ISPIM, John Wiley & Sons and Innovation Leaders are offering prizes worth over EUR 10,000 to the authors of the three best innovation management dissertations from 2014. The deadline for submission to the ISPIM PhD Innovation Management Dissertation Award is 31st January. Info here.
Previous dissertations are interesting to browse. Open innovation seems to have earned quite a few interesting thoughts:
Du, Jingshu – Vlerick Business School, Belgium – Research open innovation at the R&D project level (Prize winner)
“First, the effect of open innovation depends on the type of partners involved in the collaboration process, as well as the key performance indicator of the project that managers are focusing at. While science-based partners are particularly helpful in achieving high financial returns, market-based partners are beneficial in faster project development.
Second, the effect of open innovation depends on a number of contingencies, such as project characteristics, project management style, project resources and technological stock, timing of
collaboration, and technological fields that are involved in the collaboration. I find that these characteristics are important, but they have been neglected in prior research. More R&D
collaboration will not necessarily improve innovation performance. In contrast, it is the organization, the management style, and the timing of R&D collaboration activities that help to
generate better innovation performance.Furthermore, besides project management and timing of collaborations, managers also have to keep in mind that different technological fields that are involved into collaborations may affect
their innovation performance differently. While my sample firm seems to collaborate more in the core technology fields, results suggest that collaborations conducted in firms’ non-core
technology fields lead to higher returns. However, establishing partnerships in firms’ non-core technology fields is not easy, as the focal company may suffer from both a weak absorptive
capacity as well as the unwillingness of potential partners in establishing links. To cope with these issues and to maximize the value of collaborations, firms may therefore first start
collaborating in their related non-core technology fields, instead of in distant non-core technology fields”.
Gruel, Wolfgang – RWTH Aachen University / Daimler AG, Germany – Open Innovation and Individual Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Evaluation of Individual Knowledge Preferences (Prize winner)
“The dissertation’s findings have significant theoretical implications. It was found that besides from preferences for internal knowledge, that are frequently mentioned by existing innovation
management literature, especially in the Not-Invented-Here research, preferences for external knowledge existed as well. Up to now, this phenomenon has hardly been considered by
innovation researchers and thus, a comprehensive understanding of the development of knowledge preferences has not yet been possible.Furthermore, the results make a valuable contribution to a more detailed understanding of the knowledge absorption process. The fact that knowledge preferences did not exist at the first point
of contact with an idea, but preferences for internal knowledge have been shown at the level of actually absorbing and using the knowledge suggests that there are significant differences
between these two levels of knowledge absorption. Distortion effects that are based on the knowledge source seem to be limited or less powerful in the early stages of the knowledge
absorption process, but seem to develop over time and have a significant impact on later phases of assimilation and transformation processes. This interrelation should be examined more closely. Also, it should be considered that some of the examined factors do not only influence the knowledge preferences, but might also have a significant impact on the innovation process in
general. For example, a high level of perceived competition within a group helps to promote preferences for external knowledge. However, at the same time, it might also be a source of internal conflicts, which, in turn, might have a negative impact on the group-internal transfer of knowledge.”
As for access to science, JC De Martin shares the following working paper:
Does Cheap Access Encourage Science? Evidence from the WWII Book Replication Program
Barbara Biasi
Stanford University – Department of Economics; Bocconi University
Petra Moser
Stanford University – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
December 26, 2014
Abstract:
Policies that reduce the costs of accessing prior knowledge (which is covered by copyrights) are becoming increasingly prominent, even though systematic empirical evidence on their effects continues to be scarce. This paper examines the effects of the 1942 Book Republication Program (BRP), which allowed US publishers to replicate science books that German publishers had copyrighted in the United States, on the production of new knowledge in mathematics and chemistry. Citations data indicate a dramatic increase in citations to BRP books after 1942 compared with Swiss books in the same fields. This increase is larger for BRP books that experienced a larger decline in price under the program. We also find that effects on citations are larger for disciplines in which knowledge production is less dependent on physical capital: Citations to BRP books increased substantially more for mathematics (which depends almost exclusively on human capital) than chemistry (which is more dependent on physical capital).
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