a few use a product-based measuring technique. However, they fail to offer suitable scenarios for managers' decision-making process and consider cost structures in measurement techniques. Hence, this paper attempts to overcome these drawbacks.

This chapter studies ways of supporting sustainable growth in high technology small firms by managing innovation. The chapter examines technology-based and knowledge-intensive business service firms (KIBS) and their innovation management in Finland. The goal is to find at least one meaningful innovation process for a small KIBS firm that takes growth into consideration. In this chapter, incremental, radical, disruptive, open and systemic innovation are seen from a small KIBS firm perspective and a model that combines these types of innovation is presented. Two cases of high technology-based small KIBS firms are also selected for closer examination.

This paper aims to present a framework to guide managerial action for social media (SM) strategies for innovation by exploring its constituent elements – the “what” (SM types), the “who” (stakeholders to be reached), the “for” (innovation types) and the “how” (innovation process stages), as well as the value, benefits and barriers.

A comprehensive and critical review of literature at the intersection of SM and innovation guides the development of a typology of SM types and their use across innovation types and stages.

SM type and use tend to differ across innovation processes. The authors identify four types of SM in use across four stages of innovation, supporting six types of innovation, influenced by five categories of barriers, benefits and stakeholders each.

The research provides an integrative set of building blocks to consider for developing further studies of SM and innovation.

By highlighting the intertwined aspects of SM and innovation in an open and collaborative environment, the paper calls for development of an SM readiness organisational diagnosis. It empowers managers with a coherent framework of different elements they should take into consideration when defining their SM strategies for innovation.

Research on SM adoption and the extent of its usage for innovation purposes is still at its infancy. Given the increasingly open and collaborative innovation settings, the authors draw managerial attention to the need of SM strategies for innovation activities and provide a coherent analytical framework to guide action for organisational diagnosis.

Organizational innovations are closely associated with organizational knowledge, and thus a firm builds its knowledge base to enhance its innovative performance. However, insights into this process are still limited, especially in the context of firms in developing countries. Building on the dynamic managerial capabilities literature and open innovation paradigm, this paper attempts to fill this gap by developing and empirically testing a model that investigates how firms in developing countries accumulate knowledge to innovate.

A model of a firm's knowledge accumulation and innovation is proposed in which it specifies relationships among absorptive capacity, knowledge breadth, research and development (R&D), knowledge depth, exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation, and then it is empirically tested by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique based on the surveyed data of Vietnamese firms.

The results indicate that absorptive capacity positively influences both knowledge breadth and knowledge depth, knowledge breadth positively influences R&D, R&D positively influences exploratory innovation and knowledge depth, and knowledge depth positively influences exploratory and exploitative innovation.

The study proposes an “acquire and develop” open innovation model for firms in developing countries in which firms acquire external technologies and then develop R&D (develop and design) capability to adapt acquired technologies to their local conditions to create new organizational-specific capabilities and exploratory innovation.

This study argues that external knowledge acquisition is beneficial to innovative performance of firms in developing countries via renewing their knowledge base. Furthermore, the study provides the unique evidence that novel external knowledge acquisition and internal R&D are fit to each other in the fit-as-mediation form in which novel external knowledge acquisition is mediated by R&D to positively influence exploratory innovation.

Over the past decade, the rapid evolution of social media has impacted the field of human resource management in numerous ways. In response, scholars and practitioners have sought to begin an investigation of the myriad of ways that social media impacts organizations. To date, research evidence on a range of HR-related topics are just beginning to emerge, but are scattered across a range of diverse literatures. The principal aim of this chapter is to review the current literature on the study of social media in HRM and to integrate these disparate emerging literatures. During our review, we discuss the existent research, describe the theoretical foundations of such work, and summarize key research findings and themes into a coherent social media framework relevant to HRM. Finally, we offer recommendations for future work that can enhance knowledge of social media’s impact in organizations.

While the Chinese securities market is booming, the phenomenon of listed companies falling into financial distress is also emerging, which affects the operation and development of enterprises and also jeopardizes the interests of investors. Therefore, it is important to understand how to accurately and reasonably predict the financial distress of enterprises.

In the present study, ensemble feature selection (EFS) and improved stacking were used for financial distress prediction (FDP). Mutual information, analysis of variance (ANOVA), random forest (RF), genetic algorithms, and recursive feature elimination (RFE) were chosen for EFS to select features. Since there may be missing information when feeding the results of the base learner directly into the meta-learner, the features with high importance were fed into the meta-learner together. A screening layer was added to select the meta-learner with better performance. Finally, Optima hyperparameters were used for parameter tuning by the learners.

An empirical study was conducted with a sample of A-share listed companies in China. The F1-score of the model constructed using the features screened by EFS reached 84.55%, representing an improvement of 4.37% compared to the original features. To verify the effectiveness of improved stacking, benchmark model comparison experiments were conducted. Compared to the original stacking model, the accuracy of the improved stacking model was improved by 0.44%, and the F1-score was improved by 0.51%. In addition, the improved stacking model had the highest area under the curve (AUC) value (0.905) among all the compared models.

Compared to previous models, the proposed FDP model has better performance, thus bridging the research gap of feature selection. The present study provides new ideas for stacking improvement research and a reference for subsequent research in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the screening of product ideas is supported by the NPD (new product development) process design throughout the NPD phases.

Data were collected with an internet survey questionnaire from 43 large companies producing high and low‐technology consumer products.

Results reveal that the screening of product ideas is detached from the NPD process design, but significantly influenced by the market conditions facing companies.

To understand NPD in companies, NPD literature will benefit from knowledge of the process of implementing “best practices” of NPD. Companies follow guidelines, but how is the NPD process followed through? This paper supports the need for improved insight into the complexity of screening decisions as well as knowledge of the screening determinants.

The implementation of cross‐functional teams and interacting phases demands more attention by management in order to reduce costs of NPD relative to the ROI of new products.

By showing that the screening is detached from the NPD process design, the paper gives valuable insight into the need for theory to investigate the complexity of implementing “best practices” of NPD.

New product concept screening, i.e., selecting a few viable innovative concepts from numerous candidates, involves high stakes and is complicated and resource intensive. Over the years, there has been heated debate about the relative merit of monadic (sequential) tests vs that of preference-based paired comparisons. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study proposes the Generalizability Theory as a framework to assess and compare the performance of traditional monadic test with the Adaptive Concept Screening (ACS) in terms of their testing results and psychometric quality.

Using 50 yogurt concepts and two independent groups of respondents, the results indicate that ACS requires a significant smaller sample of respondents to achieve a necessary minimum G coefficient for decision making. Moreover, ACS offers a more discriminating and reliable solution for early stage concept screening as manifested by a higher G coefficient and greater percentage of variance due to the selected concepts given the same sampling design.

The results lend strong support to ACS as a more cost-effective method for screening new product concepts and the Generalizability Theory as a systematic framework for assessing concept testing methods.

This study adopts the Generalizability Theory framework to assess the validity of new product concept screening method.