Beyond Creativity

Gatekeepers in the Innovation Process

In ECIS Galway in June 2008 Eoin Whelan and I will have a following session:

"Knowledge Diffusion in R&D Groups: The Impact of Internet Technologies"

Abstract:

Knowledge flows are the lifeblood of any R&D organisation. These firms are increasingly
discovering that the knowledge they require is often located beyond their boundaries. In this paper, we investigate how R&D groups acquire and diffuse external knowledge and the role Internet technologies play in this process.

The focus of our study is on the technological gatekeeper. Previous studies have found that gatekeepers are key nodes in the innovation process. These sporadic individuals have the skills to identify useful knowledge outside the firm and disseminate this among their local colleagues.

However, much of the seminal gatekeeper research has been conducted over two decades ago. In the time since, there have been huge advances in ICT and especially Internet technologies. These technologies have dramatically altered how knowledge workers source and share their information. Our objective is to advance the gatekeeper theory into an era where the knowledge worker is saturated with information. Using case study methods, we examine knowledge flows in the R&D group of an Irish medical devices firm.

Our results indicate that due to advances in Internet technology, the traditional gatekeeper no longer exists to any great extent. Instead, the modern R&D lab acquires and diffuses external knowledge through a combination of a ‘web gatekeeper’ and a
‘knowledge transformer.’

You are welcome to participate the session or comment the topic beforehand !

How can inventing be research?

Too often research and practise are totally separated tracks. I have met  inventors who dislike science and research, because "researchers have nothing practical to provide". Somehow I have a feeling that these sceptics do not really understand the current state of research and its methods.

True, the traditional, positivistic view on science does not accept inventing in the university.  However, design research and especially Herbert Simon's book "The Sciences of the Artificial" was the first attempt to introduce inventing in research and emphasise the importance of artefacts .

The term artifact is used to describe something that is artificial, or constructed by humans, as opposed to something that occurs naturally (Simon 1996).

"Building a system in of itself does not constitute research", saw Jay Nunamaker & Co. I agree. Theories need to guide the building process of systems and artefacts .

Artefacts are built, evaluated and demolished as part of design research. In Information Systems (IS) field this is called design science. If you are interested in building artefacts (software, models, prescriptions, etc) I recommend you to take a look at:

- Design Research in Information Systems, an overview by Vijay Vaishnavi and Bill Küchler (UPDATE D 20th Jan 2008) .

- Action Design - a method integrating action research and design science. Originally this was introduced by Chris Argyris. There is a company and a consulting methodology related to it. BUT, more interesting stuff is coming from Matti Rossi, Maung Sein, Ola Henfridsson & Co.  Please, keep on eye on their work.

- The evolutionary management-related work of Joan van Aken: "Prescription-driven research that provides solutions for management problems in addition to description driven research that enables us to understand the nature of problems but leaves undone the task of developing sound change programs".

- Theory of Design Science:  The latest article by Shirley Gregor and David Jones.

(If the links above do not work or you need more info about design research, please, let me know)

Afterword: Thanks to my advisor, professor Pertti Järvinen for advancing this field and my understanding.

COfundOS - OSS Werk? Synergies with CrowdSpirit?

Open Source Sofware (OSS) and Open Innovation are becoming closer to each other.

This was the first thought when I saw CofundOS.

COfundOS seems to be the first intermediary working on OSS basis.

Bidding for software this way is new to me. I like the openness of this approach: "All ideas and contributions on Cofundos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. All project outcomes must be licensed under an OSI approved open-source license".

The developer of the COfundOS website and service is the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web Research Group ( (AKSW) at the University of Leipzig, Germany. A great start and Good luck / Alles Gute with your efforts!

The COfundOS operation model  (not using word business model here...) is similar to CrowdSpirit.

An idea: Could CrowdSpirit use COfundOS to find OSS developers for the software development of those gadgets? Any open APIs or Web Services in these two services?

The Creative Cities - A visit to Limerick and Galway

On the week 42 I will be visiting LERO ( The Irish Software Engineering Research Center) and NUI Galway.

Previously I wrote about Dublin as a creative city - in terms of Richard Florida. I expect Limerick and Galway to be even more interesting places and represent the soul of Ireland. Ireland has had tremendous development and growth during the last 20 years. Definitely I will be blogging about (Irish) creative environments after my trip.   

Meetings with professors Brian Fitzgerald (open source software, information systems )  and Brian Donnellan (information systems, innovation, knowledge management) will be fun and interesting.  In the LERO I will have a public talk about intermediaries and innovation marketplaces as well.  Let's see what kind of comments and feedback I will receive ;-)

MindTrek - Open Innovation meets Open Source

MindTrek is a high-profile conference about:
- Open Innovation
- Open Source
- Social Media etc.

This conference will take place in Tampere, Finland between 3rd and 4th October 2007. Please, check the program, this year MindTrek is truly worth participating!

Selected topics:

- MindTrek starts with OpenMind, the top open source happening in northern Europe.   The atmosphere in MindTrek/OpenMind is ...amazingly open. Last year I wrote about openness, flow and coding.

- Jaiku micro-blogging service will be demonstrated on Wednesday 3rd October in the Social Media track by its founder, Jyri Engeström. I still can not fully understand that service, so I will definitely be listening ;-)

- My colleague Katri Lietsala will talk about StarWreck movie production community with Atte Joutsen. Motivation to participate in a movie community will be ... multi-faceted!

- I will be interviewing Ruben Robert and asking questions concerning FellowForce as an intermediary.

- In the evening, on Wednesday 3rd October, there will be an  Open Innovation Round Table as an invitation-only event. If you are interested to participate this, please, let me know.

- Update: On Tuesday we had a seminar on blogs and wikis, more at  Juha-Matti Arola's blog.

I expect that Open Innovation will mean different things for different people and creative friction is ready ;-)

Please, book your seat before the conference will be full! Join also the Facebook community of MindTrek.

Press release: Open Innovation and Intermediaries

A small press release, originating from 23rd August 2007:

Open Innovation Challenges Companies to Utilise Intermediaries

Traditional, closed innovation activity has a limited effect in an organisation. External specialists and innovators could provide novel insights and additional value. Internet-based innovation markets enable companies and innovators to buy and sell IP (Intellectual Property) as well as to develop ideas collaboratively to the level of innovation. This creates savings in R&D expenses.

The Hypermedia Laboratory at the University of Tampere in Finland investigates the Open Innovation phenomenon. We focus on innovation intermediaries who confidentially integrate companies and innovators to solve problems and challenges.

Currently Hypermedia Laboratory conducts future research of Open Innovation with leading academics. Additionally, a web-based survey is targeted to intermediaries and their customers. Innovators and their motivational factors, interests, brokering and creative problem-solving methods are inspected in this survey. Summaries of these research results will be embedded in a business book, planned for publication at the end of 2008.

This research is part of Tekes (http://www.tekes.fi) funded Parteco project which is focused on social media and participatory economics. In Hypermedia Laboratory this research closely links to our open source research area.

The preliminary research findings indicate that companies in Europe should put more emphasis on recognising outside expertise both in their innovation and human resource activities.

Original: http://www.uta.fi/hyper/news.php?item=14392

The press release is also available in Finnish. I did not dare to put an over-simplified picture in the actual press release. So, I put it here:

 

End note: I am still figuring out resources and time for editing that business book. Let's see.

Intermediaries - 5 Challenges

"Being an innovation intermediary is not an easy business", writes Henry Chesbrough.

His Open Business Models book introduces 5 tough challenges:

1. How can the intermediary help its clients define the problem that needs to be solved. This definition must be sufficiently clear to outsiders that they can recognise whether they know enough to answer the problem, without being so clear as to reveal sensitive client information.
      
2. How to manage the problem of identity: whether  and when to disclose the identity of  one party to the other party.
   
   
3. How to demonstrate the value of their service to their clients. Other processes, beyond the control of the intermediary, must occur in order for an idea or technology to become valuable, so how can one measure the contribution for the intermediary to whatever value was subsequently created?
   
   
4. How to create or access a two-sided market, with lots of buyers and lots of sellers.
   
   
5. How to establish a strong, positive reputation early on in the company’s operation

                                                                        Chesbrough (2006, 139-140)

The best part of this book is when Chesbrough concretely illustrates these challenges in InnoCentive, NineSigma, Big Idea Group, InnovationXchange, Shanghai Silicon Intellectual Property Exchange and Ocean Tomo.

Would you like to add an extra challenge element to the list above?

Fellowforce - Evaluating a New Innovation Intermediary

I received a request from Ruben Robert to evaluate their new intermediary service called Fellowforce. This service is an intermediary, acting between innovators and companies (or 'solvers' and 'seekers'). (Updates: August 8th 2007)

Fellowforce - How does it work :

- First you will create a profile and you will be asked about your "professional area of expertise" and "industry of experience"

- After you sign in, the "My Challenge Alerts"-area will be immediately visible. I was curious to test this service and I responded to one of these challenges. Making a response or "pitching" was an easy and a comprehensible process.

- The service and especially "My Challenge Alerts" is cleverly built. Although there are currently only few challenges, Fellowforce looks very alive ;-)

- In the "Innovation Box" you can pick up a company from a list and propose them an innovation. I intend to do that. I will get back to this feature later on.

Fellowforce - Things to improve:

- Collaboration. Users of Fellowforce have no chances to communicate with each other. There is no "collaborative problem-finding and problem-solving". (Update: Fellowforce is working on that) What a pity! Those responses ('pitches') to challenges would be much better quality if there were more participants. (A dilemma in Ahonen&Lietsala's earlier paper). Of course, users ('solvers') are worried that their ideas are 'stolen', but the service could be built so that you can ask your colleagues to join in to solve problems. The reward would be automatically split by the number of solvers.  Additionally, Fellowforce could act as community that creates new kind of consulting business!! + + + I am curious about those HR dimensions of Fellowforce ;-)

- Sign-in. Your Fellowforce user id is your e-mail address. (Update: Fellowforce is working on that) Convenient? Perhaps, but your e-mail address will/may be visible for external marketeers and spammers as well :-(  For this reason, I selected my second, non-significant e-mail address as my user id. Fellowforce administrators should inform their users in the sign-in, how users e-mail is used/made visible.

- Terms and Conditions could be more easily visible in the hierarchy.

- Getting your reward. If you will not check you e-mail constantly, you will not receive your possible reward ( see the item 2D in previous "Terms and Conditions").  That is ... not fair! (Update: Fellowforce is working on that)

- Only E-mail. Fellowforce is too much e-mail centred. As a user of that service I would wish to receive the most important messages by SMS or by snail mail.  However, in your profile, there is no address field or no mobile number field, only e-mail!! (Update: Fellowforce is working on that, telephone/ cellphone  number can be added to the profile)

- RSS. For notifications, the service could use RSS, not only e-mail. This way, I  could monitor my challenges with my mobile phone  and it's RSS reader. I welcome the administrators of Fellowforce to look at Rok Hrastnik's RSS Diary (the blog and the book).

In overall, I have a very positive view on Fellowforce and I intend to intend to continue my experiments with the platform. Earlier my intermediary platform favourite was Ideawicket but Fellowforce is more intuitive to use. The slogan of Fellowforce is also great " This is Wikinomics in practise ". The challenge of Fellowforce is to get enough 'solvers' and 'seekers'. Let's see.

What is your opinion about Fellowforce?

What if TRIZ tools were available for everyone?

TRIZ (Теория Решения Изобретательских Задач, Russian Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving) is a strange case. TRIZ was developed by a Russian engineer called Genrich Altshuller in peculiar circumstances, it is based on analysis of 3 million patents and finally extracted "invention rules". Nowadays original TRIZ researchers are working mostly in the USA (Detroit area). TRIZ is utilised in versatile fields and especially Asian companies are heavily utilising it.

Why to utilise TRIZ in innovation activity? Katie Barry, Ellen Domb and Michael S. Slocum have a point:

"Common creativity tools have been limited to brainstorming and related methods, which depend on intuition, fiat and the knowledge of the members of the team. These methods are typically described as psychologically based and having unpredictable and unrepeatable results. TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team's ability to solve these problems creatively.

I have tested those "40 Inventive Principles" in a contradiction matrix of TRIZ and these can be utilised ... outside gadget design ;-) The TRIZ Journal is "uneven" on its academic status, but it contains many fascinating cases.

Currently, there are interesting things happening around TRIZ. I had a great meeting in May with Yoni (Yonathan) Mizrachi. He is doing research on the next level of TRIZ called Directed Evolution:

"Directed Evolution is a systematic process for predicting future generations of a system by inventing them. In business terms this means that its users can use Directed Evolution to reach a position of market and technological leadership"

Yoni, good luck with you efforts!

Although TRIZ is widely researched and developed, tools based on TRIZ are proprietary, closed.

My dream: There would be an open source software (or open research) community developing TRIZ method and software tools. These tools would be available for individuals and intermediaries.

What would happen if these powerful tools would be available for everyone in open source? An increase in innovation rates? Or collapse in inventions, when nobody can not differentiate useless chindogu from real novelty ;-) What do you think?

Highlights - Innovation in Services -conference

All the papers and presentations of 'Innovation in Services ' conference are now available at:

http://www.tekes.fi/berkeleyserviceinnovation/program.htm

My favourites:

- Rich Mironov: Issues in Shifting from a Product-Based Business Model to a Service-Based Model --> Software business is changing. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure is emerging. Rich nicely illustrated those changes in marketing and innovation. I also found the  Toolset resource valuable.

- Mikko Välimäki,  Nina Helander, Marko Seppänen, Mikko Puhakka & Juha Laine: Building SaaS Business on Top of Open Source - Economic and Legal considerations. Since I have been working in the ASP (Application Service Provisioning) business before, this presentation was truly interesting. Who is responsible for those mash-ups and services that are like collections of services? Who is able to define the SLA (Service Level Agreement)? I liked their point: "None of the widely used OSS-licenses contains special ASP/SaaS-related clauses." Mikko Välimäki's work is also connected to our Parteco Social Media research project and the Community Created Content -book.

- Mary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom and Felicia Morgan: Service Blueprinting: A Practical Tool for Service Innovation --> I have not seen many good evaluation instruments for services. The Service Blueprinting tool has been developed and tested many years by researchers at the University of Arizona. Additionally, Mary Jo was a skillful chair in my session.

- Stephen Ezell: Customer perspective on Services innovation -->  Companies design experiences  from an operations-centric perspective.  BUT,   customers experience services through a different lens. Empathy -  Reliability - Responsiveness - Assurance - Tangibles.

My previous posting tells about our (Ahonen&Lietsala) innovation communities contribution ;-)

Did anyone of you participate the conference?  - - or - -  Do you have comments about the service innovation in overall?