Idea Competitions under scrutiny: Acquisition,intelligence or public relations mechanism?

Idea Competitions (ICs) are becoming a popular mechanism chosen by firms to perform Open Innovation. They are a way to engage with external sources of knowledge such as individual entrepreneurs and small firms who are asked to submit ideas and compete for a prize. However, little is known about the success of ICs as acquisition mechanisms. The researchers conducted interviews in five multinational companies to evaluate the effects of using ICs as an acquisition mechanism. Although still preliminary, the results of this study show that the success of ICs as an acquisition mechanism remains uncertain because their output (i.e. the number of ideas acquired) is often low compared to the input (i.e. the number of ideas submitted) and effort required to run them (e.g. to vet ideas). Across the cases observed, ICs appear to be more successful at identifying and acquiring early-stage ideas, particularly those outside the current business focus. The study shows that ICs deliver other functional benefits such as improved intelligence and public relations and that these need to be considered as part of the evaluation of the IC's success. The paper concludes by discussing the conditions in which ICs are implemented and the implications for Open Innovation theory.     

Revisiting and extending our understanding of Pierre Wack's the gentle art of re-perceiving

Pierre Wack's 1985 Harvard Business Review papers are two of the most frequently referenced in the scenario planning literature. Wack argued that planning had to be based on the more predictive elements of the business environment. If not, plans would be based on uncertainty and a ‘best guess’ basis. Yet there is a lack of subsequent empirical research to investigate Pierre Wack's contribution. The research findings presented in this paper extend our understanding of Wack's contribution. We show how social discourse during scenario building helped to make sense and reveal the significance of historical events. These historical events were seen, but not previously understood; consequently a new understanding of reality emerged. The findings are in contrast to Wack's explanation of re-perceiving and extend our understanding of the basis of re-perceiving with scenarios.     

A substitution orbit model of competitive innovations

Successful innovation and diffusion of technology can be attributed to the identification of the orbit of emerging new technologies that complement or substitute for existing technologies. This dynamism resembles the co-evolution process in an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, in order to maintain sustainable development, the complex interplay between competition and cooperation, typically observed in predator-prey systems, create a sophisticated balance. Given that an ecosystem can be used as a masterpiece system, this sophisticated balance can provide suggestive ideas for identifying an optimal orbit of competitive innovations with complement or substitution dynamism.Prompted by such a sophisticated balance in an ecosystem, this paper analyzes the optimal orbit of competitive innovations and, on the basis of an application of Lotka-Volterra equations, it reviews substitution orbits of Japan's monochrome to color TV system, fixed telephones to cellular telephones, cellular telephones to mobile Internet access service, and analog to digital TV broadcasting. On the basis of substitution orbits analyses, it attempts to extract suggestions supportive to identifying an optimal policy option in a complex orbit leading to expected orbit.Key findings include policy options that are effective in controlling parameters for Lotka-Volterra equations leading to expected orbit.     

On the forecasting of the challenging world future scenarios

Logistic and power law methodologies for both retrospective and prospective analyses of extended time series describing evolutionary growth processes, in environments with finite resources, are confronted. While power laws may eventually apply only to the early stages of said growth process, the Allee logistic model seems applicable over the entire span of a long range process. On applying the Allee logistic model to both the world population and the world gross domestic product time series, from 1 to 2008 AD, a projection was obtained that along the next few decades the world should experience a new economic boom phase with the world GDP peaking around the year 2020 and proceeding from then on towards a saturation value of about 142 trillion international dollars, while the world population should reach 8.9 billion people by 2050. These results were then used to forecast the behavior of the supply and consumption of energy and food, two of the main commodities that drive the world system. Our findings suggest that unless the currently prevailing focus on economic growth is changed into that of sustainable prosperity, human society may run into a period of serious economical and social struggles with unpredictable political consequences.     

Making real money in virtual worlds: MMORPGs and emerging business opportunities, challenges and ethical implications in metaverses

Today, millions of people from around the globe play online role playing games (MMORPG), in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world, either using their existing identities in the physical world, or more often than not, through new virtual identities that might not even be remotely linked to the identities of the players in the physical world. The number of users is growing at an exponential rate and we are probably on the verge of a new development that is going to be as significant as the Internet itself. This positioning paper will discuss the business opportunities and challenges of such a virtual world, that of Second Life, and will examine the resultant corporate social responsibility implications focusing on the ethical and policy-related ones. This will help to identify important research questions that need to be systematically addressed.     

Technological diversification, complementary assets, and performance

Most research on technological diversification or complementary assets has been carried out in isolation when assessing their effects on performance. In this study, we posit that technological diversification and performance are positively linked and that specialized complementary assets have a moderating effect on this relationship. This study also finds that different specialized complementary assets have distinctive moderating effects on the relationship between technological diversification and performance. We conclude that maintaining a coherent relationship between technological diversification and specialized complementary assets give firms generates competitive advantage.     

Infrastructural change and secular economic development

Long-term economic development is determined by changes to the infrastructure, especially material and non-material infrastructural networks that link agents in different locations. The infrastructure consists of the slowly changing, collective arena that supports production, exchange, and consumption, such as the built environment, transport networks, and institutions. In the short run the infrastructure can be regarded as fixed. Changes to the infrastructure are under normal conditions small enough to be disregarded by producers and consumers. With the creation of a critical link of a network, there will however be a revolutionary restructuring of the arena. Critical links are here defined as additions to infrastructural networks that create opportunities for new information and transport flows between previously unconnected regions. Such a revolutionary restructuring of infrastructural networks has been called a logistical revolution. Certain institutional pre-conditions are necessary for a logistical revolution, while the creation of a critical link is both a necessary and a sufficient condition. This paper discusses the three logistical revolutions that occurred in the 13th century, around 1600, and in the 19th century, which each had crucial similarities with the current “information revolution.”     

Exploring technology paths: The development of alternative transport fuels in Sweden 2007-2020

By using socio-technical scenarios, we investigate how present policy choices may affect the development of alternative transport fuels in Sweden. One important choice for policy lies in the balance between general tax exemptions stimulating the market for alternative fuels, and funding of research and development more directly promoting new technology. The implications of this choice are illustrated with four diverging development paths until 2020. In the market-oriented scenarios, we illustrate consequences of breaking the dominance of entrenched technologies and demonstrating a growing market potential for alternatives, but also the risks with a large focus on first generation renewable fuels. In the technology-oriented scenarios, we point out the value of keeping variety among niches in this stage of the transition. In conclusion, if policy is implemented without taking the dynamic forces within the system into account, there is a risk that any measure leads the system into a dead end. But if policy strives to balance the development in different parts of the technological system while making use of various prevailing forces of change, a multitude of different efforts can contribute to the development of a more sustainable transport system.     

Foresight and innovation in the context of industrial clusters: The case of some Italian districts

The “territory” is widely recognized in the literature on business strategy as a critical driver of industrial competitiveness (see, as an example, Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations). The generation and exploitation of new knowledge, both tacit and explicit, through the process of socialization, articulation, combination and internalization (see Nonaka and Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company) is essential to enable innovation of processes and products of “local” firms.Our recent Foresight exercises in the metal working and machinery district of Lecco and in the silk district of Como show that Foresight can play an important role in creating and exploiting new knowledge, and that different methodologies can be more or less effective to this aim.Critical technology list and interactive workshops, with the participation of entrepreneurs of SMEs and technologists, are more suited to foster the transfer of technologies that have overcome the initial stage of the life cycle and that have been already applied in other sectors. However, when radical innovations are needed in order to face the challenges posed by global competition, other methodologies, as Scenarios, are more appropriate. Even if these approaches are complex and time and resource consuming, they may be very effective in actively involving the most relevant private and public stakeholders of a district, and in making them to envisage the long term future of the economic, social, and cultural structure of their district. In this way Foresight drives the small entrepreneurs, the district stakeholders and the medium and large size firms to play the critical roles of Nonaka and Takeuchi's “frontline employees”, “senior managers” and “middle managers” in their “knowledge creating company”: the first ones grasp what the district is; the second ones build the vision of what it ought to be; the third ones, serve as a bridge between the future and the present.     

Foresight analysis of tilapia supply chains (Sistema Producto) in four states in Mexico: Scenarios and strategies for 2018

In order to increase competitiveness among individual producers and to encourage their integration, the federal government of Mexico has pursued the establishment, at both the state and national levels, of supply chains, or Sistema Producto (SP). For fisheries and aquaculture, 33 SPs exist at the state level and 7 at the national level, 1 of them for tilapia. The objective of this study is to carry out a foresight analysis (FA) of 4 tilapia SPs in Mexico—for the States of Colima, Sonora, Tabasco and Yucatán—analyzing their 2018 vision for the development of the tilapia chain. FA provides an integral vision of both the internal and external environments, identifying the key factors for each SP and helping to develop the best strategies in order to compete successfully. Sonora, Tabasco and Yucatán identify marketing aspects as key elements for their 10-year future: adding value to the product by means of new processing technologies, developing their own brand, and identifying and differentiating their product based on sanitary issues. Colima focuses its industry future success on efficiency improvements. Finally, the main technological disruptions identified by the 4 states are the incremental use of information technology, product and process certification, new hatcheries with genetically-improved fry, and new processing methodologies developed and/or applied.