Managing Innovation

Understanding and Motivating Crowds

Alexander Brem, Joe Tidd;Tugrul Daim

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781786346506
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Managing Innovation is a three-part series covering contemporary technology and innovation management research areas. Each volume comprises key articles from both the International Journal of Innovation Management and the International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, published by World Scientific, and provides an international, disciplinary approach across its broad coverage of topics.

Relevant for both academics and practitioners, this volume focuses on key aspects of crowd innovation including motivations, challenges and benefits of this approach.

Contents:

• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Crowdsourcing Challenges (Joe Tidd, Alexander Brem and Tugrul Daim)
• Motivations of Crowd Innovation:
  • A Contemporary and Systematic Literature Review of User-centric Innovation: A Consumer Perspective (Jordan Robert Gamble, Michael Brennan and Rodney McAdam)
  • User Motivation and Knowledge Sharing in Idea Crowdsourcing (Miia Kosonen, Chunmei Gan, Mika Vanhala and Kirsimarja Blomqvist)
  • Motivational Factors Affecting Participation and Contribution of Members in Two Different Swiss Innovation Communities (Louise Muhdi and Roman Boutellier)
  • Everybody is Invited But Not Everybody Will Come — The Influence of Personality Dispositions on Users' Entry Decisions for Crowdsourcing Competitions (Rita Faullant, Patrick Holzmann and Erich J Schwarz)
  • Walking Parallel Paths or Taking the Same Road? The Effect of Collaborative Incentives in Innovation Contests (Viktoria Boss, Robin Kleer and Alexander Vossen)
  • Innovative Brand Community Members and Their Willingness to Share Ideas with Companies (Sladjana Nørskov, Yun Mi Antorini amd Morten Berg Jensen)
• Challenges of Crowd Innovation:
  • User-Centric Innovations in New Product Development — Systematic Identification of Lead Users Harnessing Interactive and Collaborative Online-Tools (Volker Bilgram, Alexander Brem and Kai-Ingo Voigt)
  • Can the Crowd Do the Job? Exploring the Effects of Integrating Customers into a Company's Business Model Innovation (Philipp Alexander Ebel, Ulrich Bretschneider and Jan Marco Leimeister)
  • Crowdsourcing Intermediaries and Problem Typologies: An Explorative Study (Gabriele Colombo, Tommaso Buganza, Ilse-Maria Klanner and Susanne Roiser)
  • Diversity and Change of User Driven Innovation Modes in Companies (Sampsa Hyysalo, Petteri Repo, Päivi Timonen, Louna Hakkarainen & Eva Heiskanen)
• Benefits of Crowd Innovation:
  • Opening Up the Innovation Process: Outside-In Involvement of Innovative Users and Established Firms' Innovation Performance (Spyros Arvanitis, Barbara Fuchs and Martin Woerter)
  • Innovative Behaviour Types and Their Influence on Individual Crowdsourcing Performances (Hangzi Zhu, Katharina Djurjagina and Jens Leker)
  • Benefits and Barriers of Crowdsourcing in B2B Firms: Generating Ideas with Internal and External Crowds (Henri Simula and Mervi Vuori)
  • With a Little Help from My Customers: The Influence of Customer Empowerment on Consumers' Perceptions of Well-Established Brands (Martin Meiβner, Michelle D Haurand and Christian Stummer)
  • Innovation Awards: Reward, Recognition, and Ritual (Lisa Callagher and Peter Smith)
• Index

Readership: Students and practitioners in the fields of technology and innovation management. Innovation Management;Technology Management;Innovation Success;Crowd;International Innovation0 Key Features:

• This book contains most important publications in the field of technology and innovation management from the recent years

Part 1

Motivations of Crowd
Innovation

Chapter 1

A Contemporary and Systematic Literature Review of User-centric Innovation: A Consumer Perspective^∗

Jordan Robert Gamble, Michael Brennan and Rodney McAdam

This paper aims to provide a contemporary, critical and systematic overview of user-centric innovation (UCI) from a consumer perspective. The objectives of this paper were to identify and categorise gaps in research and/or knowledge, contextually classify empirical UCI studies, critically analyse the literature in terms of coalition/fragmentation and derive practitioner implications for industry implementation. Our findings indicate that user communities should be carefully evaluated by firm management as they can represent significant risks in relation to resource requirements as well as opportunities for capitalising on new product development. Furthermore, by ascertaining which product-related resources the consumers are lacking, it may provide organisations with details of the consumers’ ahead-of-the-market needs and may be used to devise effective recognition-based proactive UCI strategies. A research framework was also formulated to help future UCI researchers navigate the complex network of previous research and to assist in developing more structured and focussed future research questions.

Keywords: User-centric innovation; UCI; user communities; co-creation; UGC; crowdsourcing; crowdfunding.

Introduction

Many recent academic studies now acknowledge that consumers and their communities play an increasingly vital role in innovation across many markets and industries (Berthon et al., 2007; Nambisan and Baron, 2007; Payne et al., 2009; Piller et al., 2010). User-centric innovation (UCI) has emerged as a crucial strategy for organisations in terms of their survival (Desouza et al., 2008), innovation development (Greer and Lei, 2012; Janssen and Dankbaar, 2008), closer customer relations (Jespersen and Buck, 2010) and achieving best practice (Enkel et al., 2005). The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater clarity and understanding of UCI from a user perspective, through a critical and systematic analysis of both the contemporary academic literature and the associated empirical studies into UCI.

The authors define UCI as a dimension of open innovation in which the firm encourages or facilitates active participation or involvement by the end consumer in the innovation process of the product/service/idea developed and offered by the firm (Di Gangi and Wasko, 2009; Faulkner and Runde, 2009). This definition of UCI as centred on end user contributions as opposed to business-to-business (B2B) partnerships is reflected by other management scholars (Ebbesson, 2012; Gamble and Gilmore, 2013; Greer and Lei, 2012; Piller et al., 2010). Some of the authors provide alternative terminology for UCI such as co-creative innovation (Ebbesson, 2012), customer co-creation (Gamble and Gilmore, 2013; Piller et al., 2010), collaborative innovations with consumers (Greer and Lei, 2012) and crowdsourcing or crowd creation (Howe, 2009). Due to the fluid and evolving concept of UCI and the multitude of perspectives from which it can be contextualised and discussed, the authors regard the aspects of end-consumer participation, involvement and contributions as encompassing a range of distinct yet complementary consumer interactions. This aspect is supported in the management literature; for instance, Howe (2009) not only coined the term crowdsourcing but also described it as comprising four application categories of crowd wisdom, crowd creation or user-generated content (UGC), crowd voting and crowdfunding. Furthermore, Gamble and Gilmore (2013) proposed in their paper a typological continuum of co-creational practices that they demarcate into the concepts of viral marketing, sponsored user-generated branding, UGC, vigilante marketing and “prosumer” marketing. The above examples indicate that these varied types of consumer interactions can be considered valid channels through which organisations can centre their innovation processes on the end consumers. The subsequent keyword searches and systematic literature review (SLR) are therefore based upon these varied interactions as cited in this definition of UCI.

UCI is not a recent concept as it was first discussed in depth by von Hippel in the 1970s (Bogers et al., 2010). However, it has received a plethora of recent interest in academic literature in the digital age as more radical forms of innovation are sought on account of changing consumer preferences (Baldwin et al., 2006), more interactive marketing strategies (Wright et al., 2012) and the diversification of technology platforms and services (Laursen and Salter, 2006; Sawhney et al., 2005). The changing application of UCI within the context of management disciplines has led naturally to changing perceptions of its usefulness and relevance in the contemporary management literature (for the purposes of this paper we consider the “contemporary literature” to be papers published since 2005).

Lettl and Gemünden (2005) assess the current significance of UCIs by stating that “After almost three decades of research on user innovation it is widely acknowledged that users are an important actor in the innovation process” (339). Despite this statement and the above literature arguments, however, the concept of UCI is not well understood (Baldwin et al., 2006; Bogers et al., 2010) or utilised in industry or policy (Hienerth and Lettl, 2011; Shah and Tripsas, 2007), and there has been a lack of empirical research that has been carried out to date regarding UCI in practice (Baldwin et al., 2006; Di Gangi and Wasko, 2009; Faulkner and Runde, 2009; Hienerth, 2006; Morrison et al., 2000). These suggestions of on-going uncertainty surrounding the application of UCI in practice, and the fact that it has still not been widely accepted and implemented as a valid business and management approach, highlight the need for more research into our understanding of this phenomenon.

A small number of scholars have provided tentative steps towards reviewing some of the literature; for instance, Greer and Lei (2012) critiqued some of the UCI articles from a number of different disciplines and from the context of different types of collaborations. However, their study was conducted from a purely organisational engagement perspective and the majority of the reviewed literature corresponded to B2B collaborations. Bogers et al. (2010) have made some initial progress into reviewing UCI literature from an end-consumer perspective; however, their conceptual paper is subject to a number of weaknesses such as brevity, a non-systematic approach and a lack of contemporariness (over two-thirds of the literature articles they review were published prior to 2005). The authors have found that no research paper has presented a contemporary overview of the UCI literature from a user perspective in terms of what has been learned from empirical investigations, which proposed gaps in research or knowledge have been fulfilled and what is still unknown about user topics relating to UCI. So instead of reviewing a niche area within UCI topics at the expense of considering the broader perspectives of the UCI management topic, this research paper will aim to provide this contemporary, critical and systematic overview of UCI that is lacking in the recent management literature. The authors will attempt to demonstrate that we offer a useful addition to the current UCI research field through the provision of insights relating to various aspects of user benefits, communities, characteristics and motivations. In doing so, we will endeavour to develop a new and original research framework for consumer perspectives of UCI that will offer a greater clarity and structure of our knowledge and understanding of these important topics. Our intended outcome of this research framework will be to facilitate more targeted and relevant further empirical studies to address the important issues and challenges that have been neglected in the research to date. This research framework will also aim to develop a unique conceptual model for how our current understanding of these UCI topics have practical applications for industry practitioners; it may therefore enhance the profile of UCI as a legitimate and important business strategy for organisations and not solely an academic exercise.

On account of the lack of research, knowledge and understanding of UCI and how it can be developed and enhanced within industry, the aim of this research paper is to conduct a SLR of the UCI literature to assess our current understanding/knowledge of UCI from a user perspective and identify areas of further research. In order to achieve this overall aim, the four key objectives of this paper are:

(1)To identify and categorise gaps in research or knowledge relating to contemporary UCI topics from a user perspective that have been proposed in academic journal publications;

(2)To ascertain and classify contemporary empirical UCI studies from a user perspective into emergent UCI categories, contextual purposes of study and the nature/scale of the empirical data;

(3)To critically analyse the discussion on each of the UCI topics in terms of research gaps that have been fulfilled, empirical studies that have driven further research on UCI and the coalition/fragmentation of the literature in linking the research gaps to the empirical investigations;

(4)To derive practitioner implications from the literature review findings that will demonstrate how our understandings of the existing UCI research have practical application for industry firms.

Review Methodology

In order to address the aim and objectives of this paper, the methodology incorporated a SLR of a wide range of double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal articles. The decision to incorporate an SLR was inspired and guided by a seminal paper by Tranfield et al. (2003) in which they pioneer the benefits of using an SLR as a key tool in developing an evidence base for management research. The use of a SLR in this paper proved instrumental for developing a robust and holistic collection, synthesis and critical assessment of the present understandings of this contemporary concept of UCI, and for facilitating the emergence of the key themes and sub-themes that have formed the basis of the subsequent sections and discussions of this paper. A 7-stage SLR was conducted:

Stage 1: Keywords. A range of keywords relating to this research paper were formulated through a combination of the prior knowledge/experience of the authors in this management field, as well as a brainstorming exercise. Consideration was also given to the above acknowledgements of alternative terminology for UCI (see Ebbesson, 2012; Gamble and Gilmore, 2013; Greer and Lei, 2012; Howe, 2009; Piller et al., 2010) as well as the inherent application categories or practices (Gamble and Gilmore, 2013; Howe, 2009). This triangulation of sources resulted in initial devised keywords of “innovation”, “consumer”, “user”, “involvement”, “control”, “interaction”, “co-creation”, “prosumer”, “UGC”, “UCI”, “user centric”, “viral” “collaborative”, “contribution”, “crowdsourcing”, “crowdfunding”, and “crowd creation”.

Stage 2: Database search. Three distinct academic databases were utilised in order to cross-reference the results and eliminate the risk of overlooked literature. The first search was conducted through the “Business Source Premier” database. This was chosen as the primary database as it offered the most comprehensive and wide range of business and management literature on a broad variety of themes. The search was then repeated using the databases “Emerald Management Extra” and “Google Scholar”. For each search, the keywords from Stage 1 were constructed into search strings that included a combination of an article title stem search (i.e., Innovat*) and a main text body stem search (e.g., consum* OR user OR involve* OR control OR interact*). Searches were filtered (where possible) to only scholarly articles published from 2005 to 2013 in order to reduce the results to a manageable number and remain con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Contents
• Introduction: Crowdsourcing Challenges
• Part 1 Motivations of Crowd Innovation
• Part 2 Challenges of Crowd Innovation
• Part 3 Benefits of Crowd Innovation
• Index