Strategy and Organization Research Seminar

How user innovation is changing the way we are looking at new product development.

Professor Christoph Hienerth

Associate Professor
Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics
Copenhagen Business School

Abstract:

Research on innovation is increasingly focusing on users and company external actors as a source of innovation. Recent work in this field is dealing with the effects that distributed sources of innovation have for the new product development and strategies of incumbent firms and the emergence of new firms.

In my talk I first want to give a short overview of the development of research on user innovation. Then, I will provide three examples of current research projects: One, in more detail, is dealing with firm hosted online user communities. I look at the challenges of working with such communities and whether firms can use simple predictors to anticipate promising user designs and/or individuals out of a vast number of contributions. A second research project is dealing with entrepreneurship emerging from firm hosted user communities and how incumbent firms (on the example of LEGO, the toy manufacturer) make use of that phenomenon. The third research project is dealing with the change of business models when large companies start dealing with external user innovators (analyzing the cases of IBM, Coloplast and LEGO).

With my talk I hope to motivate a discussion whether and how research on user innovation can connect to other fields of research such as strategy and organization.

Light lunch will be served at noon.

This event is open to Desautels students, faculty, and staff.