California Management Review

Majchrzak, Ann; Bogers, Marcel L. A. M.; Chesbrough, Henry; Holgersson, Marcus

doi: 10.1177/00081256231158830pmid: N/A

Open innovation rests on the idea that not all the smart people work only for you, and managing human interaction across organizational boundaries is therefore central to open innovation. This article starts with outlining and reviewing research on this human dimension of open innovation. The article develops seven principles of innovation-producing encounters that can guide managers in enabling value creation through open innovation. We continue by introducing the rest of the special section, which expands beyond the human dimension to also include firms, platforms, and ecosystems, with important implications for the creation and capture of value from open innovation.

Rayna, Thierry; Striukova, Ludmila; Fauchart, Emmanuelle

doi: 10.1177/00081256231161628pmid: N/A

The ability to commercialize products based on distributed innovation is one of the critical challenges of large-scale open innovation. While this issue has been largely investigated in relation to open-source software (OSS), the literature on commercialization strategies of open-source hardware (OSHW) is comparatively scarce, despite OSHW commercialization being more complex. Based on a multi-method exploratory study, this article shows that with OSHW, firms may strategically leverage a “gray area” between closeness and openness to take advantage of OSWH community innovations.

Gutmann, Tobias; Chochoiek, Christopher; Chesbrough, Henry

doi: 10.1177/00081256221147342pmid: N/A

Although corporate venture capital (CVC) has been studied as part of open innovation (OI), assumptions about knowledge flows crossing organizational boundaries between “the inside” and “the outside” have limited those explorations. Drawing on an abductive approach to grounded theorizing, this article introduces an intuitive yet novel framework that traces the sources and applications of knowledge obtained from CVC to derive new conditions for how those investments allow companies to orchestrate knowledge flows to overcome barriers and increase their innovation effectiveness. Besides exploring traditional OI knowledge flows within the CVC context, this article further identifies and examines both outside-out knowledge flows (which help to shape an ecosystem for a corporate innovator) and inside-in knowledge flows (which overcome internal silos to achieve real innovation impact).

van der Geest, Coen; van Angeren, Joey

doi: 10.1177/00081256231159398pmid: N/A

In the context of platforms, an open architecture is instrumental in enabling innovation by complementors. But as complementors increasingly deplete the innovation opportunities that the platform architecture affords, the platform architecture must evolve to reinvigorate the platform’s generative capacity. This article underscores the role of complementors in the process of platform architecture evolution by introducing the notion of architectural generativity. Architectural generativity involves actively soliciting and selectively incorporating contributions from complementors to help evolve the platform in unforeseen ways. In the case of the Mozilla Firefox web browser platform, complementors contributed new ways to facilitate access to the platform’s technological components and suggested better ways to control the platform and its architecture.

Olk, Paul; West, Joel

doi: 10.1177/00081256231165329pmid: N/A

Orchestrating an ecosystem requires coordination to create value, but prior research has tended to emphasize centralized ecosystem control over solutions involving distributed governance. By studying multilateral public-private collaborations to develop scientific knowledge to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, we identify a new model of ecosystem control—indirect and distributed governance using R&D consortia. We report archival and interview data on 46 consortia with overlapping corporate, nonprofit, and governmental membership. We find three models of consortia that allow member organizations to jointly orchestrate an ecosystem without centralized control. We discuss the broader implications of this model for orchestrating ecosystems.

Kokshagina, Olga; Schneider, Sabrina

doi: 10.1177/00081256221137720pmid: N/A

Digital technologies have become omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide numerous opportunities, they also cause tensions, many of which are paradoxical. They confront us with conflicting yet synergetic and interdependent alternatives that persist over time—such as benefiting from the increasing availability and access to information at the risk of information overload and technostress. Thus far, we know little about the specific paradoxes caused by digital technologies in the workplace and how managers perceive and cope with them. This article offers a comprehensive perspective on the multiplicity and interrelatedness of paradoxes in the digital white-collar workplace and suggests how managers can develop effective coping mechanisms for convergent change and transforming work practices in paradoxical environments.

Snihur, Yuliya; Thomas, Llewellyn D. W.; Burgelman, Robert A.

doi: 10.1177/00081256221140930pmid: N/A

This article presents a strategic decision-making tool to assist corporate management in analyzing the trajectory of their business model portfolio. The tool provides a robust means of assessing the trajectory of a business model portfolio through the evolution of inter-business model complementarity and intra-business model complexity. The article illustrates the use of the tool through the example of the radical restructuring of Hewlett Packard’s (HP) business model portfolio in 2015, which resulted in two smaller, more adaptive corporate entities with distinct business models that could pursue redefined growth opportunities after the split.