CHS: Small: Blending the Virtual and the Physical: Understanding and Designing Crowd-Based Open Innovation Systems for Physical Products

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Firms often turn to external contributors to perform vital functions, including "open innovation" scenarios in which firms create challenges or competitions where external crowd workers develop and submit creative ideas. This project will study a number of open questions around crowd-based open innovation around complex physical products, which pose challenges above and beyond the software and simple design contexts in which open innovation has been studied before. These include (1) How do external contributors successfully align their contribution to an organization of which they are not a part and propose designs for a physical context to which they do not have easy access? (2) How do internal employees source, import, and adapt the inputs of external contributors whose assumptions, processes and tools might be entirely different? (3) How can systems and practices be designed to facilitate creative work from external contributors and effective integration into the the firm's processes? To address these questions the project team will work closely with a firm that uses advanced engineering technologies to develop and manufacture new vehicles, observing the firm and related crowdworker communities during several innovation challenges. They will also develop material on open innovation for an undergraduate course centered the future of work that both teaches findings from the work and gives students hands-on experience developing a project that incorporates creative crowd input into the group's work. The team will collect a number of sources of data for each challenge. From the crowd platform itself, they will collect all of the online discussions from the inception of the challenge to the choice of winning ideas, evaluation of those ideas by both the crowd and the firm, and the subsequent technical work around developing the winning designs. They will also conduct interviews with online community members, seeking to understand why collaborations form and disband, why some designs are not ultimately submitted to the competition, how community members perceive feedback, and how both winners and non-winners engage with the winning designs. In parallel, they will observe and interview activity at their partner firm, attending both specific meetings related to the challenges being studied and general weekly meetings (to give an overview of relevant discussions and decisions outside of the challenge itself). Much of the analysis will involve applying social network and open coding techniques to track interaction patterns and knowledge flows between actors both inside and outside the firm, looking at how these evolve through the course of the challenge. These, along with grounded theory-based analysis of interviews and observational data, will highlight both key regular patterns (such as the representation and manipulation of non-textual artifacts) and important gaps (such as the need to provide an appropriate but not sensitive or paralyzing level of context) that might benefit from better tool support.