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There is a lack of empirical-based models derived from practice to explain the digital innovation process. The authors investigate how the digital innovation process unfolds in practice.

The authors undertake an exploratory and phenomenological study of 21 Malaysian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector.

The findings show that the delineation between digital innovation process and outcome is blurred in practice, due to the process' iterative nature. Under this process, customers' role has changed from being passive receivers of innovative products to active reviewers, testers, influential decision-makers, initiators and co-creators at different review points in the innovation process. Enterprises' role has expanded from being the initiator of the innovation process to being a cogitative actor by seeking and absorbing knowledge from customer reviews into the digital innovation process. Market analysis is often the initiator of the digital innovation process, and the findings shed light on the underlying causative mechanisms of the initiation stage, which are understudied and not well understood in the existing literature.

The study contributes to academic knowledge by answering scholars' call for developing third-generation practice-based innovation models, which accounts for enterprises' context-specificities and internal and external environments, and for exploring the suitability of the need–solution fit approach for the digital innovation process. Such models have only been conceptually advocated in the literature. The study also informs practitioners on the organizational and operational activities involved in managing and strategizing for the digital innovation 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 aims to explore professional product designers’ views on creative design and to compare their viewpoints with the related academic literature on product marketing.

To find the designers’ views on creative design, face-to-face in-depth interviews based on repertory grid analysis and semi-structured questions were conducted with 32 professional and award-wining product designers who mostly design for international producers.

Although marketing scholars often approach design as a noun – something that can be viewed and analysed as a bundle of attributes, dimensions or characteristics – professional designers view design differently. To them, design is a verb, a problem-solving process through which they meet the challenges consumers have with products. Comparing professional product designers’ views on design creativity with the main topics in the product marketing literature places scholars’ dispositionalism against designers’ situationalism; it also enables marketing scholars to improve their viewpoints on product design and to bring practical problem-solving and design thinking into their research. This also increases mutual understanding between marketers and designers.

This research enhances the knowledge of marketing scholars, marketers and designers about each other’s perspectives on product design creativity, which will improve their mutual understanding and the business-to-business relationship between marketers and designers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first study that has attempted to discover product designers’ opinions on the main topics in the related academic literature.

Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, the authors first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they wish to have completed; (2) broadcast to a pool of potential contributors; (3) attract a crowd of contributors; and (4) select among the inputs they receive. For each of these phases, the authors identify the key decisions organizations make, provide a basic explanation for each decision, discuss the trade-offs organizations face when choosing among decision alternatives, and explore how organizations may resolve these trade-offs. Using this decision-centric approach, the authors continue by showing that there are fundamental interdependencies in the process that makes the coordination of crowdsourcing challenging.

How do financial innovations form and evolve in Islamic countries? How do nature and the organisation of innovation interact? Focussing on retail payment services, this paper aims to analyse recent developments and displays an overview of the status of financial innovation in Islamic countries.

This study uses six countries as case studies, namely, Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey and the UAE. Comparison within and across those cases helps the author provide explanations of how and why such innovations have worked in particular contexts.

While cash remains dominant, the author found rapid growth in retail payments, but no consensus on standardisation. Several digital innovations have been introduced and begun to converge. Finally, there seems to be a disconnection between innovations and inclusions.

This research paper is, among the few, related to innovation in financial services in Islamic countries, and can be used to develop appropriate marketing strategies for capturing value in the market.

The success rate of new products is stubbornly low. This paper aims to explore the differences in how product designers and product managers approach the new product development task by comparing their perspectives on the process.

This study conducted a worldwide survey of professional product designers and managers and compared their perspectives.

Managers struggle to understand the problem to be solved until they see the solution in the form of an outstanding product design. Designers struggle to develop new products until they have a specific and insightful understanding of the problem that needs to be solved.

Designers’ and managers’ ways of thinking are different, and effective collaboration depends on them being cognizant of each other’s ways of thinking; the success of their work is highly interdependent.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study that simultaneously investigates both product designers and managers to reveal the paradoxical dynamics between their perspectives.

Research in the business-to-business (B2B) and user entrepreneurship literature agrees that “user-driven” perspectives allow entrepreneurs to develop innovative products superior to conventional products. Other researchers argue that such “user-driven” products have limited success and limited impact in certain markets (e.g. niche and industrial markets). This study aims to understand the extent to which user input or co-creation becomes critical in determining product performance.

The key informant approach is used for data collection. Data were collected using a survey instrument via an online panel. Existing scales are used to measure all the focal constructs. Partial least square-based structural equation modeling was used to check for the psychometric properties of the scales and test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that user entrepreneurship is significantly related to firm collaboration efforts and customer collaboration efforts in the B2B market. Both firm collaboration efforts and customer collaboration efforts are significantly related to product performance and mediate the relationship between user entrepreneurship and product performance. Also, findings show that there is an “n” relationship between firm collaboration efforts and product performance.

This study supports the concerns raised by researchers about the dark side of value co-creation and highlights that value co-creation can impede product performance when user entrepreneurs lay too much emphasis on the collaboration processes.

This study first aims to survey the state of user innovation in Iran and then identified barriers and incentives for user innovation in Iran.

In this study, a questionnaire (through 1,360 adults from Iran) prepared by De Jong (2016) was used to survey user innovation.

The results showed: the percentage of user innovators is high in Iran, there is no linear relationship between the income of a country and the percentage of the user innovators, there is a positive relationship between the education level and the percentage of user innovators in Iran, there is no linear relationship between the number of people educated in the scientific and technical fields and the percentage of user innovators. Finally, based on surveying users opinion in questionnaire, four incentives and five barriers in user innovation were identified that can help policymakers to improve their innovation policies.

Literature review in this field showed it was found that in a number of developed countries, the issue of user innovation has been addressed, but in Iran as a developing country, no such research has been conducted so far. In addition, it was found that so far, no comprehensive research has identified barriers and incentives for user innovation, so this study, first surveyed the state of user innovation in Iran and then identified barriers and incentives for user innovation in Iran.

This paper investigates the framing and redefinition of innovation challenges as an approach to generate creative solutions in the field of project management.

The study applies the Innovation Challenge Canvas (ICC), a new conceptual model that redefines innovation challenges. The research undertakes a review of the literature in the field of project management, followed by seven in-depth interviews with innovation directors to ascertain the professional view. Finally, usefulness of ICC was tested in three case studies.

An innovative approach focusing on redefining a challenge instead of proposing solutions to a problem fosters creative thinking and encourages innovative proposals. This ideation challenges the organization's traditional way of managing innovation projects. The ICC provides a better means by which to manage projects that embody high uncertainty, while helping to generate more innovative solutions.

The review of the literature shows that project management has given little attention to the redefining of innovation challenges. This study aims to fill this gap by orienting and adapting the traditional literature on framing to project management. From a practical point of view, the ICC is proposed as a model that can be used to consider the most relevant elements needed to redefine an innovation challenge and enhance the management of those projects.

For at least three decades, inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled its inner dynamics. More recently, new phenomena have appeared in the changing landscape of IOC, affecting the way in which organizations are open to interact with, and rely upon, other actors that may be standalone entities as well as representatives of other organizations. These actors operate “betwixt and between” the organizational core and its external environment(s), populating a liminal space located at the organization’s boundary in which activities take place according to non-proprietary and non-employment logics. The authors focus on the forms of collaboration, which blur the lines between organizations, calling into question the fundamental label of crowd-focused IOCs. The authors consider two forms: crowd-open and crowd-based organizations. The authors show the organizational design impact of openness spans from the mere scalability associated with organizational growth to the phenomena of reshaping formalization and standardization of roles and processes, and self-organizing over time.