Open for Ideation: Individual-level Openness and Idea Generation in R&D

By Ammon J. Salter, A. T. Wal, Paola Criscuolo, Oliver Alexy. 2012

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Organizations are increasingly encouraging their scientists and engineers to work with ideas originally created outside the firm. Such attempts at open innovation have profound consequences for individuals working in R&D, forcing them to realign the direction of their search efforts outward. However, it is as yet unclear whether and how this individual-level increase in external search efforts impacts individuals’ ideation performance, and which factors might moderate this process in turn. Using a sample of 355 R&D scientists and engineers working at a large, mature organization, we examine the relationship between individuals’ openness to external sources of knowledge on their ability to develop new, useful innovative ideas for their organization. Drawing from theories of combinatorial search, we theorize – and empirically substantiate – that the openness to external ideas is curvilinearly related to ideation, indicating that benefits of openness to external sources are positive until they reach a point ...

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/971a4d8613e7716eacdb5ba017a86408e15dc706

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Citations in the corpus

The Organizational Innovation System: A systemic framework for radical innovation at the organizational level (2016, background): “…looks at the innovation process as a whole (West and Bogers, 2013) but rather focusses on specific stages of the process (e.g. idea generation (Salter et al., 2015) or Research and Development (R&D) (Bruns et al., 2010)) or on specific aspects linked to innovation (e.g. knowledge sharing…”
The open innovation research landscape: established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis (2016, unknown): “…openness-performance relationship, including the strategic orientation of firms (Cheng and Huizingh 2014), individual-level characteristics (e.g. Salter et al. 2015), or new product development project characteristics (e.g. Salge et al. 2013), or the integration of key individuals (Lüttgens et…”
Making a marriage of materials: The role of gatekeepers and shepherds in the absorption of external knowledge and innovation performance (2017, methodology): “…variety of knowledge that can serve as input for recombinatorial novelty (Dahlander et al., 2016; Fleming ING ModelR 4 arch P a e 2 h f m B i i w n o d t 2 u t 1 t a i t a – ( m i e k i p e k ARTICLEESPOL-3399; No. of Pages 16 A.L.J. Ter Wal et al. / Rese nd Sorenson, 2001; Salter et al., 2015).”