Embracing open innovation to acquire external ideas and technologies and to transfer internal ideas and technologies outside

The objective of this dissertation is to increase understanding of how organizations can embrace open innovation in order to acquire external ideas and technologies from outside the organization, and to transfer internal ideas and technologies to outside the organization. The objective encompasses six sub-objectives, each addressed in one or more substudies. Altogether, the dissertation consists of nine substudies and a compendium summarizing the substudies. An extensive literature review was conducted on open innovation and crowdsourcing literature (substudies 1–4). In the subsequent empirical substudies, both qualitative research methods (substudies 5–7) and quantitative research methods (substudies 8–9) were applied. The four literature review substudies provided insights on the body of knowledge on open innovation and crowdsourcing. These substudies unveiled most of the influential articles, authors, and journals of open innovation and crowdsourcing disciplines. Moreover, they identified research gaps in the current literature. The empirical substudies offer several insightful findings. Substudy 5 shows how non-core ideas and technologies of a large firm can become valuable, especially for small firms. Intermediary platforms can find solutions to many pressing problems of large organizations by engaging renowned scientists from all over world (substudy 6). Intermediary platforms can also bring breakthrough innovations with novel mechanisms (substudy 7). Large firms are not only able to garner ideas by engaging their customers through crowdsourcing but they can also build long-lasting relations with their customers (substudies 8 and 9). Embracing open innovation brings challenges for firms too. Firms need to change their organizational structures in order to be able to fully benefit from open innovation. When crowdsourcing is successful, it produces a very large number of new ideas. This has the consequence that firms need to allocate a significant amount of resources in order to identify the most promising ideas. In an idea contest, customarily, only one or a few best ideas are rewarded (substudy 7). Sometimes, no reward is provided for the selected idea (substudies 8 and 9). Most of the ideas that are received are not implemented in practice

Crowdsourcing in business and management disciplines: an integrative literature review

The objective of this study is to review crowdsourcing literature of the business and management disciplines and to know its relation with the open innovation concept. A systematic literature review is used in this study. Studies on crowdsourcing are published mostly in recent years, 2011-2013. Studies are highly dispersed, published in a very wide range of journals and are mostly based on a single case as data source. Content analysis of the findings of articles are performed to synthesize the findings in the extant literature. Most of the qualitative articles used single case method and most of the quantitative studies relied on online survey over a single crowdsourcing platform. Studies and scholars in the literature are from a limited number of countries. Although crowdsourcing as a concept overlaps with the open innovation concept, by no means, it can be considered a concept under the broad umbrella of open innovation concept. Based on identified gaps, future research avenues are presented

Seasonal employees' intention to return and do more than expected

Seasonal employment is important in the service industries. Having motivated and satisfied employees is fundamental when front-line employees play a key role for the customers' perceived service quality. Seasonal work differs from permanent employment in many aspects and if managed properly, this could be a competitive advantage and contribute to the success of an organization. This study focuses on seasonal employees' intention to return and to do more than expected at work as well as the relationships between certain motivational factors and job satisfaction. A survey was carried out at four ski resorts with 477 respondents. Correlation and regression analyses indicate that job satisfaction influences the intention to return but does not have a strong influence on organizational citizenship behaviour (i.e. doing more than expected at work). The results improve our understanding of seasonal workers' motivation and behaviour. The concluding part discusses managerial implications