Strategic Organization
"Organizing crowds and innovation"
Guest editors:
Teppo Felin, University of Oxford, UK, teppo.felin@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Karim R. Lakhani, Harvard University, USA, klakhani@hbs.edu
Michael Tushman, Harvard University, USA, mtushman@hbs.edu
Overview
25 years ago Administrative Science Quarterly published a highly visible Special Issue on "Technology, Organizations, and Innovation." This Special Issue featured landmark articles that introduced such concepts as absorptive capacity, technology and structure, and architectural innovation. These articles and concepts-many years later-continue to gain attention and to shape the way scholars think about innovation, technological change, strategic management, and organization theory.
However, the intervening decades have seen significant shifts in the locus, structure, and nature of innovation. For example, technological changes have decreased computing and communication costs and transformed the nature of organizational boundaries and the ways firms innovate. Of particular interest are the emergence of participatory practices and voluntary contributions that involve multiple external stakeholders in the innovation process. These include practices such as crowdsourcing, online communities, innovation contests, crowdfunding, user innovation, prediction markets, and open innovation. New and existing organizations are utilizing these types of practices to harness the information, wisdom, capacities, and motivations of individuals and communities both inside and outside the firm.
While there is much work that descriptively captures some of the participatory phenomena and new forms of innovation, there is little work on their theoretical foundations, or their implications for questions such as organizational design, organizational boundaries, leadership and agency, innovation, and the development of organizational capabilities. This Special Issue will explore the theoretical and empirical effects of this shifting nature of innovation on incumbent firms, on new organizational forms, and on organizations that are born in these open contexts.
The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring together research that not only describes emergent phenomena related to organizing crowds and innovation-crowdsourcing, innovation contests, crowdfunding, user innovation, prediction markets, and open innovation-but also discusses the implications of these practices for central theoretical and empirical issues such as the boundaries of the firm, strategy, organizational design, innovation, entrepreneurship, and capability development. Because technological progress and outcomes are affected by organizational, economic, social, and historical factors, we encourage articles from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives utilizing a variety of methodologies.
Motivating questions
We are interested in research on the following types of questions:
• How can organizations best engage, utilize, and organize both internal and external participants or crowds when innovating?
• What is the role of organizational boundaries in new forms of innovation?
• How do insights from organization theory inform our understanding of open, participatory forms of innovation?
• What are the respective benefits and costs of engaging different crowds and organizational forms when innovating?
• How do institutions enable or constrain more open forms of organization, capability development, and innovation?
• What is the role of social movements (e.g. the open software movement) in enabling and structuring new forms of collaboration and innovation?
• How do culture, markets, and society influence novel ways of organizing crowds and innovation?
• What forms of institutional entrepreneurship have enabled new forms of innovation?
• What are the implications of various crowd-related practices (e.g. crowdsourcing or crowdfunding) for value creation and appropriation?
• What psychological, sociological, and economic factors are central for understanding new forms of organization and innovation?
• How does open innovation change the boundaries of the firm? What role do incentives and motivation play?
• Are there new organizational forms (e.g. market versus hierarchy or other hybrid forms) that arise as firms engage in different forms of innovation and capability development?
• How does the development of organizational capabilities change as we consider more "open" firms?
• What institutional and organizational characteristics support crowdfunding and crowdfunded innovation?
• How can aggregation mechanisms such as prediction markets be incorporated into organizational strategy, capability development, and innovation?
The above and related questions provide the central domain of the Special Issue. We seek rigorous contributions that advance theory and also feature empirical backing.
Timeline and submission instructions
All submissions should be uploaded to the Manuscript Central/Scholar One website:http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/so between 1 April and 30 April 2015. Once you have created your account (if you do not already have one) and you are ready to submit your paper, you will need to choose this particular Special Issue from the drop down menu that is provided for the type of submission. Contributions should follow the directions for manuscript submission described on the SO webpage: http://soq.sagepub.com. For technical queries about submissions, contact strategic.organization@hec.ca. For questions regarding the content of this Special Issue, contact one of the guest editors.
Authors who are invited to revise their manuscripts will also be invited to attend a Special Issue conference at the University of Oxford.