December 1, 2016
Open Innovation in Barcelona
The conference will be held Dec. 15-16 at ESADE near Barcelona. It is chaired by Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke, the academic program by Marcel Bogers with Jonathan Sims and Ann-Kristin Zobel; and (as in previous years), Solomon Darwin of UC Berkeley running the industry program. On a personal note, this will be my first year at WOIC as a mere program committee member (rather than conference or program chair), and thus without the (sizable) organizational responsibilities to put on an event like this.
As in previous years, the conference is distinguished by an unusually large share of participants from outside academia. The plenary sessions include the vice mayor of Barcelona, an award-winning chef, the EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, a Philips VP, and directors from Telefonica and a local hospital. The program also includes five ESADE faculty or administrators (plus Chesbrough and Vanhaverbeke, who hold part-time appointments there), and a panel of four China scholars talking about open innovation in China.
The academic program will begin with a plenary session of three highly-rated papers that is chaired by the editor of R&D Management (which is publishing a special issue from the conference). The remainder of the conference consists of 63 papers in 20 parallel session (across five time slots), plus the now-familiar poster reception (this year emphasizing wine over beer) with 17 poster presentations.
Over the years, we have found that the world of open (and user) innovation researchers is heavily skewed towards Europe (rather than North America). Even more so than in previous WOICs, this month’s program reflects this Eurocentric perspective. We hope to see a large turnout of leading, up-and-coming and future OI researchers in Catalonia.
August 2, 2016
Open innovation in Anaheim
Below are the 11 sessions that mention OI in the session title:
- 116: Organized by Marcel Bogers and Jonathan Sims, it includes an all-star cast of OI facillators, including Lars Frederiksen, Annabelle Gawer, Marc Gruber, Keld Laursen, Ann Majchrzak, Satish Nambisan, Frank Piller and Wim Vanhaverbeke
- 263: Organized by Gawer and Carmelo Cennamo, its best known panelist is Carliss Baldwin
- 1910: Organized by Jonathan Sim and me, it includes talks by Laursen, Vanhaverbeke, Sebastian Fixson — with Oliver Alexy as a last-minute replacement discussant
July 1, 2016
Standardization as an open innovation activity
This week I am attending the 21st annual meeting of the European Academy for Standardisation (EURAS), being held at the University of Montpellier. The theme for EURAS 2016 is ‘Co-opetition and Open Innovation’, and so I was invited to deliver the keynote address. The slides for my talk (entitled “How standards research can inform open innovation”) are online at SlideShare.
The three-day conference (June 28-July 1) is taking place at the Université de Montpellier, which was established in 1289 by Pope Nicolas IV. Along the banks of Le Lez, we are only 5km from the Meditterane, and the small size (about 50 attendees) and mild summer climate have made for an enjoyable conference.
Networks in Open Innovation
Between our first book in 2006 (Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm) and the second in 2014 (New Frontiers in Open Innovation) my own personal role in the OI ecosystem became painfully obvious. Before the 2006 book, I had done research on standards wars, standardization, platforms, ecosystems and communities, and this continued again between the two books.
In the 2006 book, co-editor Wim Vanhaverbeke introduced the importance of networks in open innovation with two chapters (10, 13) as well as editing several other chapters on the role of networks. However, one notable omission in the book was a failure to mention communities, which Karim Lakhani and I addressed in 2008 with a paper about the overlap in a special issue based on his talk (and mine) at the 2007 EURAM conference.
For the 2014 book, I sought to bring together the prior research on the various network forms and tie them to open innovation. In Chapter 4 (West, 2014a), I listed these network forms:
- Networks of alliances, which was the subject of my later introduction to the book on OI & strategic alliances (West, 2014b)
- Communities: in addition to my 2008 paper with Karim, this is the subject of his 2011 paper with Siobhan O’Mahony (O'Mahony & Lakhani 2011) and my chapter with Jonathan Sims (West & Sims, forthcoming)
- Consortia: although under-studied, this is an important topic of open innovation research, with limited prior OI research (notably Müller-Seitz & Sydow, 2012) and my paper in the EURAS proceedings.
- Ecosystems of complementary product producers, encouraged by modularity (Baldwin, 2012); firms have an interest in incentivizing ecosystem participation by sharing value control with participants
- Platforms: although founded by Bresnahan & Greenstein, this research area has almost single-handled been revived and grown by Annabelle Gawer (2009, 2010, 2014; Gawer & Cusumano, 2002, 2014)
Failed OI Network Strategies
Often the research in managing innovation networks (platforms etc.) has focused on the success cases; this is similar to the problem of open innovation more broadly, where we have lots of studies of success but (as Chesbrough has argued over years) we have few examples of failures (West & Bogers, 2014). Two of my own papers touch on this topic.
From 2007-2013, I worked to study the case of Symbian, the British software company that coined the term "smartphone” and had (thanks to Nokia’s smartphone sales) the leading global market share during the first decade of the smartphone OS wars. As predicted by Teece (1986), Symbian lacked the ability to commercialize its own innovations directly but instead partnered with leading cellphone makers to bring its technology to market. (Its founding was due in part to a desire by leading hardware makers to avoid having Microsoft take over the market).
Symbian successfully built one of the most complex ecosystems I have ever seen. Its multiple stakeholders corresponded to (at least) a four-sided market: handset makers, mobile operators, independent software vendors and end users. However, the most central relationship was between Symbian and the large handset makers (notably Nokia and Ericsson) that had founded the company as a spinoff of Psion.
In the end, Symbian OS was unable to cope with competition from iOS and Android; the company was bought and its technology eventually killed by Nokia. Two factors in its OI strategy contributed to its problems:
- Symbian attracted and promoted a large ecosystem of third-party software vendors. However, due to difficulties customers faced in buying software, few of these complementors achieved financial success: Symbian had an ecosystem but it wasn’t healthy and underestimated its problems and the significance of those problems. Similarly, Symbian considered establishing a direct distribution channel (before the arrival of the iTunes Store and Google Play) but it was constrained by pressures from its stakeholders (West & Wood, 2013).
- Rather than rely on traditional venture capital, the company was funded by the corporate VC from its wealthy handset customer-partners. While this approach provided funds to develop innovations that were nominally in both parties’ interests, in the end the interests were not fully aligned, preventing Symbian from taking steps that would have assured the continuing health (in fact survival) of its platform (West, 2014).
Smartphones (as with early laptop computers) also provided an example of joint innovation in the ecosystem among multiple parties. While the Windows desktops soon became a commodity — and thus innovation was driven by component makers supplying to all systems vendors — the adoption and market success of smartphones clearly demonstrate an interdependent combination of innovation in both hardware (handsets and components) and software (OS, apps, cloud services).
Conclusions
Alliance networks, communities, consortia, ecosystems and platforms provide important opportunities for researchers to apply, develop and extend principles of open innovation. At the same time, as Chesbrough (2006) noted, open innovation builds upon many prior streams of research regarding inter-organizational cooperation in innovation. There is considerable research prior to (and outside) the OI paradigm that informs open innovation, but from a practical standpoint it will not necessarily be known to OI scholars unless the explicit link is made (in such a way that it can be found in Google Scholar).
Cooperative standardization between firms through consortia and communities can provide an important antecedent or input to firm-specific open innovation strategies (West & Sims, forthcoming). In their standardization efforts, firms must trade off the joint value creation of the common standard against their private value capture from products and services that leverage that standard (Simcoe, 2006). Even firms that unilaterally define their own platform must balance the value capture within their ecosystem of complementors (West & Wood, 2103). Meanwhile, the adoption of basic standards (such as ASCII or ISO 9000) enable the division of labor for decentralized innovation within cooperative value networks. As such, understanding how firms do (and have previously) cooperate to create and capture value through standards bears directly on core issues of open innovation.
References
Baldwin, Carliss Y. 2012. “Organization Design for Business Ecosystems,” Journal of Organizational Design 1(1): 20-23.
Chesbrough, Henry. 2006. “Open innovation: A new paradigm for understanding industrial innovation,” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West, eds., Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-12.
Gawer, Annabelle, ed. 2009. Platforms, markets and innovation. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Gawer, Annabelle. 2010. “The organization of technological platforms.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 29: 287-296.
Gawer, Annabelle. 2014. “Bridging differing perspectives on technological platforms: Toward an integrative framework.” Research Policy 43 (7): 1239-1249.
Gawer, Annabelle, and Michael A. Cusumano. 2002. Platform leadership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco drive industry innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Gawer, Annabelle, and Michael A. Cusumano. 2014. “Industry platforms and ecosystem innovation.” Journal of Product Innovation Management 31 (3): 417-433.
Müller-Seitz, Gordon, and Jörg Sydow. 2012. “Open innovation at the interorganizational network level - Collaborative Practices in a Semiconductor Industry Consortium,” Open Innovation: New Insights and Evidence conference, Imperial College London, June 25.
O’Mahony, Siobhán and Karim R. Lakhani. 2011. “Organizations in the Shadow of Communities,” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 33, 3-36.
Powell, Walter W. 1990. “Neither Market Nor Hierarchy.” Research in Organizational Behavior 12: 295-336.
Simcoe, Timothy S. 2006. “Open Standards and Intellectual Property Rights,” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West (eds.), Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.161-183.
Teece, David J. 1986. “Profiting from Technological Innovation: Implications for Integration, Collaboration, Licensing and Public Policy,” Research Policy 15 (6), 285-305.
West, Joel. 2014a. “Challenges of Funding Open Innovation Platforms: Lessons from Symbian Ltd.,” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West, eds., New Frontiers in Open Innovation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71-93.
West, Joel. 2014b. “Open Innovation: Learning from Alliance Research,” in Refik Culpan, editor, Open Innovation Through Strategic Alliances, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 1-16.
West, Joel and Marcel Bogers. 2014. “Leveraging External Sources of Innovation: A Review of Research on Open Innovation,” Journal of Product Innovation Management, 31, 4 (July 2014): 814-831.
West, Joel and Karim R. Lakhani, 2008. “Getting Clear About Communities in Open Innovation,” Industry & Innovation 15 (2), 223-231.
West, Joel & Jonathan Sims, forthcoming. “How Firms Leverage Crowds and Communities for Open Innovation,” in Allan Afuah, Christopher L. Tucci and Gianluigi Viscusi (eds), Creating and Capturing Value through Crowdsourcing.
West, Joel, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Henry Chesbrough. 2006. “Open Innovation: A Research Agenda,” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West, eds., Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 285-307.
June 21, 2016
Research Policy added to FT journal list
The previous list of 45 FT journals was published in 2012, and an earlier list of 40 journals appeared around 2003. Based on a vote this month by the deans of 140 business schools, nine journals were added to the FT list
- Human Relations
- Journal of Management
- Journal of Management Information Systems
- Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
- Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
- Research Policy
- Review of Economic Studies
- Review of Finance
- Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
- Academy of Management Perspecties
- California Management Review
- Journal of the American Statistical Association
- RAND Journal of Economics
The starting point of this review was to look at the journals that contribute the least to the research rank. Given that the list is limited by nature, it is important to “capture” as much of the research published by business school faculty as possible in leading journals, if not necessarily in the most selective ones. However, it was never meant to demote nor to promote any journals. The FT list of journals is not a ranking. … It is likely that 50 will be the upper limit for this list. So future reviews will also look at potential journals to drop and their replacement.As an associate editor of Research Policy, I can say that the editorial board is very proud of the recognition that comes from being added to this list. While subjectively many would consider RP on par with journals such as Journal of Business Venturing and Journal of Management Information Systems, by Google’s ranking of high-impact (h5 index) papers it ranks at the top of Entrepreneurship & Innovation journals.
It is unclear what impact any of these changes will have upon business school hiring and promotion. US business schools tend to use the Business Week rankings while the rest of the world uses the FT rankings. Unlike in Europe, few American business schools have an innovation or technology management department, which means that innovation scholars tend to be found in strategy, management, entrepreneurship or operations management departments.
Still, it seems like a good omen for innovation studies in Europe and the rest of the world, and should bring RP greater visibility in the U.S. I remember when I was up for tenure in 2005, the department tenure committee was questioning my 2003 RP publication (which until recently was my most cited journal article). “What is Research Policy?” one of the committee members asked another colleague (who could offer the answer). Hopefully there will be less of that going forward.
List of 50 Journals Used in FT MBA Rankings
- Academy of Management Journal
- Academy of Management Review
- Accounting Review
- Accounting, Organisations and Society
- Administrative Science Quarterly
- American Economic Review
- Contemporary Accounting Research
- Econometrica
- Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
- Harvard Business Review
- Human Relations
- Human Resource Management
- Information Systems Research
- Journal of Accounting and Economics
- Journal of Accounting Research
- Journal of Applied Psychology
- Journal of Business Ethics
- Journal of Business Venturing
- Journal of Consumer Psychology
- Journal of Consumer Research
- Journal of Finance
- Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
- Journal of Financial Economics
- Journal of International Business Studies
- Journal of Management
- Journal of Management Information Systems
- Journal of Management Studies
- Journal of Marketing
- Journal of Marketing Research
- Journal of Operations Management
- Journal of Political Economy
- Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
- Management Science
- Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
- Marketing Science
- MIS Quarterly
- Operations Research
- Organization Science
- Organization Studies
- Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes
- Production and Operations Management
- Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Research Policy
- Review of Accounting Studies
- Review of Economic Studies
- Review of Finance
- Review of Financial Studies
- Sloan Management Review
- Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
- Strategic Management Journal
June 8, 2016
MB Sarkar, 1961-2016
March 21, 2016
2016 User and Open Innovation Conferences
Open and User Innovation Conference: HBS, Boston, August 1-3
This year the official title of Eric von Hippel’s conference is the “14th International Open and User Innovation Conference,” acknowledging the conference’s origins as a small workshop in Vienna back in 2003. It is (to my knowledge) the first time the word “International” has been used in the title.
The key dates:
- March 1, 2016: submission website opens
- May 13, 2016: deadline for submitting papers
- June 1, 2016: notification of accepted papers
- July 1, 2016: registration deadline
As before, the conference is being run using tracks:
Topics |
Chair(s) |
---|---|
Communities: User Innovation and Open Source |
Christopher Lettl, Vienna University of Economics & Business |
Contests, Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation |
Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School |
Crowdfunding |
Lars Bo Jeppesen, Copenhagen Business School |
Firm's Interactions with User Innovation |
Christina Raasch, TUM School of Management |
Law, Policy and IP |
Katherine Strandburg, New York University School of Law |
Toolkits and Problem Solving |
Nik Franke, Vienna University of Economics and Business |
User Innovation and Diffusion |
Dietmar Harhoff, Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition |
User Innovation and Psychology |
Ruth Stock Homburg, Technische Universität Darmstadt |
User Innovation in Healthcare |
Pedro Oliveira, Católica-Lisbon School of Business & Economics |
Sharing Economy and Platforms |
Christoph Hienerth, Otto Beisheim School of Management |
Still, those who want an open innovation audience may find Spain a better venue this year.
World Open Innovation Conference: ESADE, Barcelona, December 15-16
After its inauguration in Napa Valley and subsequent session in Silicon Valley, the WOIC leaves California (Henry Chesbrough’s home turf) for Europe — specifically the coastal capital of Catalonia (and Spain’s second largest city). As in previous years, we hope to continue the mix of industry and academic attendees, which was highly valued by the 2015 attendees.
Although it’s not yet up on the website, here are the relevant dates.
- July 1, 2016: submission website opens
- August 15, 2016: deadline for extended abstracts
- September 15, 2016: notification of accepted abstracts
- December 1, 2016: submission of full papers
- Conference Chair: Henry Chesbrough (UC Berkeley & ESADE)
- Conference Co-Chair: Wim Vanhaverbeke (Hasselt, ESADE & NUS)
- Academic Program Chair: Marcel Bogers (U. Copenhagen)
- Associate Program Chairs: Jonathan Sims (Babson) & Ann-Kristin Zobel (ETH Zürich)
- Industry Program Chair: Solomon Darwin (UC Berkeley)
This will be the first year that I won’t be leading WOIC, after being co-chair (with Chesbrough, Piller and Chris Tucci) of the inaugural conference, and last year being program chair (with Chesbrough as the sole chair).
However, after managing submission process for two years — where we had more Europeans than Americans — I have long felt that the "W" in WOIC meant we need to sometimes meet in Europe. ESADE was the natural venue, given Chesbrough and Vanhaverbeke’s long ties there — and that Barcelona in December is a lot more temperate than many of the other possible venues.
I look forward to seeing friends and colleagues in Boston and Barcelona. (Because AOM was kind enough to bring its annual conference to me — I drive or take the train through Anaheim every day en route to work — I will also be there, but the chances of seeing friends among the horde of 10,000+ are slim at best).