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New opportunities to nurture good ideas for innovation arise as firms use web-based ideation platforms for collective idea generation and development. What influences creative performance in firm-internal collective idea development is however not as well researched as idea generation and thus an important area of research is the feedback and commenting on ideas. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas in collective firm-internal online idea development.

An empirical study has been performed, drawing on data collected from a Swedish multi-national company using a web-based system for collective firm-internal ideation. The investigation explicitly captures the effects on ideation performance played by idea development contributions, in terms of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas.

The empirical results show that idea development is significantly influenced by feedback timeliness as well as by the knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas. Specifically, it is found that longer time to feedback and an increased knowledge overlap result in an increased likelihood of idea acceptance. However, beyond a certain point, the positive effects of a longer time to feedback and increased knowledge overlap decrease, resulting in curvilinear relationships with idea acceptance.

The results do not only shed new light on theory about collective idea development, but also provides management implications for collective firm-internal ideation. As the data used in the study has been collected in one single firm, care should be taken in generalizing the results to other domains.

The results inform managers that it is not always better to involve more individuals in these emergent and distributed ideation systems, but that it might be beneficial to take measures to exercise some control in terms of when distributed and diverse employees can freely join in and out, especially considering the diversity of ideas, comments and creators.

The results from the empirical study reveal the effects of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap on idea development. This provides us with new insights on the complex dynamics at place in collective firm-internal idea development and offers implications for how we can fruitfully manage this process.

Firms increasingly rely on both external and internal crowdsourcing to capture ideas more broadly and enhance innovative problem-solving. Especially in internal crowdsourcing, knowledge sharing that contributes to develop or further the understanding of the problem the idea is focused on solving can take place between critical employees, and in that way improve ideas generated by others. This far, most crowdsourcing practices have focused on identifying solutions to proposed problems, whereas much less is known about how crowds can be used to share problem-related knowledge. There is thus an untapped potential in leveraging crowds not just to generate solution-oriented ideas but also to share knowledge to improve ideas and even to reframe problems. This paper aims to explore the effect of problem- and solution-related knowledge sharing in internal crowdsourcing for idea development.

Data on ideas and comments were collected from an idea management system in a Swedish multinational company. The investigation captures the influences of the problem- and solution-related knowledge sharing on ideas based on content analysis and logistic regression analysis.

The results from this study show that sharing knowledge related to solutions in idea development impacts idea acceptance positively, whereas sharing knowledge related to problems in idea development has a negative effect on the likelihood of idea acceptance and these effects of knowledge sharing are moderated by the active author responses.

This research provides managerial implications for firms to deliberately manage knowledge sharing in peer communities in internal crowdsourcing, especially by providing suggestions on problem reframing and solution refining for ideas.

The results contribute to existing theory in terms of extending the view of crowdsourcing in ideation to include how crowds contribute to the development of the problem and the solution during the development of ideas and providing new insights on knowledge sharing in internal crowdsourcing based on problem-solving theory.

This paper analyzes how the distribution and structure of employees' attention influence idea survival in an organizational internal crowdsourcing session.

Data from an online internal crowdsourcing session carried out within a multinational company with headquarters in Sweden were used to explore how idea attention influenced idea survival.

Our findings indicate that the positive relationship between attention allocation and idea survival is mediated by idea appreciation, i.e. positive comments and suggestions that employees provide in response to ideas. In addition, we find that competition for attention negatively moderates the relationship between idea attention and positive comments. Finally, our results indicate that ideas are more likely to survive if they are submitted earlier in the crowdsourcing process and when the elapsed time since previously posted ideas in the session is longer.

This study provides organizers of internal crowdsourcing sessions with new insights about factors influencing idea survival and about potential systematic biases in idea selection due to timing and competition between ideas.

This paper contributes to the literature highlighting the relevance of attention-based theory in the context of crowd-based creativity and innovation management.

Digital capabilities in operations and delivery through constant data acquisition and future predictions have accelerated digital servitization through reduced uncertainty. New flexibility in value-capture concepts like dynamic and value-based pricing is introduced, which was impossible before. This paper explores two things. Firstly, how embracing contractual flexibility of price-variance and contract lengths influences customer perceived value in artificial intelligence (AI) enabled digital offerings. Secondly, the role transparency plays in the perceived value of such offerings.

The paper uses an experiment-based survey and quantitative assessment within a business-to-business setup with 137 respondents across a couple of industrial manufacturers in the Nordic region.

The authors observations indicate that value-capture-related flexibilities introduced by digital offerings, namely price fluctuations and longer contract lengths, are perceived to deliver more value to customers than standard offerings with known conditions. The authors findings indicate that introduced flexibilities are perceived as opportunities rather than uncertainties leading to higher perceived value by customers. The increased value perception can be explained by the transparency of these offerings provided by data-driven digital technologies'.

The paper is an original work to understand the value-capture implication of digital servitization. The authors discuss the possibilities of different value-capture strategies that companies can adopt within digital business models.

This article aims to investigate how R&D employees use their social networks to acquire user information and how this information is used in the development of new products.

A single case study was conducted within a business unit at a multinational medical technology company. Data were collected through a mixed method.

The results show that many R&D employees lack social networks through which they can acquire information about the users’ needs. However, some R&D employees establish cost-efficient relationships to people with a direct experience of using the company’s products. These relationships are established over time and are often used in a rather informal way to acquire user information. Moreover, the results show how R&D employees are purposefully complementing these relationships with more occasional interactions with people who hold direct and indirect use experiences.

As with most single-case studies, it will be important to replicate this investigation in other contexts to clarify the generalizability of the findings.

The article shows how important it is that management provides R&D employees with opportunities to establish, nurture and utilize relationships conducive to information about the users’ needs. The article provides some advice on how this can be accomplished.

This is one of the first articles that clearly explain how R&D employees use their social networks to acquire user information for the development of new products.

An increasing share of manufacturing, logistics and R&D activities takes place today in a number of geographically dispersed organisational units. The units involved can be different autonomous companies or a number of focused subsidiaries. Using the CIMA‐methodology and its computerised questionnaire as an analysis and action research tool, organisational learning in distributed product development projects at a multinational company in the telecom industry has been investigated. Organisational units with different operational focuses displayed differences in the types of learning to which attention was primarily given. Based on the findings, the role of communities of practice in distributed product development is investigated.

Competition today is forcing companies to increase their effectiveness through exploiting synergy and learning in product innovation. Literature, however, is still mainly focused on how product development projects, seen largely as isolated efforts, should be organised and managed. This article proposes a model to describe and explain how companies can gain a substantive competitive advantage by extending their innovation efforts to other phases of the product life cycle and by facilitating knowledge transfer and learning both within the company and with other partner organisations. The model is based on collaborative research by the authors, based on their involvement in the Euro‐Australian co‐operation project CIMA (Euro‐Australian co‐operation centre for Continuous Improvement and innovation MAnagement).

This chapter presents results from initial studies on personal certifications of innovation management professionals, drawing from a Swedish context. The results capture motivations for, as well as effects from, the certification process. They are discussed from the perspective of how this is relevant for developing and enhancing innovation leadership competencies. Increased knowledge, enhanced professional communication, and strengthened self-confidence related to innovation management were identified as outcomes for individuals pursuing the certifications. Further, this laid the ground for increased visibility, expanded network, and thus more opportunities to influence innovation work. An overarching theme appearing in the study is how a certification can contribute to strengthening the legitimacy of working with innovation management, and thus serve as an enabler for innovation management practice and subsequently innovation leadership. Effects from the certification that may be beneficial for successful innovation leadership include the opportunity for practitioners to articulate their own experiences and competencies, in addition to improving the impact of their efforts utilising innovation terminology. For organisations, knowledge of personal certification can be used both for recruitment and for development of existing personnel and their innovation leadership. Through a longer perspective, it can also contribute to decreasing the dependence on a few specific individuals and instead strengthen the long-term organisational innovation capabilities.

There is a lack of studies investigating the role of the structural configuration of social capital – more specifically, structural holes – for employees' individual learning. The objective of this paper is to address this gap in the literature, ultimately enhancing understanding of the link between the structural configuration of social capital and individual learning.

An online questionnaire survey was administered to employees affiliated to 22 pharmacies in Sweden to gather attributional and relational data on the individual level. Social network analysis techniques were used to describe salient structural characteristics of individuals' social capital. The impact of social capital on individual learning was explored through ordinal logistic regression models based on maximum likelihood estimations.

The presence of structural holes initially increases the degree of individual learning, then reaches a maximum and begins to gradually decrease.

The results of the study provide valuable input for the development and management of networks within firms, in order to improve learning and innovation. In addition, given the close proximity between learning, as conceptualized in this study, and other job attitudes, human resource management practices in general could benefit greatly from the results.

In this paper, the authors focus on the structural configuration of social capital, more specifically structural holes, and its inter‐relationship with learning. Although prior literature has analyzed various beneficial effects of social capital, this study is the first of its kind to investigate the role of the structural configuration of the social capital for employees' individual learning.