Private-collective model of innovation

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The term private-collective model of innovation was coined by Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh in their 2003 publication in Organization Science . [1] This innovation model represents a combination of the private investment model and the collective-action innovation model.

In the private investment model innovators appropriate financial returns from innovations through intellectual property rights such as patents, copyright, licenses, or trade secrets. Any knowledge spillover reduces the innovator's benefits, thus freely revealed knowledge is not in the interest of the innovator.

The collective-action innovation model explains the creation of public goods which are defined by the non-rivalry of benefits and non-excludable access to the good. In this case the innovators do not benefit more than any one else not investing into the public good, thus free-riding occurs. In response to this problem, the cost of innovation has to be distributed, therefore governments typically invest into public goods through public funding.

As combination of these two models, the private-collective model of innovation explains the creation of public goods through private funding. The model is based on the assumption that the innovators privately creating the public goods benefit more than the free-riders only consuming the public good. While the result of the investment is equally available to all, the innovators benefit through the process of creating the public good. Therefore, private-collective innovation occurs when the process-related rewards exceed the process-related costs. [2] [3]

A laboratory study [4] traced the initiation of private-collective innovation to the first decision to share knowledge in a two-person game with multiple equilibria. The results indicate fragility: when individuals face opportunity costs to sharing their knowledge with others they quickly turn away from the social optimum of mutual sharing. The opportunity costs of the "second player", the second person deciding whether to share, have a bigger (negative) impact on knowledge sharing than the opportunity costs of the first person to decide. Overall, the study also observed sharing behavior in situations where none was predicted.

Recent work [5] shows that a project will not "take off" unless the right incentives are in place for innovators to contribute their knowledge to open innovation from the beginning. The article [5] explores social preferences in the initiation of PCI. It conducted a simulation study that elucidates how inequality aversion, reciprocity, and fairness affect the underlying conditions that lead to the initiation of Private-collective innovation.

While firms increasingly seek to cooperate with outside individuals and organizations to tap into their ideas for new products and services, mechanisms that motivate innovators to "open up" are critical in achieving the benefits of open innovation.

The theory of private collective innovation has recently been extended by a study on the exclusion rights for technology in the competition between private-collective and other innovators. [6] The authors argue that the investment in orphan exclusion rights for technology serves as a subtle coordination mechanism against alternative proprietary solutions.

Additionally, the research on private-collective innovation has been extended with theoretical explanations and empirical evidence of egoism and altruism as significant explanations for cooperation in private-collective innovation. Benbunan-Fich and Koufaris [7] show that contributions to a social bookmarking site are a combination of intentional and unintentional contributions. The intentional public contribution of bookmarks is driven by an egoistic motivation to contribute valuable information and thus showing competence.

Example: Development of Free and Libre Open Source Software

The development of open source software / Free Software (consequently named Free and Libre Open Source Software – FLOSS ) is the most prominent example of private-collective innovation. [8] By definition, FLOSS represents a public good . It is non-rival because copying and distributing software does not decrease its value. And it is non-excludable because FLOSS licenses enable everyone to use, change and redistribute the software without any restriction.

While FLOSS is created by many unpaid individuals, it has been shown [9] [10] that technology firms invest substantially in the development of FLOSS. These companies release previously proprietary software under FLOSS licenses, employ programmers to work on established FLOSS projects, and fund entrepreneurial firms to develop certain features. In this way, private entities invest into the creation of public goods.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge management</span> Process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization

Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Innovation</span> Practical implementation of improvements

Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value". Others have different definitions; a common element in the definitions is a focus on newness, improvement, and spread of ideas or technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public good (economics)</span> Good that is non-excludable and non-rival

In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Use by one person neither prevents access by other people, nor does it reduce availability to others. Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person. This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, its simultaneous availability to more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-design movement</span> Movement for product development with publicly shared designs

The open-design movement involves the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. This includes the making of both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardware. The process is generally facilitated by the Internet and often performed without monetary compensation. The goals and philosophy of the movement are identical to that of the open-source movement, but are implemented for the development of physical products rather than software. Open design is a form of co-creation, where the final product is designed by the users, rather than an external stakeholder such as a private company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric von Hippel</span> American economist

Eric von Hippel is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user.

Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions with a peer-to-peer dynamic. These peers can be humans or computers. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s.

User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users, rather than by suppliers. This is a concept closely aligned to co-design and co-creation, and has been proven to result in more innovative solutions than traditional consultation methodologies.

Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.

Collaborative innovation is a process in which multiple players contribute towards creating new products with customers and suppliers.

Lead user is a term developed by American economist Eric von Hippel. His definition for lead user is:

  1. Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and
  2. Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to their needs and so may innovate.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:

Knowledge spillover is an exchange of ideas among individuals. Knowledge spillover is usually replaced by terminations of technology spillover, R&D spillover and/or spillover (economics) when the concept is specific to technology management and innovation economics. In knowledge management economics, knowledge spillovers are non-rival knowledge market costs incurred by a party not agreeing to assume the costs that has a spillover effect of stimulating technological improvements in a neighbor through one's own innovation. Such innovations often come from specialization within an industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georg von Krogh</span>

Georg von Krogh is a Norwegian organizational theorist and Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and holds the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation. He also serves on Strategy Commission at ETH Zurich.

The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2006 in the Netherlands. Inspired by the free software movement, the FKI fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society by promoting freedom of use, modification, copying, and distribution of knowledge about education, technology, culture, and science.

Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the principal investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His research and teaching focuses on open innovation and user innovation. Lakhani is the founder and one of the principal investigators of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

Communities that support innovation have been referred to as communities of innovation (CoI), communities for innovation, innovation communities, open innovation communities, and communities of creation.

Open collaboration is any "system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product of economic value, which is made available to contributors and noncontributors alike." It is prominently observed in open source software, but can also be found in many other instances, such as in Internet forums, mailing lists and online communities. Open collaboration is also thought to be the operating principle underlining a gamut of diverse ventures, example including bitcoin, TEDx, and Wikipedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open coopetition</span>

In R&D management and systems development, open coopetition or open-coopetition is a neologism to describe cooperation among competitors in the open-source arena. The term was first coined by the scholars Jose Teixeira and Tingting Lin to describe how rival firms that, while competing with similar products in the same markets, cooperate which each other in the development of open-source projects in the co-development of Webkit).

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.

References

  1. Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh (2003) "Open Source Software and the 'Private-Collective' Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science" Organization Science 14, 209-223.
  2. Democratizing innovation (2005) Eric von Hippel, MIT Press
  3. Georg von Krogh (2008) "Researching the Private-Collective Innovation Model" The SAGE Handbook of New Approaches in Management and Organization, Daved Barry and Hans Hansen (ed.) Sage, 396-397.
  4. Gächter, S., von Krogh, G., Haefliger, S. "Initiating private-collective innovation: The fragility of knowledge sharing," Research Policy, 39(7), 2010, pp. 893-906.
  5. 1 2 Helena Garriga, Efe Aksuyek, Georg F. von Krogh, Fredrik Hacklin, What social preferences matter in private-collective innovation? Behavioral game theory in collective action, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, Forthcoming
  6. Alexy, O., Reitzig, M. "Private-collective innovation, competition, and firms' counterintuitive appropriation strategies", Research Policy, 42(4), 2013, pp. 895-913.
  7. Benbunan-Fich, R., Koufaris, M., "Public contributions to private-collective systems: the case of social bookmarking", Internet Research, 23(2), 2013, pp. 183-203.
  8. Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh "Free revealing and the private-collective model of innovation incentives", R&D Management, 36(3), 2006, pp. 295-306.
  9. Matthias Stuermer, Sebastian Spaeth, and Georg von Krogh, G. (2009) "Extending private-collective innovation: a case study" R&D Management 39(2), 170-191.
  10. Sebastian Spaeth, Matthias Stuermer, Georg von Krogh (2010) "Enabling Knowledge Creation Through Outsiders: Towards a Push Model of Open Innovation" International Journal of Technology Management (Forthcoming Special Issue on Open Innovation).