Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search

By Lars Bo Jeppesen, Karim R. Lakhani. Organ. Sci., 2010

1,175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine who the winners are in science problem-solving contests characterized by open broadcast of problem information, self-selection of external solvers to discrete problems from the laboratories of large research and development intensive companies, and blind review of solution submissions. Analyzing a unique data set of 166 science challenges involving over 12,000 scientists revealed that technical and social marginality, being a source of different perspectives and heuristics, plays an important role in explaining individual success in problem solving. The provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solver's field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem. Female solvers---known to be in the “outer circle” of the scientific establishment---performed significantly better than men in developing successful solutions. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on open and distributed innovation by demonstrating the value of openness, at least narrowly defined by disclosing problems, in removing barriers to entry to nonobvious individuals. We also contribute to the knowledge-based theory of the firm by showing the effectiveness of a market mechanism to draw out knowledge from diverse external sources to solve internal problems.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Safety Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb9894368bcb5b0440dcfef0236c16881fa7095c

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Citations in the corpus

Managing Distributed Innovation: Strategic Utilization of Open and User Innovation (2012, positive): “Researchers have recently examined examples of each of these approaches, including the innovation intermediaries such as InnoCentive (Jeppesen & Lakhani, 2010), direct firm solicitation of innovation by P&G for consumer goods and Threadless for T-shirts (Dodgson et al., 2006; Ogawa & Piller, 2006),…”
Social capital of venture capitalists and start-up funding (2012, background): “The latter is, for example, crucial in innovation problems, which are often successfully solved by individuals at the interface between different fields ( Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010 ).”
Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation (2010, background): “Members of the crowd do not see nor do they have rights to use the proposed solutions: the outputs are closed and owned by the sponsor (Howe 2006, Pisano and Verganti 2008, Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010).”
Ready to Be Open? Explaining the Firm-Level Barriers to Benefiting from Openness to External Knowledge (2017, positive): “…we would expect firms to face difficult trade-offs in allocating resources between competing demands, one likely scenario being to favor internal R&D (because it is better understood) rather than trying to find new applications for externally sourced knowledge (Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010).”
Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests: An Empirical Analysis (2011, background): “Single prizes are argued to be effective for homogeneous and risk-neutral individuals; multiple prizes are optimal when contestants have asymmetric ability and are risk averse (see Sisak 2009 for a review of the theoretical literature); and penalties are useful for motivating further effort by…”
Comparing Business and Household Sector Innovation in Consumer Products: Findings from a Representative Study in the United Kingdom (2012, background): “Companies may also adopt other innovation management practices, such as offering innovation toolkits to consumers (Thomke and von Hippel 2002) or holding innovation contests to attract consumer activity that might not otherwise occur (Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010).”
Task Design, Motivation, and Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests (2011, background): “, [9, 38, 44]), the sample sizes were small [9, 44].”
Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains* (2018, background): “Ideas and knowledge from one domain can sometimes be productively applied to others (Hargadon and Sutton, 1997; Burt, 2004; Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010; Ferguson and Carnabuci, 2017).”
Organizational Decision-Making Structures in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2019, background): “41 By formulating a problem and broadcasting it to the crowd, firms can attract a diverse set of solutions.”