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Theories of platform strategy and adoption have been largely derived from studies of their application in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. These platforms vary in openness, with the model of open source software providing the best-known exemplar for open platforms.

This exploratory field study examines the degree to which nine attributes of ICT platforms are applicable to open platforms in biotechnology. Using a combination of interview and secondary data, it identifies three patterns of such biotechnology platforms – IP commons, hackerspaces, and crowdsourced patient registries – and the degree to which these nine attributes apply. It shows the impact of ICT platforms and open source software on open source approaches to biotechnology, and how the latter are affected by the technical, legal, and institutional differences between information technology and biotechnology.

Instead of open source software platforms organized around modular interfaces, complements, ecosystems, and two-sided markets, this study instead suggests a model of open source knowledge platforms which benefits from economies of scale but not indirect network effects. From this, it discusses the generalizability of the ICT-derived models of open source platforms and offers suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of biotechnological inventions and innovations on the organization of the burgeoning Atlantic salmon farming industry.

The authors study how novel biotechnological inventions are utilized within Atlantic salmon aquaculture. The authors compare the findings with the historical development path of invention and innovation in the plant sector, and explore parallels and dissimilarities between the plant breeding sector and Atlantic salmon aquaculture.

The innovation capacity within Atlantic salmon aquaculture is distinct from the plant sector, but nonetheless likely to become equifinal. Similar to plants, the female fecundity of salmon is high. Hybridization, which is an effective mechanism for protection of investments in high fecundity organisms, is less effective in salmon farming because the genetic variability is higher in salmon. Hybridization provides plant breeders with significant power over grow-out farmers. The development path in Atlantic salmon sector is distinctively dissimilar from plants, but salmon farmers nonetheless appear to move toward the structural configurations that are parallel to the plant sector. The significance of new breeding technologies in Atlantic salmon farming ascends, and will play an increasingly important role in the further development of this industry.

The study contributes to the prevailing knowledge of how inventions and innovations influence the future development of the Atlantic salmon industry.

Biotechnological inventions are evolving within aquaculture. So far, the implications of novel biotechnological possibilities for the Atlantic salmon sector have been underanalyzed. The paper explores these implications from the perspective of political economy.

In the wake of growing pressures to make scholarly knowledge commercially relevant via translation into intellectual property, various techno-scientific communities have mobilized to create open access/open source experiments. These efforts are based on the ideas and success of free and open source software, and generally try to exploit two salient features: increased openness and circulation, and distributed collective innovation. Transferring these ideas from software to science often involves unforeseen challenges, one of which is that these movements can be deemed, often incorrectly, as heretical by university administrators and technology transfer officers who valorize metrics such as number of patents filed and granted, spin-off companies created, and revenue generated. In this paper, we discuss nascent efforts to foster an open source movement in nanotechnology and provide an illustrative case of an arsenic removal invention. We discuss challenges facing the open source nano movement that include making a technology widely accessible and the associated politics of metrics.

This article explores how the introduction of a family of advanced information management sciences has dramatically altered modern direct marketing in the consumer marketplace. In particular, a relatively new breed of consumer segmentation databases has been commercially developed to segment customers into demographic and psychographic “clusters.” This segmentation has allowed innovative direct marketers to combine commercial data with their own proprietary computer‐controlled consumer databases to appreciably improve their marketing impact. This type of data‐based direct marketing permits a more targeted offer and message and introduces new marketing effectiveness and economic efficiencies. The article concludes with management recommendations for adopting a high‐tech direct marketing program as a significant addition to a company's overall consumer marketing strategy.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

Current research about American Indians of all ages is in short supply, yet design and allocation of public services and resources are increasingly guided by ‘evidence’ provided by research. The health and wellness of this population is persistently poorer than that of other marginalized populations. American Indian tribes have been beset progressively since the earliest arrival of European settlers by both malevolent and well-intentioned assaults on their cultures and peoples. This long history of cultural and physical genocide continues into the present and undermines the effectiveness of Eurocentric processes for research that have been shaped by values and beliefs antithetical to those of most tribes (e.g. individualism, proprietary ownership, science as the way of knowing). Individual and collective historical trauma is present in all of the more than 500 federally recognized tribes in the United States of America, and a lack of trust further compromises the validity and positive impact of most research. This chapter describes the roots and foundations of flawed and successful research and identifies practical resources and approaches that are valid and beneficial for conducting research with indigenous people. The processes described in this chapter are grounded in the experiences of tribes in the United States of America; however, parallel experiences of indigenous populations that have a continuing legacy of trauma are found in many other countries (such as in Brazil and New Zealand) and the insights and approaches found in this chapter may be applicable to some degree.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of decolonial approaches (DAs) such as epistemic locus (Mignolo, 1995, 2000) in studying innovation.

This paper is based on a case study of a stem cell surgical innovation developed in India. A critical hermeneutic analysis method has been followed for data analysis.

Epistemic locus influences the framing of the problem, perceptions of risks/opportunities as well as the envisioning of alternate institutional systems. Persistent and strategic effort at building connections changes local improvisation into a globally legitimate innovation.

It indicates the value of using DAs for innovation studies especially epistemic locus, enactment and connections in understanding knowledge generation and innovation.

Innovation in Global South can be encouraged by giving more space to the innovator to attempt or experiment. More conscious conversation of epistemic locus of the researcher could help.

Countries have to move beyond a mere technological imitation to include discussions on epistemic imitation. Epistemic imitation prevents one from seeing what one has and one only looks at conditions from the eyes of the dominator.

This study documents the development of an innovation from an Indian epistemic locus which differs from a western epistemic locus and the impact this has on an innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to further build up the knowledge about reasons for small and mid‐sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The paper presents and analyses findings in articles about proprietary ERPs and open source ERPs. In addition, a limited investigation of the distribution channel SourceForge for open source is made.

The cost perspective seems to receive a high attention regarding adoption of open source ERPs. This can be questioned and the main conclusion is that costs seem to have a secondary role in adoption or non adoption of open source ERPs.

The paper is mainly a conceptual paper written from a literature review. The ambition is to search support for the findings by doing more research in the area.

The findings presented are of interest both for developers of proprietary ERPs as well as SMEs since it is shown that there are definitely reasons other than costs involved when deciding on proprietary ERPs or open source ERPs.

It can be argued that there is a lack of research conducted and published about why SMEs choose open source ERPs instead of proprietary ERPs. This paper identifies the gap and suggests future research directions about this subject.

To provide an overview of research published in the management accounting literature on methods for cost management in new product development, such as a target costing, life cycle costing, component commonality, and modular design.

The structured literature search covered papers about 15 different cost management methods published in 40 journals in the period 1990–2013.

The search yielded a sample of 113 different papers. Many contained information about more than one method, and this yielded 149 references to specific methods. The number of references varied strongly per cost management method and per journal. Target costing has received by far the most attention in the publications in our sample; modular design, component commonality, and life cycle costing were ranked second and joint third. Most references were published in Management Science; Management Accounting Research; and Accounting, Organizations and Society. The results were strongly influenced by Management Science and Decision Science, because cost management methods with an engineering background were published above average in these two journals (design for manufacturing, component commonality, modular design, and product platforms) while other topics were published below average in these two journals.

The scope of this review is accounting research. Future work could review the research on cost management methods in new product development published outside accounting.

The paper centers on methods for cost management, which complements reviews that focused on theoretical constructs of management accounting information and its use.

We focus on the internal workings of a university organization’s response to institutional plurality. In the field of higher education, both organizations and individuals are prescribed competing demands due to academic logic and the logic of managerialism. We interpret six individual experiences of institutional plurality and illuminate how social position, disposition, emotions, and apprehension regarding plurality affect their response to shifting emphases in the logics of the university. In addition, we show that although there may appear to be harmony in the organizational-level response to institutional plurality, turmoil may be affecting the organization’s members, highlighting the importance of looking at how people experience institutional logic multiplicity.