Open Innovation strategies within Information and Communication Technologies

Plan Estatal 2013-2016 Retos (From: 01-01-2014 To: 31-12-2016)

Summary:

Open Innovation is an emergent paradigm by which organizations make use of their internal and external resources to perform their innovation processes. The growth of information and communication technologies has facilitated the spread of online open innovation communities and ideas contests, allowing a more direct contact with customers and users. The purpose of this proposal is to analyze the behavior of online community members and improve the efficiency of these communities with a double aim. First, to demonstrate the existence of a reduced group of users responsible of the majority of contributions. This fact is in line with the phenomenon of participation inequality typical of online communities. More specifically, to determine to what extent this reduced core of the community can be defined in terms of reputation and popularity. Second, to assess the evaluation schemes based on collective intelligence considering their ability to detect those users sharing ideas potentially applicable by the organization. That is, to what extent they can identify the so called 'lead users'.
Typically, open innovation communities offers several complementary types of participation: sharing ideas, commenting ideas previously shared, or evaluating ideas. One of the main challenges of these communities is that they generate hundreds or even thousands of ideas in a short period of time, which far exceed the evaluation resources and the absorptive capacity of organizations. That is the reason why collective evaluation procedures are introduced. In this scheme, Community members are the ones who assess shared ideas, highlighting the best or the worst ideas. The main problem of this solution is that although information about users' preferences are collected, they can also promote non affordable ideas, ideas with a prohibitive cost or ideas that are not aligned with the strategic innovation policies of the organization. The lead user theory from Von Hippel posits the existence of lead users characterized because they can foresee innovations much earlier than the rest of users, sharing ideas that are finally adopted by the organization. This is a quite relevant group of users for the organization and its early detection constitutes a much more efficient alternative to the collective evaluation schemes. As a result, the proposal is going to measure how the collective evaluation schemes are or not appropriate for the lead users identification and it will propose new identification schemes for this group of users based on social network analysis and computational intelligence techniques.
Findings in this proposal have important implications over those organizations developing open innovation strategies and over community managers. The proposal is going to provide a new participation analysis methodology based on social networks that will improve the management of these communities by focusing on the lead users group. It will also provide a solution to the problem of managing high volumes of information, so organization can concentrate in those ideas potentially applicable.

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