Idea management platforms enable firms to generate pools of ideas and connect employees to large number of colleagues. Although these platforms hold the potential to support employee innovation, managers face considerable difficulties when it comes to deploying them in a way that generates business value. This article describes Allianz UK’s ten-year initiative to tap into its employees’ ideas a...

This paper discusses several challenges in designing field experiments to better understand how organizational and institutional design shapes innovation outcomes and the production of knowledge. We proceed to describe the field experimental research program carried out by our Crowd Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University to clarify how we have attempted to address these research design cha...

This essay argues that medical innovation proceeds most efficiently and effectively within a free market economy. Medical innovation is an expression of the technological project: the program through which we seek to control nature, to improve the quality and quantity of life. The Technological Project proceeds most efficiently with a free market economy because such a market both promotes comp...

1. OPEN INNOVATION Open innovation was defined by Henry Ches-broug, a professor at Harvard Business School, in 2003. He believes that in an open innovation model, companies should use internal and external strength to develop new products and to commercialize them (Chesbrough, 2005). Figure 1 shows the open innovation model. In the closed innovation model, the steps from new products developmen...

This paper examines the implications for research into the diffusion of innovations (DOI) arising from a growing body of literature in two related fields. The first area concerns the debate on the role of regional and national systems of innovation (NSI) in the innovation process. The second area deals with the argument that enterprises must move from a “closed innovation” to an “open innovatio...

Given the importance of contextual influences on the diffusion of innovations, theories and methodologies which take context into account are increasingly relevant to research and practice. One such approach, the systems of innovation approach, considers context to be a cascading set of effects arising from various participants and innovations surrounding the production and diffusion of a focal...

The Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation – GpENI is an international programmable network testbed centered on a regional optical network in the Midwest US, providing flexible infrastructure across the entire protocol stack. The goal of GpENI is to build a collaborative research infrastructure enabling the community to conduct experiments in future Internet architecture. GpENI is fund...

Why do some concepts come to be highly popular, significantly reshaping the IT landscape, while others do not? We address this question by exploring the communities of organizations that underlie IT innovation concepts. In an illustrative investigation of the community for cloud computing, we integrate theories of organizational ecology and scale-free network and their associated methods. Subst...

This article discusses the influence of policies on the development of biopharmaceuticals. We choose the experiences of Taiwan for our empirical study and focus on the evolution between 2000 and 2008; in the period of time the country provides an interesting example for further exploration of biopharmaceutical policies. Among all the policies, the two National Programs (National Research Progra...