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This chapter advances our understanding of collaborative innovation processes that span across organizational boundaries by providing an ethnographic account of idea generation dynamics in a member-initiated online songwriting community. Applying a science and technology studies perspective on processes “in the making,” the findings of this chapter reveal the generative entanglements of three processes of content-in-the-making, skill-in-the-making, and community-in-the-making that were triggered and maintained over time by temporary stabilizations of provisional, interim outcomes. These findings also elucidate interferences between these three processes, particularly when an increased focus on songs as products undermines the ongoing collaborative production of ideas. Regular interventions in the community design were necessary to simultaneously stimulate the three processes and counteract interfering tendencies that either prioritized content production, community building, or skill development, respectively. The authors conclude that firms seeking to tap into online communities’ innovative potential need to appreciate community and skill development as creative processes in their own right that have to be fostered and kept in sync with content production.

From the organisational perspective, the authors know that management, including innovation management, becomes less “organised” by bureaucracy and administrative tools, and much more impacted by organisational capabilities, competences and hidden, “soft” routines, bringing innovation and creativity to the core of organisation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on competency sets for open innovation (OI) and is to provide recommendations for OI competency development in companies, linked to the core OI processes.

The research is exploratory and aims at theory-based practical indication combining deductive identification of competency clusters and inductive model development. Thus, the authors apply quantitative methods to data collection and analysis. The authors conducted an extensive literature review on competence challenges with regard to execution of OI, and empirical data analysis based on a large-scale structured industrial survey in Europe (N=264), leading to the development of competency sets for companies. SPSS tools are applied for empirical tests.

The authors develop a generic OI competency model applicable across industries, combined with organisational implications for sustaining OI management capabilities. The research clusters competencies based on the empirical analysis, which addresses the various challenges of OI, leading to recommendations for competency management in an OI context.

The data were collected from one key informant per company. Although the authors made efforts to ensure that this was a senior manager responsible for innovation, the authors cannot exclude some bias in the way that OI activities and related competencies are perceived. Exploratory nature of the research, which calls for a more systematic investigation of the OI activity modes and the OI competencies resulting competency model. In particular, the competencies could be tested on an inter-professional sample of employees with involvement in and/or responsibility for innovation, development, and HR management, as well as on leaders of innovating companies. Third, although significant in size for the analyses undertaken, the sample is not large enough to enable a more fine-tuned analysis of regional differences across Europe in the way that OI is managed through the development and implementation of competencies.

The research contributes to the OI management field with an outlined OI competency profile that can be implemented flexibly and tailored to individual firm’s needs. It brings indications for both further theory building and practice of innovation organisation, especially with regard to human resource development and organisational capability building for OI.

The social implications of the paper result from the contribution to innovation management competency development in OI regimes, which is an important tool for designing contemporary educational programmes, contributes to OI management sophistication in business which is especially important during the economy slowdown and search for new sources of growth and productivity, and supports firms productive engagement in OI ecosystems and collective technology upgrading towards higher societal benefits and stakeholder involvement.

An empirically grounded OI competency model is proposed with an implication to support human resource development for OI. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has been no prior attempt to build such a model. The distinguished feature of the research is its extensive European coverage of 35 countries and multinational scope. The empirical validation strategy makes the research extremely relevant for management decisions related to human factors related OI capability development in organisations.

This study aims to explain how learning occurs in collaborative retailer–logistics service provider (LSP) relationships. The research is guided by two research questions, addressing absorptive and desorptive capacities and the interaction between these capacities.

The study is based on a case study of a Swedish, collaborative retailer–LSP dyad. The empirical data are structured around five specific learning situations within the retailer–LSP dyad.

The findings provide an explanation for how learning occurs within a collaborative retailer–LSP relationship based on subprocesses of absorptive and desorptive capacities. The interaction between these processes is found to rely on two types of support: one-directional and bidirectional. The findings also indicate positive outcomes of learning, such as improved cost efficiencies in warehouse operations, better customer services and improved long-term strategic planning.

This study shows how retailers and LSPs can learn from each other and together create an improved logistics system for end customers.

This research takes into account absorptive and desorptive capacities in a collaborative retailer–LSP relationship. This study enhances the understanding of inter-organisational learning processes in a retail logistics context.

One of the greatest challenges faced by the 1994 post-apartheid government in South Africa is the housing problem that has persisted for almost 30 years into democracy. Innovation in research and practice is required to address this problem. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

This paper presents an argument for housing knowledge management as one part of a much larger system of housing provision and critically compares information variations on one hypothetical, low-cost housing unit adapted for varying climatic regions. It aims to enquire if there is an overlap in information.

The findings do confirm a noteworthy overlap in the information of the varying units. Therefore, knowledge management of the information would prove effective and may contribute in part to housing provision.

The study is limited to assessing the information changes made to the contract documentation of the housing unit.

The paper argues that knowledge management of this overlapping information could impact housing provision by providing knowledge power to those affected by the housing problem.

The findings are a unique perspective presented through a knowledge management lens. In addition, the said knowledge management lens provides a platform to raise additional questions. When seeking answers to these questions, it is expected that research sub-themes would be identified focussing further research studies towards finding answers.

A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

The purpose of this article is to investigate attempts to safeguard classical humanism in secondary schools by appealing to a cultural-historical link with Antiquity, voiced in the face of educational reforms in Sweden between 1865 and 1971.

By focusing on the content of the pedagogical journal Pedagogisk Tidskrift, the article highlights a number of examples of how an ancient historical lineage was evoked and how historical knowledge was mobilized and contested in various ways.

The article argues that the enduring negotiation over the educational need to maintain a strong link with the ancient past was strained due to increasing scholarly specialization and thus entangled in competing views on reform and what was deemed “traditional” or “modern”.

From a larger perspective, the conflict over the role of Antiquity in Swedish secondary schools reveals a trajectory for the history of education as part of and later apart from a general history of the humanities. Classical history originally served as a common past from which Swedish culture and education developed, but later lost this integrating function within the burgeoning discipline of Pedagogy. The findings demonstrate the value of bringing the newly (re)formed history of humanities and history of education closer together.

This paper examines the contributors to a successful online educational program. In particular, it focuses on an online mentoring program called Tracking Canada's Past (TCP) which was implemented in three high schools in British Columbia, Canada, in 2003. Tracking Canada's Past investigated the application of online mentoring in the high school history curriculum through the use of Knowledge Forum® software–a web-based group workspace in which students could share and discuss their ongoing research with their online mentors and other students. The goal of TCP project was to help students understand the concept of history as a discipline through online mentoring and the use of “primary” sources, in addition to standard textbooks. There were 72 students and 16 online mentors involved in this study, approximately one mentor for each group of 5-11 students. Through a series of pre- and post-program surveys and interviews, data were collected on the students' backgrounds, expectations for specific mentoring functions, affective responses to mentoring, and the mentoring functions they recognized receiving. Volunteer mentors were also asked about the mentoring functions and the type of advice they would offer to their students. Findings from this study indicated that students' judgments of a successful online mentoring program were best predicted by the helpfulness of the questions mentors asked, the usefulness of the reading materials and/or web resources they recommended, the helpfulness of mentors in developing questions or ideas to investigate, the level of trust students placed in their mentors, and the helpfulness of the online workspace where students and mentors shared their ideas. These findings suggest that the most important determinants of a successful online mentoring program are those that online program designers have the ability to refine over time.

Our chapter explores the benefits of informal academic communities by focusing on the Finland-based early career higher education researchers' network (ECRN). Established two years ago, the ECRN primarily operates through monthly online coffee meetings. Via dialogical reflections by the authors and a qualitative inquiry into the ECRN, we explore the ECRN's role in its members' professional growth and well-being. We provide a narrative vignette of an imagined online coffee meeting to illustrate the significant peer-learning conversations in the ECRN. Based on our dialogical approach, we conclude that the ECRN is beneficial for its members' professional growth and well-being as it provides peer support, information sharing, scholarly support and higher education research-related support. Hence, we call for academia to better recognise and support informal academic communities as they have the potential to nourish a more collaborative working culture in academia.

An empirical study investigated the antecedents to perceived usefulness (PU) and its consequences in the context of smoking cessation online health communities (OHCs).

To validate a research model for perceived informational support, perceived emotional support and perceived esteem support, the authors conducted a partial-least-squares analysis of empirical data from an online survey (N = 173) of users of two smoking cessation OHCs. The proposed model articulates these as antecedents to PU from a social support perspective, and knowledge sharing and continuance intention are expressed as consequences of PU.

The empirical study identified that the PU of smoking cessation OHCs is influenced by perceived emotional support and perceived esteem support, and perceived informational support indirectly affects PU via these factors. In turn, PU exerts a positive influence on both knowledge sharing and continuance intention. Also, knowledge sharing positively affects continuance intention.

The study contributes to scholarship on users' postadoption behavior in the context of smoking cessation OHCs by disentangling the antecedents to PU from a social support perspective and pinpointing some important consequences of PU. The research also has practical implications for managing smoking cessation OHCs.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.