Routledge Studies in Innovation, Organizations and Technology Series

Open Source Innovation

by Cornelius Herstatt and Daniel Ehls

Published 11 February 2015

Open Source Innovation (OSI) has gained considerable momentum within the last years. Academic and management practice interest grows as more and more end-users consider and even participate in Open Source product development like Linux, Android, or Wikipedia.

Open Source Innovation: Phenomenon, Participant Behaviour, Impact brings together rigorous academic research and business importance in scrutinizing OCI from three perspectives: The Phenomenon, Participants' Behavior, and Business Implications. The first section introduces OCI artefacts, including who is participating and why, and provides a systematic overview of the literature. The second section stresses the behaviour of participants, highlighting participation progression, community selection, user entrepreneurship and fair behaviour, and answering key questions like how to manage governance rules, openness and community design aspects. The third explores the impact and implications of OSI for firms and economies by evaluating business models, uncovering opportunities for firms to interact with communities, and presenting value capture mechanisms.

Open Source Innovation provides a full picture of the movement to help readers understand and engage with OSI from the micro perspective of individuals, to the community, to the macro perspective of firms and economies.

User-Innovation

by Viktor R G Braun and Cornelius Herstatt

Published 1 April 2009

Economic growth is highly dependent on technological progress and innovation, yet the sources from which these innovations originate are still largely misunderstood and untapped. Recent research has demonstrated that users, rather than manufacturers, are often a critical source of innovation in numerous fields from extreme sports to medical devices to software. This book systematically identifies the most important barriers to user-innovation and critically evaluates the democratization of innovation argument by critically assessing the main legal, economic, technological, and societal barriers to user-innovation for the first time and proposing alternative possibilities. Through original research the author reveals the dynamics of user-innovation and offers strategies for minimizing those factors that inhibit and stifle the spread of this phenomenon. From this analysis it becomes clear that user-innovation has become more difficult over time and that the problem is now of how manufacturers can enable users to overcome the discussed barriers and simultaneously benefit from such consumer-driven activities.
Arguing that licenses are not just an important technology commercialization instrument but are tools critical to generating innovations, the author explains how licenses can in certain situations be employed to help users overcome some of the barriers to user-innovation. User-Innovation: Barriers to Democratization and IP Licensing is a practical guidebook as well as a startlingly original work of scholarship that will be essential reading for years to come.