Innovation strategy has been playing an important role on innovation development in industrial firms. Extant studies have investigated in particular open innovation strategy.  By using a qualitative case study, I have conducted a research in an Indonesian R&D firm that has implemented an open innovation strategy. The purpose of this research is to add more information and confirm existing knowledge by exploring challenges and opportunities during the implementation of an open innovation strategy. I identify many challenges which are found in several aspects of innovation development such as collaboration management, assets protection and accessing external knowledge. Furthermore, the opportunities that I found are related with enhancement of license strategy, nurture of employee’s loyalty and establishment of various collaboration forms. These challenges and opportunities occurred due to the influence of the openness paradigm. The results of this study also confirm previous research result on the adoption of the partly open innovation scheme and the layered collaboration scheme. RQ: what are the firm-level challenges and opportunities with using an open innovation strategy?

There are many existing programs and initiatives in Uganda supporting small businesses, but tend to suffer from a number of weaknesses. In particular typically small businesses find it difficult to do research and development; commercialize their results in markets (innovation) as fast as they should. For micro, small & medium enterprises to be dully competitive in a competitive economic environment requires that they develop internal capabilities to effectively assimilate, use and adapt product and process technologies for their businesses to survive on an ongoing basis. To overcome this drawback, the concept of Business Incubation has been proposed. This concept has gained large interest in the research community. The key idea is to create and nurture new businesses for growth by providing services and infrastructure required by utilizing the external knowledge sources (open innovation) and triple-helix model which assist formation of business and industrial clusters. A business incubator is an organization that supports the creation and growth of new businesses by providing services and infrastructure that is required by the targeted clients. Given that most firms in developing countries start too small to compete especially in international markets, a pre-requisite to industrial development, governments and policy makers should give particular attention to the constraints and needs of MSMEs. This can be done by adopting a mix of policies and framework conditions to reduce on the obstacles that hamper technological innovation, collaboration and business growth. In particular is access to finance and enhancing technology and business capacity development through training, linkages and networks. This Licentiate thesis discusses and reviews the initiatives and programs aimed at supporting the development of MSMEs with a view to stimulate industrial development in Uganda. The main aim of this research is to examine the process of business incubation and explain the contribution of open innovation business incubators to entrepreneurs/ start-up firms within the broader context of developing entrepreneurship, promoting science, technology and innovation and creating employment. This research focuses on the roles and relationships of government, university and research institutions and the private sector as sources of knowledge for technological innovations. Literature review, theory understanding, and participatory methods including group discussions with questionnaires, meetings and interviews, were used to achieve the objectives. From the findings, it was revealed among MSMEs that due to their sizes, limited managerial and technological skills, and inadequate functional business support services have had adverse effects on their upgrading and growth. There was little linkage and follow up between industry and other public research sectors i.e. government agencies and higher institutions although there are quite a number of support institutions with poor coordination. The research analyzed a wide range of issues that are related to the desired structural transformation of the Ugandan economy towards industrialization process. Finally it will propose strategies for the most appropriate model for Uganda.

The involvement of customers and other stakeholders in the innovation process is proposed to be a key success factor and something that makes companies more competitive. As a consequence, more and more organizations alter their innovation strategy accordingly. In order for a company to open up innovation processes, it is vital to foster a practice where there is openness for external ideas and knowledge. However, when external ideas meet internal innovation practices complex organizational situations appear. Creativity, for example, involves co-dependence of other persons’ strategies and actions. New roles for those involved affect hierarchies and knowledge sharing opportunities. This thesis involves three different perspectives of the same process provides an opportunity to study both individual and structural challenges. This research aims to identify on-going challenges for an organization during the transformational processes that adjustment from a traditional product innovation structure to an open service innovation culture implies. This qualitative case study involves two main cases and three supporting cases and aims to understand how users and other external parties, top management and middle managers experience open innovation processes. The results describe interactions between organizations and users or external stakeholders as well as internal interactions within the organization. Top management were dedicated to the idea of increased openness, but detected structural issues to deal with in order to implement user involved innovation. Among middle management, some individual aspects such as attitudes and relational issues matter, as well as organizational structures and practices. Users had mixed opinions about their participation in the process. Favorable experiences, such as benevolence and deepened relationships, were balanced by un-favorable experiences such as incapability and intrusion. Different dimensions of openness regarding open innovation practice are discussed. In this work a relational focus is emphasized. The findings assist managers in their work to create conditions for open innovation. Managers can benefit from this research by getting a better understanding of how different stakeholders’ experience co-creation of value. This is relevant for innovation managers in the process of redesigning innovation processes to understand different aspects of the interactions involved. / KIT / SIMGIC

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Background: 20% of the world's population is responsible for about 80% of the life-cycle impacts of consumption and the per-capita footprint of developed countries is at least double than that of developing countries. This is why there is an urgent need for companies in industrialized countries to find more sustainable production methods and encourage sustainable consumption. Global sustainability trends drive innovation, which is why it is important to study how companies use, and can use, innovation to be more sustainable. Despite the will to work sustainably innovative, many SMEs today face resource constraints that hinder them from doing so - a problem that in part can be mitigated by open innovation. In Sweden today, however, open innovation is not widely used, especially not amongst SMEs. Purpose: This study aims at mapping how Swedish SMEs currently work with open innovation in order to promote innovative sustainability initiatives, and how they could do it. Methodology: This is a qualitative multiple case study in which seven cases have been studied and compared. The study is based on the hermeneutic philosophical standpoint, with an abductive approach. The empirical data consists of seven semi-structured interviews with representatives from seven different Swedish SMEs, from different industrial sectors. Conclusion: This study concludes that Swedish SMEs mainly work with inbound open innovation in the form of sourcing information from customers and/or suppliers. It is also found that outbound open innovation is used to a lesser extent among the studied SMEs. The study proposes that more cross-sectoral collaboration can be beneficial. Furthermore, it is established that clearer methods for, and more knowledge about, open innovation could increase the use of it, and thus the benefits of it.

Computer systems have replaced human work-force in many parts of everyday life, but there still exists a large number of tasks that cannot be automated, yet. This also includes tasks, which we consider to be rather simple like the categorization of image content or subjective ratings. Traditionally, these tasks have been completed by designated employees or outsourced to specialized companies. However, recently the crowdsourcing paradigm is more and more applied to complete such human-labor intensive tasks. Crowdsourcing aims at leveraging the huge number of Internet users all around the globe, which form a potentially highly available, low-cost, and easy accessible work-force. To enable the distribution of work on a global scale, new web-based services emerged, so called crowdsourcing platforms, that act as mediator between employers posting tasks and workers completing tasks. However, the crowdsourcing approach, especially the large anonymous worker crowd, results in two types of challenges. On the one hand, there are technical challenges like the dimensioning of crowdsourcing platform infrastructure or the interconnection of crowdsourcing platforms and machine clouds to build hybrid services. On the other hand, there are conceptual challenges like identifying reliable workers or migrating traditional off-line work to the crowdsourcing environment. To tackle these challenges, this monograph analyzes and models current crowdsourcing systems to optimize crowdsourcing workflows and the underlying infrastructure. First, a categorization of crowdsourcing tasks and platforms is developed to derive generalizable properties. Based on this categorization and an exemplary analysis of a commercial crowdsourcing platform, models for different aspects of crowdsourcing platforms and crowdsourcing mechanisms are developed. A special focus is put on quality assurance mechanisms for crowdsourcing tasks, where the models are used to assess the suitability and costs of existing approaches for different types of tasks. Further, a novel quality assurance mechanism solely based on user-interactions is proposed and its feasibility is shown. The findings from the analysis of existing platforms, the derived models, and the developed quality assurance mechanisms are finally used to derive best practices for two crowdsourcing use-cases, crowdsourcing-based network measurements and crowdsourcing-based subjective user studies. These two exemplary use-cases cover aspects typical for a large range of crowdsourcing tasks and illustrated the potential benefits, but also resulting challenges when using crowdsourcing. With the ongoing digitalization and globalization of the labor markets, the crowdsourcing paradigm is expected to gain even more importance in the next years. This is already evident in the currently new emerging fields of crowdsourcing, like enterprise crowdsourcing or mobile crowdsourcing. The models developed in the monograph enable platform providers to optimize their current systems and employers to optimize their workflows to increase their commercial success. Moreover, the results help to improve the general understanding of crowdsourcing systems, a key for identifying necessary adaptions and future improvements. / Computer haben menschliche Arbeitskräfte mittlerweile in vielen Bereichen des täglichen Lebens ersetzt. Dennoch gibt es immer noch eine große Anzahl von Aufgaben, die derzeit nicht oder nur teilweise automatisierbar sind. Hierzu gehören auch solche, welche als sehr einfach erachtet werden, beispielsweise das Kategorisieren von Bildinhalten oder subjektive Bewertungen. Traditionell wurden diese Aufgaben vorwiegend von eigens angestellten Mitarbeitern oder über Outsourcing gelöst. In den vergangenen Jahren wurde hierfür jedoch immer häufiger Crowdsourcing verwendet, wobei die große Anzahl an weltweiten Internetnutzern als hoch verfügbare, kostengünstige und einfach zu erreichende Arbeiterschaft eingesetzt wird. Um eine weltweite Verteilung von Arbeit zu ermöglichen hat sich eine neue Art von Internetdienstleistern entwickelt, die sogenannten Crowdsourcingplattformen. Diese dienen als Vermittler zwischen Arbeitgebern, welche Aufgaben auf den Plattformen einstellen und Arbeitnehmer, welche diese Aufgaben bearbeiten. Hierbei ergeben sich zwei Arten von Herausforderungen. Einerseits entstehen Herausforderungen technischer Art, wie etwa Fragen bezüglich der Dimensionierung der Plattforminfrastruktur oder der Realisierung von Programmierschnittstellen zur Verbindung von Crowdsourcingplattformen mit anderen Cloudanbietern. Andererseits ergeben sich konzeptionelle Herausforderungen, wie etwa die Identifikation vertrauenswürdiger Arbeitnehmer oder Methoden zur Migration von traditionellen Arbeitsaufgaben in Crowdsourcing-basierte Arbeit. In diesem Monograph werden beide Arten von Herausforderungen adressiert. Hierzu werden aktuelle Crowdsourcingsysteme analysiert und modelliert, um basieren auf den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen, Arbeitsabläufe im Crowdsourcing und die den Systemen zu Grunde liegende Infrastruktur zu optimieren. Zunächst wird hierfür eine Kategorisierung von Crowdsourcing Aufgaben und Plattformen entwickelt um generalisierbare Eigenschaften abzuleiten. Basierend auf dieser Kategorisierung und einer beispielhaften Analyse einer kommerziellen Crowdsourcingplattform werden Modelle entwickelt, die verschiedene Aspekte der Plattformen sowie der eingesetzten Mechanismen abbilden. Hierbei wird ein besonderer Fokus auf die Verlässlichkeit von Qualitätssicherungsmechanismen, deren Kosten und Einsetzbarkeit für verschiedene Aufgabentypen gelegt. Ferner wird ein neuer Qualitätssicherungsmechanismus vorgestellt und evaluiert, welcher lediglich auf den Interaktionen der Crowdsourcingarbeitnehmer mit der Nutzeroberfläche basiert. Die Erkenntnisse, aus der Analyse existierender Plattformen, den abgeleiteten Modellen und dem entwickelten Qualitätssicherungsmechanismus fließen schließlich in konkrete Designempfehlungen für zwei exemplarische Crowdsourcinganwendungsfälle ein. Die beiden gewählten Anwendungsfälle decken Aspekte einer Vielzahl von Crowdsourcingaufgaben ab und zeigen sowohl die Vorteile als auch die Herausforderungen beim Einsatz von Crowdsourcing. Aufgrund der zunehmenden Digitalisierung und Globalisierung des Arbeitsmarkes ist es zu erwarten, dass Crowdsourcing in den nächsten Jahren noch weiter an Bedeutung gewinnt. Dies zeigt sich bereits daran, dass Crowdsourcingansätze mittlerweile vermehrt in Unternehmen oder im mobilen Umfeld eingesetzt werden. Die Modelle aus diesem Monograph, ermöglichen Plattformbetreibern eine Optimierung ihrer Systeme und Arbeitgebern eine Optimierung ihrer Arbeitsabläufe. Weiterhin helfen die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse das prinzipielle Verständnis von Crowdsourcingsystemen zu verbessern, was wiederum eine Grundvoraussetzung für das Erkennen von Anpassungsbedarf und Optimierungspotential ist.

<p>Most forestry machines being produced today include a PC that monitors and controls the harvester head, and an information system that stores data on every action the driver or the machine performs. ICT thus provides an opportunity to improve efficiency and competitiveness and possibly also opens up for new ways of working for actors in the forestry industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate how ICT can enable the transformation from selling products to selling services in the forestry industry. We investigate this through performing a Case Study including a number of actors from the Forestry industry in northern Sweden. First, we investigate the barriers for establishing an Open Innovation system in forestry. Then we describe the main steps to be taken and how the use of ICT can enable the establishment of such a system. The case study shows that the forestry industry is committed to working according to a traditional value chain and is committed to a closed innovation paradigm. We argue that the ICT component in Timbercut’s forestry machines constitutes a latent potential that cancaptured through changing the business model and setting up a joint venture with Rewire.</p>

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Open Innovation är ett relativt nytt arbetssätt som innebär att organisationer tar in extern kunskap med syftet att utveckla interna processer och vidga den egna kompetensen. Studien utgår ifrån ett kvalitativt perspektiv där relevanta teorier hämtats ifrån tryckt litteratur, vetenskapliga artiklar samt empiri som består av en omvärldsanalys samt intervjustudie med ett antal individer med varierande kunskap inom områdena; Open Innovation samt medborgardialog kopplat till offentlig förvaltning. Det framkom i studien att faktorer som transparens, verktyg samt process är viktiga byggstenar i en Open Innovation-process. Utifrån studien har författarna tagit fram en metod som skall synliggöra hur de olika områdena samverkar med varandra och vilka verktyg som kan tillämpas i processen (se nedan). Författarna fann genom studien att hanteringen utav de idéer och förslag som hämtas från Open Innovation-processer är den viktigaste delen i processen. Utan en bra hantering utav förslagen tappar Open Innovation-processen sitt värde och förtroendet för förhållningssättet tappas.

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