Written by Alexander Schroll | 16 March 2009

Tags: Term | Terminology

The term "Open Innovation" was coined by Henry Chesbrough in 2003. Since 2003 the concept of open innovation was remodeled and was often used in a context which was primarily not related to open innovation anymore. But despite of that, there are new terms created every day, which describe a part of open innovation. For instance:

• E-Novation,Prosumer,Participative Consumption,Crowdsourcing, Coolhunting,Community Based Innovation,Web 2.0, Design Thinking, Attention Economy,and many more (forgot most of them...)

I don't have a problem with all these different terms. But what is annoying me, is that many people (bloggers, but also academic researchers) mix these terms and concept. And in many cases, something is called "Open Innovation" whereas "Crowdsourcing" or "E-Novation" would describe it at lot better.

Written by Alexander Schroll | 12 March 2009

Tags: passive | Scoutlabs | SM2 | social media | social media measurement | Techrigy

As already mentioned in my post yesterday, there are numerous open innovation initiatives and crowdsourcing communities out there. The request for attention is growing rapidly as every company is trying to use users and consumers for their product development.

Hence, in our current attention economy it gets increasingly difficult to actively integrate users and consumers into the companies' innovation process.

But why go for the difficult way, when there is a way easier option already available: Social Media Measurement.

Written by Alexander Schroll | 04 March 2009

Tags: Data Collection | Empirical | Research

Being a researcher on the popular topic of open innovation is getting really time-consuming. When I wake up (let's say 8:00AM), first thing I do is to check my emails, check the news and - of course- check my RSS feeds and tweets on open innovation. Because when Europe is sleeping, Asia & America are still researching and blogging - that's why I first spent around 20-30min of catching up the latest buzz. Although gadgets like RSS readers or various Twitter-Tools have made research work relatively easy, it is getting more complex because there are so many information channels which I have to cover: Academic journals (which I am covering over the ProQuest database with automatic RSS information), classic newschannels, influental bloggers, other RSS feeds, Twitter friends and Tweets on Open Innovation.

Written by Alexander Schroll | 03 March 2009

Tags: Human characteristics | influencing variables | Open Innovation Adoption | Skills

The evaluation of influencing variables on open innovation adoption is the major focus of my research work on open innovation. I define three different categories of variables:

• The market side, which could be something like industry, industry hostility, uncertainty in the industry and others.
• The organisational side, which includes everything depend on the company. For instance strategic breadth, competitive advantage, economies of scale, firm size, R&D intensity and others.
• And finally, the human side which includes several characteristics of the company executives (decision makers who have an influence on formulation of the R&D strategy)

Today, I will explain which human characteristics are needed for a company adopting open innovation.