This study investigates the creative idea generation process in an open innovation platform. The idea generation process is simultaneously influenced by multiple activities: knowledge acquisition from participants’ interactions with each other’s ideas, deliberate practice through persistent participation, and learning through failures. Due to the dynamic interplay across these activities, it is challenging to identify each activity’s influence on creative ideation outcomes using reduced-form regression analysis. To overcome these challenges, we employ a comprehensive empirical framework, the mutually exciting spatiotemporal point process model with unobserved heterogeneity, which endogenizes the occurrences of these activities in continuous time and allows for user-dependent effects. By utilizing the activity stream data of 13,028 participants from 2010 to 2016 in an open innovation platform, we uncovered synergistic effects of these activities on creative outcomes. We find that knowledge acquired through interaction with others (i.e., stimulus ideas) plays a vital role in the creative ideation process, but their effect is more nuanced than what we have known so far. In contrast to the prior belief that distant analogies, stimulus ideas outside of a problem domain, spur creativity, we find that distant analogies lead to failures. Yet, we further find that such failures are indispensable to the creative ideation process because failures motivate idea generators (1) to acquire more knowledge by increasing their future interactions with other participants’ ideas (learning from others), and (2) to persist in generating ideas that lead to improvements in their ability to apply the acquired knowledge and to identify innovation tasks that are relevant to their stock of acquired knowledge (learning by doing). Our results indicate that failures are a stronger driver of the learning activities than successes. Based on our findings, we offer insights on how to cultivate creativity in an open innovation setting.

This study develops a stochastic model to capture developer learning dynamics in open source software projects (OSS). A hidden Markov model (HMM) is proposed that allows us to investigate (1) the extent to which individuals learn from their own experience and from interactions with peers, (2) whether an individual's ability to learn from these activities varies as she evolves/learns over time, and (3) to what extent individual learning persists over time. We calibrate the model based on six years of detailed data collected from 251 developers working on 25 OSS projects hosted at Sourceforge. Using the HMM, three latent learning states (high, medium, and low) are identified, and the marginal impact of learning activities on moving the developer between these states is estimated. Our findings reveal different patterns of learning in different learning states. Learning from peers appears to be the most important source of learning for developers across the three states. Developers in the medium learning state benefit the most through discussions that they initiate. On the other hand, developers in the low and the high states benefit the most by participating in discussions started by others. While in the low state, developers depend entirely upon their peers to learn, whereas in the medium or high state, they can also draw upon their own experiences. Explanations for these varying impacts of learning activities on the transitions of developers between the three learning states are provided. The HMM is shown to outperform the classical learning curve model. The HMM modeling of this study contributes to the development of a theoretically grounded understanding of learning behavior of individuals. Such a theory and associated findings have important managerial and operational implications for devising interventions to promote learning in a variety of settings.

Although both the academic and the trade literature have widely acknowledged the need to foster the development of more-innovative products, little empirical research has examined the cognitive processes underlying the creation of these novel product concepts. In this research, three empirical studies examine how analogical thinking influences the idea-generation stage of the new product development process. The first study uses the verbal protocols of real-world industrial designers to trace the role of analogy in the context of a new product development task, and the second and third studies use an experimental approach to assess the effectiveness of different ideation strategies and conditions. Findings from these studies indicate that the originality of the resulting product design is influenced by the extent of analogical transfer, the type of analogies used, and the presence of external primes. In addition, these studies reveal a positive relationship between the originality of the product concept and consumers' willingness to pay for it, an important measure in the concept-testing phase of product development.

Firms increasingly engage customers in idea generation (or ideation) to sustain their competitive advantages. Drawing from social interaction literature, this study adopts a social network perspective to investigate empirically how the characteristics (i.e., direction, size, and strength) of customers’ online peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-firm (P2F) interactions, moderated by customers’ past efforts to post ideas (i.e., past ideation participation), influence their likelihood of generating ideas in an idea crowdsourcing community. With four years of data from a popular online crowdsourcing site, this study demonstrates the significant impacts of P2P and P2F online interactions on customers’ likelihood of subsequent idea generation. In particular, a potential double-edged sword of past ideation participation emerges: A high level of past ideation participation strengthens (weakens) the impact of P2F (P2P) interactions on customers’ subsequent idea generation. These findings suggest implications for how firms can cultivate customers’ online social interactions with peers and firms and enhance their capabilities for capturing the wisdom of the crowd.

Project forms of organizing are theorized to rely upon horizontal as opposed to vertical lines of authority, but few have examined how this shift affects progression—how people advance in an organization. We argue that progression without hierarchy unfolds when people assume lateral authority over project tasks without managing people. With a longitudinal study of a mature, collectively managed open source software project, we predict the individual behaviors that enable progression to lateral authority roles at two different stages. Although technical contributions are initially important, coordination work is more critical at a subsequent stage. We then explore how lateral authority roles affect subsequent behavior—after gaining authority, individuals spend significantly more time coordinating project work. Our research shows how people progress to the center as opposed to up a hierarchy, and how progression differs by stage and specifies the theoretical relationship between lateral authority roles and the coordination of project work.

Several organizations have developed ongoing crowdsourcing communities that repeatedly collect ideas for new products and services from a large, dispersed “crowd” of nonexperts (consumers) over time. Despite its promises, little is known about the nature of an individual's ideation efforts in such an online community. Studying Dell's IdeaStorm community, serial ideators are found to be more likely than consumers with only one idea to generate an idea the organization finds valuable enough to implement, but they are unlikely to repeat their early success once their ideas are implemented. As ideators with past success attempt to again come up with ideas that will excite the organization, they instead end up proposing ideas similar to their ideas that were already implemented (i.e., they generate less diverse ideas). The negative effects of past success are somewhat mitigated for ideators with diverse commenting activity on others' ideas. These findings highlight some of the challenges in maintaining an ongoing supply of quality ideas from the crowd over time.

Coming the era of time-based competition, since the term of "gaining the users, gaining the markets" has been recognized as a consensus, more and more firms tend to employ users to participate into their innovation processes to help them to gain competitive advantage. While users' participation in a firm's innovation will make the loop of value creation and consumption closed which does facilitate a firm to create value more effectively and efficiently, it also makes firms' innovating process much more complex to be handled for the reason that a firm has to open its innovation processes to outside. Then, what on earth is the effect of users' participation in a firm's innovation processes on a firm's innovation?</br>Theoretically, by taking users as external source of innovation, scholars of user innovation pay more attention to incentives that drive users to innovate or participate in a firm's innovation processes, with ignorance of the effect of user's participation in a firm's innovation processes on a firm's innovation capabilities. Literature of marketing on users or customers' participation in the processes of new product development focuses more on customers' satisfaction or a firm's financial performance or market share than innovation capabilities influenced by user's participation. However, the mechanism of how a firm attracts its users to involve into the processes of innovating and translates the efforts of both the firm and their users make in the processes of innovating into the firm's innovation capabilities has not been explored systematically.</br>Based on the theories of value co-creation, user innovation and firms' innovation capabilities, using data collected from 202 domestic enterprises, the mechanism of how users' participation in a firm's innovation influences a firm's innovation capabilities is explored. The construction of user-enterprise shared value propositions is explored firstly. Following the logic of "incentives construction empowerment introduction capabilities' development", the mechanism of a firm's innovation capabilities' leveraging is explored from perspective of value co-creation by the user and the enterprise. Findings are got as follows:(1) Social value expectation holding both by user and enterprise facilitates a firm to leverage its innovation capabilities, including incremental and radical innovation capabilities, namely, ambidextrous innovation capabilities. (2) Functional value expectation of uniqueness holding both by user and enterprise could improve a firm's incremental innovation capabilities. (3) Customer empowerment plays a role of mediator between social value expectation and incremental innovation capabilities. Our findings contribute theory of user innovation by identifying conditions of application of theory of user innovation. They also contribute to the theory of value co-creation by operationalizing the construct of shared value proposition in context of firms' innovation.</br>Finally, our findings may provide firms guidance to design their organizing process and incentives to attract users to take part in innovation processes to leverage their innovation capabilities effectively. Meanwhile, a firm has to be warned not to keep in too close touch with their usual users, because too close relationship between a firm and its users may produce lock-in effect, which may drop a firm in success-trap, especially when the environment changes radically.

In this paper, we assess the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single-user individuals or firms and open collaborative innovation. We analyze the design costs and architectures and communication costs associated with each model. We conclude that both innovation by individual users and open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with and may displace producer innovation in many parts of the economy. We explain why this represents a paradigm shift with respect to innovation research, policy making, and practice. We discuss important implications and offer suggestions for further research.