Written by Alexander Schroll | 26 May 2009

Tags: E-Novation | Empirical | Open Innovation | Open Innovation Adoption | Studies | web-based

The term E-Novation was created by the research team of enovationmatters.com, which consists of Ehsan Ehsani, Hazhir Rahmandad, Robert Shelton and also Frank Piller. They recently published some results of their first E-novation study regarding the use of collaborative web-based tools for innovation and product development.

Personally, I am not a fan of this new creation of "E-Novation". I think it refers to much to the late 90s with all its E-Commerce etc. Additionally, I don't think we need another term for web-based innovation tools. But anyway, it highly appreciate their empirical approach. Nowadays, too much theories about innovation in general are build without any empirical evidence. Hence, we are in desperate need of empirical studies which can prove our theories and concepts.

In the end, they collected a worldwide sample of 203 companies (main focus nordic countries and US) with no specific industry focus (also service companies were included).

Written by Alexander Schroll | 15 May 2009

Tags: Hype | Open Innovation | social media

Dear readers,

i'm sorry for my absence in the last six weeks. I was working on several projects and especially data collection for my open innovation research project kept me busy 24x7. Anyway, today we will take a look on what previously happened in the world of open innovation. Not only in the last six weeks, but from 2006.

As I already wrote in some of my previous posts, the term open innovation is increasingly hyped by social and also classic media. Blogs around the topic of open innovation and crowdsourcing are continuously popping up. My Twitter RSS-feed about open-innovation related tweets already has 650 unread items for the last weeks. And not only bloggers but also academic researchers and practitioners are entering the world of innovation as the provisional programme of the ISPIM conference 2009 shows: The conference topic is "The Future of Innovation" and as we can see from the provisional programme, 21 presentations are solely focussed on "open innovation"!

Based on this overflow of interest I ask you if Open Innovation is the future, or if it is just hyped? Let's take an aggregated look at the rise of popularity from 2006 till May 2009:

Written by Alexander Schroll | 03 April 2009

Tags: Empirical | Evaluation | Need | Open Innovation | Open Innovation Adoption | Research question

I'm researching the open innovation paradigm from a firm-perspective since more than one year. The first thing I focused on is the empirical evaluation of the open innovation paradigm, in other words: How many companies are actually adopting open innovation, in which industries is it most common and what are the characteristics a company, an industry and a leader should posses for successfully adopting open innovation.

But the other big research question is: Why are companies using/adopting open innovation?

Some guys from twitter discussed this question and came up with an interesting hypothesis:

Written by Alexander Schroll | 29 March 2009

Tags: Agency | Blog | Blogger | Intermediary | social media

Social Media Measurement as part of a semantic web 3.0 is one of the hottest topics in the (social media) blogosphere and twittersphere. Hence, also software for measurement is getting increasingly important and so are the corresponding software companies. Personally, I think it is just a matter of time until Big G (Google) aquires one of these uprising software companies. (compare to Google Analytics)

But listening to your customers is just one side of the story. Basically, there are three ways how companies can act in the social web:

• Passive Listening: Social Media Measurement, as described before
• Active Participation: Companies join the conversation under their real identity (or sometimes even with fake identities!)
• Influencing the conversation: Influencing opinion leaders can create a very positive brand sentiment at very low costs.

Today, I will focus on the latter: Turn bloggers into brand ambassadors. A work which may be done by specialized blogger marketing agencies in the future?