scholarly journals Combining knowledge to generate novelty: a study of disclosed ideas for life science inventions

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taran Thune ◽  
Magnus Gulbrandsen

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a combination of diverse sources of knowledge is important for generation of new ideas and address how institutional infrastructures and practices support integration of knowledge across organizations in medicine and life sciences. Design/methodology/approach The paper investigates new product ideas that emerge from hospital and university employees, and looks at the extent of interaction between clinical and scientific environments in the idea generation process. The paper utilizes data about all new product ideas within life science that were reported in South-Eastern Norway in 2009-2011, as well as information about the individuals and teams that had been involved in disclosing these ideas. Interviews with inventors have also been carried out. Findings Interaction and integration across scientific and clinical domains are common and important for generating new product ideas. More than half of the disclosed life science ideas in the database come from groups representing multiple institutions with both scientific and clinical units or from individuals with multiple institutional affiliations. The interviews indicate that the infrastructure for cross-domain interaction is well-developed, particularly for research activities, which has a positive effect on invention. Originality/value The paper uses an original data set of invention disclosures and investigates the hospital-science interface, which is a novel setting for studies of inventive activities.

2002 ◽  
Vol 48 (8) ◽  
pp. 1042-1059 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. Lilien ◽  
Pamela D. Morrison ◽  
Kathleen Searls ◽  
Mary Sonnack ◽  
Eric von Hippel

Traditional idea generation techniques based on customer input usually collect information on new product needs from a random or typical set of customers. The “lead user process” takes a different approach. It collects information about both needs and solutions from users at the leading edges of the target market, as well as from users in other markets that face similar problems in a more extreme form. This paper reports on a natural experiment conducted within the 3M Company on the effect of the lead user (LU) idea-generation process relative to more traditional methods. 3M is known for its innovation capabilities— and we find that the LU process appears to improve upon those capabilities. Annual sales of LU product ideas generated by the average LU project at 3M are conservatively projected to be $146 million after five years—more than eight times higher than forecast sales for the average contemporaneously conducted “traditional” project. Each funded LU project is projected to create a new major product line for a 3M division. As a direct result, divisions funding LU project ideas are projecting their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years.


foresight ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hugo Hoffmann

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a panoramic view at the credibility issues that exist within social sciences research. Design/methodology/approach The central argument of this paper is that a joint effort between blockchain and other technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning and how they can prevent scientific data manipulation or data forgery as a way to make science more decentralized and anti-fragile, without losing data integrity or reputation as a trade-off. The authors address it by proposing an online research platform for use in social and behavioral science that guarantees data integrity through a combination of modern institutional economics and blockchain technology. Findings The benefits are mainly twofold: On the one hand, social science scholars get paired with the right target audience for their studies. On the other hand, a snapshot of the gathered data at the time of creation is taken so that researchers can prove that they used the original data set to peers in the future while maintaining full control of their data. Originality/value The proposed combination of behavioral economics with new technologies such as blockchain and AI is novel and translated into a cutting-edge tool to be implemented.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mazen Hassan

Purpose This paper aims to examine why the alliance formed between non-Islamist forces and state actors to oust Mohamed Morsi from power in 2013 broke down quickly. Design/methodology/approach This paper makes use of original data set derived from three waves of surveys fielded in 2011, 2014 and 2015 that ask questions about public threat perception. Around 10 elite interviews were also conducted to further test the study’s hypothesis. Findings On the one hand, non-Islamists, civic forces challenged the status and interests of state actors in a way that made state actors view them with heightened distrust. On the other, many civic forces, in face of high threat perception, prioritized law during and order after Morsi’s removal, driven – at least partly – by shifts in public attitudes. Originality/value Many views look at transitions in the Arab world from the angle of how Islamists interact with traditional power holders. Such an approach, however, could be reductionist in many ways because it disregards civic forces. This is a point this paper seeks to address.


2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Cheng ◽  
Sami Farooq ◽  
John Johansen

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine, and present a comprehensive review of, the existing literature on the international manufacturing network (IMN). Design/methodology/approach – The original data set used for reviewing the IMN literature consisted of 107 articles selected from 21 journals: more specifically, 40 articles are concerned with plant-level analysis, and 67 articles are related to IMN-level analysis. The literature is simultaneously reviewed by two researchers. The relevance and contribution of each reviewed paper is discussed and mutually agreed upon. Findings – The paper highlights the different concepts related to IMN and traces the evolution of IMN-related research. Based on two levels of analysis (i.e. plant and network), this paper further reviews and discusses the IMN-specific literature in detail to determine the number of IMN articles published across the journals, the dominant methodologies employed, and the research focus reflected in IMN studies. A research trajectory is finally developed to provide an integrated and intuitional view on the development of IMN research. Originality/value – This is the first effort that has been made towards thoroughly investigating the existing literature on IMN, aiming to trace different concepts related to IMN from a historical perspective, to review and discuss the IMN-specific literature in detail, to provide an overview of the evolution trajectory of different existing IMN research themes, and to propose future research directions. Keeping in mind the growing importance of IMN for practitioners as well as the academic community, this study provides a timely overview of existing and emerging IMN research themes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 624-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subhadip Sarkar

Purpose – Identification of the best school among other competitors is done using a new technique called most productive scale size based data envelopment analysis (DEA). The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – A non-central principal component analysis is used here to create a new plane according to the constant return to scale. This plane contains only ultimate performers. Findings – The new method has a complete discord with the results of CCR DEA. However, after incorporating the ultimate performers in the original data set this difference was eliminated. Practical implications – The proposed frontier provides a way to identify those DMUs which follow cost strategy proposed by Porter. Originality/value – A case study of six schools is incorporated here to identify the superior school and also to visualize gaps in their performances.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonica Rautela ◽  
Sarika Sharma ◽  
Shreya Virani

PurposeThe business environment is changing and so are the rules of doing business. Constant innovation is the key to win in this dynamic marketplace, so that the new ideas get converted into new marketable products quickly with the least possible mistake. One way to inculcate innovation is by the participation of customers in the new product development (NPD) process. Platforms like social media has provided an opportunity for firms to communicate, co-create and collaborate with customers. The present study aims to understand the customers' participation in three phases, namely idea generation, development and commercialization of the NPD process for its effectiveness.Design/methodology/approachWith the help of review of existing literature, a theoretical model is proposed. This model is then empirically evaluated with data of 213 respondents using structural equation modelling (SEM). The respondents are majorly young social media users in India.FindingsThe results highlight that customer involvement is important in idea generation and commercialization phase of NPD process for its effectiveness. Also, the effectiveness of NPD process affects the financial performance of the firm. The use of social media is considered for its mediating role in NPD process effectiveness during the three phases. The results show that it has an effective role to play during the idea generation phase.Originality/valueConsumers’ perspective concerning usage of social media for their participation in NPD is an unexplored area in general and in the Indian context in particular. To fill this research gap the present study is carried out.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1628-1651 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arvind Malhotra ◽  
Ann Majchrzak

Purpose The purpose of this study is to offer implications and future research directions related to new organizational forms like crowds. Organizations are increasingly relying on online crowds to innovate through mechanisms such as crowdsourcing, open innovation, innovation challenges and tournaments. To leverage the "wisdom of crowds", crowdsourcing platforms that enable heterogeneous knowledge sharing in crowds lead to novel solution generation by individuals in the crowd. Based on the associative variety memory model of creativity, the authors hypothesize that when a crowd contributes a heterogeneous knowledge in form of a variety of knowledge associations, individual crowd members tend to generate solutions that are more novel. In contrast to the brainstorming view that focuses on ideas as knowledge, the authors propose, test, find and elaborate on implications of crowd sharing of heterogeneous knowledge for the generation of innovation, i.e. novel ideas. The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges leveraging online temporary crowds that were structured to foster knowledge sharing as part of the idea generation process. The analysis shows a positive relationship between the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd and the generation of novel solutions by individuals in the crowd. Further, the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared. The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds. Design/methodology/approach The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges. They also designed and ran these challenges in collaboration with corporate sponsors. The ideas in the challenge were rated by senior executive at each company using a creative forecasting method. Findings The variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared. Research limitations/implications The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds. Practical implications The authors propose several ways in which companies running innovation challenges can moderate and encourage crowd to generate a variety of knowledge. Originality/value The authors believe that we are the first empirical paper to emphasize and show that associative variety of knowledge sharing in crowds has impact on novel idea generation by crowds. This view is counter to "electronic brainstorming" view where crowd is asked to just generate these ideas and often just submit their ideas to the sponsor. Their view also goes beyond knowledge refinement of ideas by crowds to more of knowledge integration by crowds.


2018 ◽  
Vol 118 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanjun Lee ◽  
Keunho Choi ◽  
Donghee Yoo ◽  
Yongmoo Suh ◽  
Soowon Lee ◽  
...  

PurposeOpen innovation communities are a growing trend across diverse industries because they provide opportunities of collaborating with customers and exploiting their knowledge effectively. Although open innovation communities can be strategic assets that can help firms innovate, firms nonetheless face the challenge of information overload incurred due to the characteristic of the community. The purpose of this paper is to mitigate the problem of information overload in an open innovation environment.Design/methodology/approachThis study chose MyStarbucksIdea.com (MSI) as a target open innovation community in which customers share their ideas. The authors analyzed a large data set collected from MSI utilizing text mining techniques including TF-IDF and sentiment analysis, while considering both term and non-term features of the data set. Those features were used to develop classification models to calculate the adoption probability of each idea.FindingsThe results showed that term and non-term features play important roles in predicting the adoptability of ideas and the best classification accuracy was achieved by the hybrid classification models. In most cases, the precisions of classification models decreased as the number of recommendations increased, while the models’ recalls and F1s increased.Originality/valueThis research dealt with the problem of information overload in an open innovation context. A large amount of customer opinions from an innovation community were examined and a recommendation system to mitigate the problem was proposed. Using the proposed system, the firm can get recommendations for ideas that could be valuable for its business innovation in the idea generation phase, thereby resolving the information overload and enhancing the effectiveness of open innovation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kayo Tajima

Purpose This study aims to analyze whether and how condominium shared utilities and facilities (e.g. community spaces), of which buyers assume a share of the ownership upon acquisition of a residential unit, affect the condominium unit price over time. Design/methodology/approach The transaction price of each unit reflects the quality of the residential unit and the properties of the shared facilities. Based on the hedonic pricing method, this study assesses the impact of shared amenities on unit resale prices, using an original data set on condominium unit resale transactions and the status of housing characteristics for both condominium units and condominium buildings. Findings Results show that holding other conditions constant, a meeting room and an external space that can host events increase the unit resale price by approximately 7 and 16 per cent, respectively. Some community amenities such as a meeting room may increase its impact later in the condominium’s lifetime. Research limitations/implications Because of the proprietary nature of data, the analysis focuses on high-end condominium properties in central Tokyo. Although it is difficult to single out the shared amenities’ effects on condominium resale prices from potentially confounding factors, this study partially overcomes this issue by including explanatory geographical variables (e.g. ground heights). Practical implications The results suggest that a shared facility that hosts social interactions among residents significantly affects the resale market value of housing units and that their magnitudes may change over time. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study provides the first empirical evidence of the impacts of shared structures on condominium unit sales using micro-level transaction data in Japan.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Attila Sik

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine how different disciplines and sectors approach creativity, and how to improve cross-domain collaboration efficiency. Creativity is one of the most important factors that hugely contributes to the growth of economy, and the key to the modern organisation’s survival. There are considerable differences between disciplines regarding how they approach creativity since each discipline has a methodology which is designed to develop new ideas. Specialisation of disciplines can create difficulties when they start to interact in collaborations. Differences between sectors (Industry, Academia, Arts and Public) in definition of creativity, creativity measurement, management and collaboration motivators can hinder cross-sector collaboration efficiency. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire was distributed over the Internet, and statistical tests were performed to find differences between groups how they view various dimensions of creativity. Findings – By analysing various disciplines, the study revealed significant differences between the reward system, the creativity measurement, the required management support and the way how various disciplines solve complex problems. Sector analysis revealed significant differences in creativity quantification, personal traits, sensitivity to idea ownership, composition and size of the ideal team, communication and incentives to increase creativity. Research limitations/implications – In this study, only Internet users were sampled, and the majority of respondent were from Europe working in academic environment. Practical implications – Misalignment of forces between disciplines causes inefficient cross- and multi-disciplinary collaborations, while inter-sector misalignment results in unproductive inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary teamwork. Special emphasis has to be placed on external factor, creativity measurement and collaboration motivator adjustment that were the most misaligned across the analysed groups. Originality/value – The study indicates that to increase collaboration, efficiency factors that were scrutinised in this project have to be aligned across disciplines and sectors.


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