User Communities and Marginality for Innovation

User communities and marginality for innovation

This review offers a better understanding about the utilization of user communities for innovation with an extended focus on which external solvers are able to come up with successful solutions. This latter point will be discussed by using the theory about marginality.

Introduction

Innovation is defined as the development and implementation of new ideas by people who over time engage in transactions with others within an institutional order. However, because of the shorter innovation cycles, escalating research & development costs and shortage of resources companies are searching for new innovation strategies (Gassmann and Enkel, 2004). This search is reinforced by the globalization of research, technologies and innovation, and by new communication and information technologies (Gassmann and Enkel, 2004). The phenomenon that derived from this search is the open innovation paradigm. This paradigm assumes that companies use external ideas as well as internal ideas, as the firms look for improvements or new technologies (Chesbrough, 2003). This study focuses on the latter point that companies use outside ideas or solutions. Although a lot of problems can be solved from inside the company, there still remain problems which cannot be tackled by the company and need to be sent outside. The reasons why companies cannot solve it internally varies: “lack of appropriate knowledge, lack of capacity and need for novel ideas” (Jeppensen and Lakhani, 2010). A way to look for outside ideas is by interacting with members of a community. The so called “user communities” of innovation. As Chesbrough (2003) argued user communities ‘can be perceived as additional sources of external ideas for firms pursuing an open innovation model’. In this paper, I study the implications of utilizing the “user communities” with an extended focus on which external solvers are able to come up with successful solutions. For the past decades many...