New year, new publication

We have just presented Open Innovation and Control - A Case from Volvo at HICCS-43.

Among others Frank Piller, Jan Marco Leimeister, JP Allen, Stefan Hrastinski were there and some highlights of the session discussed are:
* Embedded user toolkits
* Collaboration systems supporting Open Innovation
* Generativity and IT design

It feels good to have presented a publication with result from our multi-year project on Open Innovation in Gothenburg. Warm feelings in multiple ways were present and even if there is critical thinking and discussion there were also several connections tied with interest to get involved with forthcoming research.


Happy New Year and look out for more publications. Special thanks from myself and Magnus to our co-author Björn Remneland who at this time opted out on being present here in the beautiful context of Kauai.

Its like comparing Apples with Pears (AnDroid)

Much exiting happens in the mobile industry for the moment. Attention is moving toward the handheld devices that everyday people walk around in their pockets. One way of seeing it is that organizations now have a chance to approach millions of sensors out in the world, customers using their eyes, ears and brains to collect creative viewpoints into content (text, photos, videos, recorings etc). This is of course increasing in scope when the mobile devices have positioning services, can read temperature and climate data etc. etc. Then the device does not only stay as a private tool (for identidy identificaion, navigation, information search etc), and social tool (conversations, networking etc) but also collects data for organizations to completely transform their business models. Probably for good and for worse.

Two big players are changing the field of mobile industry - none of them coming from traditional mobile industry (supporting Christensens argument in Innovators dilemma). Apple with its well-known success story iPhone, and the upcoming Android, well supported by Google. Apple gets praised for their impressive business model and many companies in various industries are looking to copy their receipt. Google/Android, however, is a future challenger. In a way, one can say it is a competition between "user friendliness" vs "thinkering opportunities", between "slick design" vs ´"variety", between "critical mass" vs "generativity".

Clearly, from a theoretical point of view, the Android approach (open source, less gatekeeping, distributed innovation on both hardware, OS and apps) would benefit the innovation process. "Openness" is a notion that gets applauds by users as well as the media. In the last months, we have for instance seen many new releases of mobile phones (from HTC, Motorola, Ericsson etc) pushing innovation forward. The coming months will be exciting, seeing if also the amount of applications for Android will explode - challenging the critical mass of iPhone.

Openinnovationgbg.se is following this development in the project "Open Innovation in Society", funded by the Swedish Research Council.

See for instance the discussion about the future of mobile industry here (with Steve Gillmor, Michael Arrington, JP Rangaswami, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks and Saul Hansell) discussing the "iDroid wars" from Nov 12th:

Amazon and digital media

An interesting case of digital property issues: Amazon Kindle and its withdrawal (and return) of the book 1984. Short background; in July, Amazon was informed by the US copyright holder that there was an illegal copy of Orwells books 1984 and Animal Farm in the Kindle book store. Amazon therefore decided to erase all the copys of these books, including those that customers already had bought and downloaded into their individual Kindle devices. Read more here. This without asking them first. An uproar against Amazon followed among customers and bloggers.



This case is very interesting, since it put digital intellectual property to test. What is legal? What is fair? Recently, the following message was posted by Amazon, to ask their customers for forgiveness.


This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com"

As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made. You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30.

Please email Kindle customer support at kindle-response@amazon.com to indicate your preference. If you prefer to receive a check, please also provide your mailing address.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The Kindle Team

Bernad Munos at CIP Forum

Bernard Munos, Strategic thinker at Eli Lilly, reflects on openness as a benefit for society. Bernard is writing about and promoting Open Innovation in the Life Science Industry.

Congratulations Jonas Kuschel

We congratulate Jonas Kuschel for earning the PhD in Informatics with the dissertation "Vehicle Services", Saturday the 19th of September, 2009. Good Job! Opponent was Tomas Hellström from Lund University.



ABSTRACT

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the development and diffusion of vehicle services, and to how information technology interacts with forms of organization and business models to undermine or support the development of vehicle services. The overall research question asked in the thesis is: what are the technical, business and organizational prerequisites for the development and diffusion of a rich variety of vehicle services? The development and diffusion of vehicle services have been empirically investigated by ethnographic field studies, prototype software development and case studies as part of a collaborative practice research approach involving the Volvo Group. Based on ethnographic field studies of current vehicle repair service work, analytical patterns were identified to better understand the core foundation of vehicle services. In the prototype development, a platform was developed, which allowed exploring the technical prerequisites for the development of vehicle services. Two case studies examined, first, the development of IT support for vehicle services and, secondly, the organization of vehicle service development. The results from all these collaborative practice research activities suggest that the vehicle industry needs to revise its conception of vehicle services as services extending product features in favor of vehicle services enriching the use of the vehicle. Thus, the thesis argues that the lack of vehicle services, rather than being just a question of technical nature, can only be remedied by a change of perspective from products to services, which in turn influences the choice of technology, forms of organization and underlying business models. Vehicle services are here conceptualized as services interacting across the ecosystem of vehicle stakeholders to enrich the customer’s use of the vehicle. Hence, to be really useful, vehicle services must roam organizational and technical boundaries and cannot be treated as properties of the vehicle. This requires vehicle manufacturers to adopt appropriate forms of technology and organization. The concept of information infrastructure is shown to be appropriate since it allows separating services from shared infrastructural resources. Such a separation also allows opening up the development of vehicle services to other service providers. Open innovation is described as a suitable form of opening up the innovation and development of vehicle services to a larger group of service providers. The thesis argues that these three prerequisites – business model, technology and organization – have to closely interact to facilitate the development and diffusion of a rich variety of vehicle services. The general contribution of the thesis is to show how product oriented industries have to revise their proprietary mindset in favor of an open attitude to successfully engage in the development of services.

Read more about the dissertation here.

Clay Shirky on Innovation in Mind

Listen to a audio from the presentation Clay Shirky held at the conference Innovation in Mind at Lund, Sweden 16th of september, 2009. The audio quality is a bit poor, but the content is good.

Clay Shirky is an well-known Internet Guru and has among others written the book "Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing Without Organizations", discussing the changes in society as the new media landscape forms.

See more about Clay Shirky also on Youtube.

Innovation in mind - Lund, Sweden - Day 2

The second day of the conference Innovation in Lund started with three parallell tracks, consisting of 1) User innovation (Franke etc), 2) Open innovation (Chesbrough etc) and 3) Social innovation (Shirky etc). I finally took the choice of attending the Open Innovation track.

The session started with Christopher Lettl, from Vienna University, talking about user innovation in the medical technology area. Fascinating examples of surgents building fantastic and advanced robots and other tools, that have revolutionized industries, on user communities helping each other finding good solutions etc. Second was Mats Lindoff, who has a history from Ericsson and SonyEricsson, presenting the evolution of mobile phones. Mats argued that it needs a quite high amount of technology push until the infrastructure is developed enough to let users in. It took the telecom industry 20 years. Finally, Henry Chesbrough had a presentation on Open Innovation Business Models, highligting the business model as a key driver for generating profit. A "open" platform based business model such as Apple´s AppStore was pinpoined as the optimum, where outside actors spend thousands of research hours to bring in value to Apple´s platform.

After a short coffee break, some sessions about innovation strategies around the world were held, including Curtis Carlson from SRI International (Silicon Valley), Mu Ronping from Institute of Policy and Management from Bejing and after lunch Harvard Professor Amar Bhidé discussing the failure in the financial sector leading to the financial crisis.

The afternoon ended with two parallel sessions, with 1) discussions on how EI can support regional innovation strategies and 2) a younger generation of entrepreneurs discussing the future.

All in all, the event was very interesting. Especially the first day was enlighting and it is nice to listen to inspiring thoughts. True, it becomes evident from the various examples that the notions of Open Innovation and User Innovation are complex, not easily defined. Often the success stories of openness gets more attention and fascination than critical thoughts or failures. But the conference has anyway nurtured new ideas and relations that will hopefully develop over time.