Tag: innovation

New Article in ‘Innovation: Organization & Management’: »Barracudas, Piranhas and crowds: making ideas valuable in pharmaceutical innovation through opening and closing practices of valuation«

Led by Katharina Zangerle, who collected data at a large pharmaceutical corporation in Austria and Switzerland, we are very happy to announce the first joint article by three members of the organization unit at the Department of Organization and Learning, as Katharina had teamed up with Richard Weiskopf and myself for crafting the article.

The study entitled “Barracudas, Piranhas and crowds: making ideas valuable in pharmaceutical innovation through opening and closing practices of valuation” is now available open access at Innovation: Organization & Management. The abstract reads as follows:

Attributing value to ideas is central in the journey from generating and elaborating ideas, to realising ‘creative’ products and processes. In this study, we explore the ways in which ideas are attributed value through practices of valuation in the innovation process. We examine valuation practices and intentionally and deliberately designed digital and analog spaces in pharmaceutical innovation across various stages of the ‘idea journey’. The findings shed light on the valuation of objects and emerging ideas as well as unveiling how pharmaceutical firms adapt valuation practices in times of crisis, when the imperative to generate novel solutions intensifies. The empirical case illustrates the interplay between ‘opening’ valuation practices, such as crowd votings facilitated by a digital ideation software, and ‘closing’ mechanisms, such as idea rankings within exclusive evaluation boards, or idea clustering through the digital device, as well as how these practices enable a working consensus on defining what qualifies as new and valuable within the organisation. While closing valuation with its quantifying practices might allow for efficient decision-making in organising novelty, it may turn out to be problematic when it comes to achieving organisational legitimacy in innovation processes. Balancing opening and closing mechanisms seems crucial in innovation processes, particularly in times of uncertainty. Taking a closer look at the spatial and temporal conditions and dynamics of valuation, as well as the role of digital technology in the production of value advances the understanding of how value is produced.

The research has been conducted in the realm of joint DFG and FWF research project on “Organized Creativity” and regulatory uncertainty in music and pharma.

New Article in RSO: “Between Anxiety and Hope? How Actors Experience Regulatory Uncertainty in Creative Processes in Music and Pharma”

We, that is Katharina Zangerle, Konstantin Hondros, Sigrid Quack, myself, have recently contributed to an issue in “Research in the Sociology of Organizations” on “Organizing Creativity in the Innovation Journey”. The article is based upon data collected in the course of our joint DFG-funded research project on “Organizing Creativity under Regulatory Uncertainty: Challenges of Intellectual Property”. The photo below was obviously taken pre-pandemic but captures quite nicely the exhausted happiness we feel right now. And feelings and emotions is also what our article is about.

In our article “Between Anxiety and Hope? How Actors Experience Regulatory Uncertainty in Creative Processes in Music and Pharma” we approach the issues of what rules and uncertainty have to do with creativity, with distinct professions navigating and organizing creators’ related emotional experiences.

Continue reading “New Article in RSO: “Between Anxiety and Hope? How Actors Experience Regulatory Uncertainty in Creative Processes in Music and Pharma”” →

New Article in Industry & Innovation: “The Open Innovation in Science research field”

The article “The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approach”, published in Industry & Innovation, is the result of a collaborative authoring process. A group of 47 contributors (including myself) tried to bring together the concepts of Open Science and Open Innovation:

Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsible Research and Innovation by proposing a unifying Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Framework. This framework captures the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of open and collaborative practices along the entire process of generating and disseminating scientific insights and translating them into innovation. Moreover, it elucidates individual-, team-, organisation-, field-, and society‐level factors shaping OIS practices. To conceptualise the framework, we employed a collaborative approach involving 47 scholars from multiple disciplines, highlighting both tensions and commonalities between existing approaches. The OIS Research Framework thus serves as a basis for future research, informs policy discussions, and provides guidance to scientists and practitioners.

In line with its topic, the article is available open access.

New Article on »Creating digital innovation« in Research Policy

In the article “Creating digital innovation: Bridging analog and digital expertise” I, together with my co-authors Raissa Pershina and Taran Thune (both University of Oslo), investigate how digital innovation is created. The empirical setting for our study is the development of digital serious games, a novel breed of digital learning products whose creation involves a wide range of gaming/digital and learning/analog expertise. We look at how experts rooted in digital and analog knowledge domains jointly innovate. Continue reading “New Article on »Creating digital innovation« in Research Policy” →