Publications

SSRN

2006
Working Paper

How User Innovations Become Commercial Products: A Theoretical Investigation and Case Study

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin, Christopher Hienerth and Eric Von Hippel

December 2006
Article

How User Innovations Become Commercial Products: A Theoretical Investigation and a Case Study

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin, Christoph Hienerth and Eric von Hippel

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Product; Theory; Information

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Article

Firms, Crowds, and Innovation

By: Teppo Felin, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael L. Tushman

The purpose of this article is to suggest a (preliminary) taxonomy and research agenda for the topic of “firms, crowds, and innovation” and to provide an introduction to the associated special issue. We specifically discuss how various crowd-related phenomena and... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Innovation; Open Innovation; Organization Theory; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Organizations; Theory; Strategy

14 Sep 2009
Research & Ideas

Understanding Users of Social Networks

Only difference: Piskorski has spent years studying users of online social networks (SN) and has developed surprising findings about the needs that they fulfill, how men and women use these services differently, and how Twitter—the newest... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Advertising; Publishing

September 1984
Article

Diffusing Innovations When the Users are not the Choosers: The Case of Dentists

By: D. A. Leonard

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health

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2004
Working Paper

The Accidental Entrepreneur: The Emergent and Collective Process of User Entrepreneurship

We develop a process model of how users, an understudied source of entrepreneurship, create, evaluate, share, and commercialize their ideas. We compare and contrast our model to the classic model of the entrepreneurial process, highlighting the emergent and collective... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Commercialization; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention

Research Summary

Design Driven Innovation

By: Roberto Verganti

Firms, managers and scholars have often balanced between two approaches to innovation: user centered (where incremental innovation is pulled by the market) and technology push (where innovation comes from breakthrough development in technologies). However there is a... View Details

August 1998 (Revised July 2002)
Case

Innovation at 3M Corporation (A)

By: Stefan H. Thomke and Ashok Nimgade

Describes how 3M Corp. introduces and learns a new and innovative methodology called Lead User research to understand future customer and market needs. A team from 3M's Medical-Surgical Markets Division applies the Lead User methodology to the field of surgical... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Managerial Roles; Marketing Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Market Timing; Product Development; Problems and Challenges; Business Strategy; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

Educators

06 Jul 2006
News

Kraft's Innovation Challenge

2015
Chapter

Innovating without Information Constraints: Organization, Communities, and Innovation when Information Costs Approach Zero

By: Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman

Innovation has traditionally taken place within an organization's boundaries and/or with selected partners. This Chandlerian approach to innovation has been rooted in transaction costs, organizational boundaries, and information processing challenges associated with... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Sharing; Cost; Innovation and Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

October 2022
Article

A Structural Model of Organizational Buying for Business-to-Business Markets: Innovation Adoption with Share-of-Wallet Contracts

By: Navid Mojir and K. Sudhir

The paper develops the ﬁrst structural model of organizational buying to study innovation diﬀusion in a B2B market. Our model is particularly applicable for routinized exchange relationships, whereby centralized buyers periodically evaluate and choose contracts,... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Buying Behavior; Healthcare Marketing; B2B Markets; B2B Innovation; New Product Diffusion; New Product Adoption; Organizations; Acquisition; Behavior; Health Care and Treatment; Marketing; Innovation and Invention

The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation... View Details

18 Aug 2008
Research & Ideas

How Disruptive Innovation Changes Education

book, coauthored with Michael B. Horn (HBS MBA '06) and Curtis W. Johnson, shows how the theory of disruptive innovation-which in a nutshell explains why organizations experience difficulty with particular types of innovation and how they... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

12 PM – 1 PM EDT, 19 May 2016
Webinars: Trending@HBS

Design Thinking and Innovative Problem Solving

In their book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, Professors Srikant Datar and David Garvin and researcher Patrick Cullen identified creative and innovative thinking as an essential skill for managers operating in a world of rapidly evolving... View Details

18 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Organization Design for Distributed Innovation

Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin

October 2018
Case

Booking.com

By: Stefan Thomke and Daniela Beyersdorfer

The case reveals how Booking.com has become the world's leading travel accommodation platform. The company has put online experimentation at the heart of how it designs digital experiences for its customers and partners. To unlock the potential of large-scale testing,... View Details

Keywords: Travel; Product Innovation; Experimentation; A/B Testing; User Experience Design; Product Development; Product Design; Innovation and Management; Transformation; Information Technology; Digital Transformation; Travel Industry

Educators

2016
Book

Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation

By: Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani

The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process, which emphasize users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Transformation; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

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October 2020
Supplement

OpenIDEO (B)

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Anne-Laure Fayard, Manos Gkeredakis and Jin Hyun Paik

In the midst of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was unfolding, OpenIDEO—an online open innovation platform focused on design-driven solutions to social issues—rapidly launched a new challenge to improve access to health information, empower communities to stay safe... View Details

November 2018
Case

frog design

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

The case follows the genesis and development of Palo, a radical urban communications hub designed to replace payphone booths on Manhattan’s city streets, through a joint venture between frog design and a venture-backed firm LQD WiFi. The case explores the complexity of... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Prototyping; User Experience Design; Design Heuristics; Telecommunications; Urban Systems; Communication Technology; Urban Scope; Innovation and Invention; Design; Product Development

Educators