First Name
Jörg
Last Name
Haller
Affiliation
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg
(Preliminary) PhD Title
Towards Open Evaluation of Innovation: A Socio-Technical Systems Perspective
PhD abstract
During the past decade, open innovation has become a widespread concept to improve a company’s ability to innovate. It can be enabled by different methods and tools (e.g. Lead User Method or Toolkits). The majority of research, however, emphasizes the integration of external knowledge for ideation purposes or focuses on later phases of the innovation process like concept development and testing. Evaluation and selection of innovative ideas and concepts on the other hand, are still a typical task of the company itself. Despite this, open innovation methods like innovation contests increasingly allow participants to comment on contributions of other peers or to evaluate their attributes like the originality or usefulness. This research wants to add to the academic understanding of this phenomenon and related influencing factors in order to provide design suggestions. Therefore a multi-method approach, consisting of case studies, quasi-experimental field studies and experiments, is chosen to identify characteristics, results and influencing factors of open evaluation. Taking a socio-technical perspective the emphasis lies on the analysis of the social (personal traits) as well as technical aspects (task, technology) and their impact on the evaluation outcome and general attitude towards evaluation objects. Further, a scale for the evaluation of innovative concepts in the context of innovation contests shall be developed.