Open Innovation, Brokering and Web 2.0

In Berkeley, California, I had today a  presentation called "Managing Service Ideas – Information Systems in Innovation Brokering". This presentation took place in the "Innovation in Services" conference at Haas School of Business.

Together with my colleague Katri (Lietsala)  we utilised the following Hargadon and Sutton's  (1997, 2000)  knowledge brokering framework:

 

                   

Brokering process	Description
1. Capture   good ideas	Knowledge   brokers scavenge constantly for promising ideas, sometimes in the likeliest   places. They see old ideas as their primary raw material.
2. Keep ideas   alive	To remain   useful ideas must be passed around and toyed with. Effective brokers also   keep ideas alive by spreading information on who knows what within the   organization.
3. Imagine new   uses for old ideas	This is where   the innovations arise, where old Ideas that have been captured and remembered   are plugged into new contexts.
4. Put   promising concepts to the test	Testing shows   whether an innovation has commercial potential. It   also teaches brokers valuable lessons, even when an   idea is a complete flop.

 

... to evaluate services like InnoCentive, IdeaWicket and del.icio.us. Interesting selection of services, isn't it! These 4 knowledge brokering elements by Hargadon & Sutton (1997) were mostly missing from those (Web 2.0) services. In overall, build trust and enabling collective creativity are complicated topics.

Some conclusions from my and Katri's Berkeley-paper:

To manage ideas and suggestions efficiently is an essential skill for firms that aim at new or better services. A new organization type called broker is emerging and these brokers utilize information technology to facilitate the innovation management for their clients. Within Open Innovation paradigm brokers act like intermediaries. The focus of our paper was on information systems referred as social media, social software or Web 2.0 which include features that could be very beneficial in binding customers as co-creators or co-innovators.

Attached you will find an early draft
  Download ahonen_lietsala_updated_tekes_haas_managing_service_ideas.pdf of this paper. Every comment is welcome!

Our work will continue with a web questionnaire targeted to users and administrators of those innovation marketplaces.

- Update 8th October 2007:  Our presentation among others was blogged by David Ing (Co-evolging).   .  Good work, David, you found my and Katri's highlights :-)

After word: Discussions with professor Henry Chesbrough (in Berkeley) and professor Andrew Hargadon (in Davis) proved very valuable to me.  Henry Chesbrough kindly advised me to focus particularly on identity management, intellectual property and scalability topics.