Risk and Open Innovation

2010 AFP Pinnacle Awards – Call for Entries

liamaral — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:48:48 +0000

The Association for Financial Professionals® (AFP) and Wells Fargo invite you to nominate your winning solution for a 2010 AFP Pinnacle Award and to take your place alongside the other prestigious companies who have previously been recognized.

Too see the Award Categories click here.

Crowdsourcing Example: The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

liamaral — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:54:19 +0000

I loved this idea and want to share it with everyone! The Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Each year a distinguished jury awards a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

Entries must be:

Comprehensive — applies a whole systems approach to all facets of the design and development process; aims to simultaneously address multiple goals, requirements, conditions and issues;
Anticipatory — factoring in critical future trends and needs as well as projected impacts of implementation in the short and long term;
Ecologically responsible — reflecting nature’s underlying principles while enhancing the Earth’s life-support systems;
Feasible — relying on current know-how, technology and existing resources;
Verifiable — able to withstand rigorous empirical testing;
Replicable — able to scale and adapt to a broad range of conditions

The thirty semi-finalists currently under consideration have undergone a rigorous review including an interview with the individual or team behind the strategy. They were advanced from a pool of 215 entries that were submitted in Fall 2009. To learn more about each project visit the Semi-Finalists summary page

The innovation capability of SMEs…

liamaral — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:24:47 +0000

How can people, IT tools, structure, culture, and power be connected in order to leverage collective abilities for applying available knowledge to solve problems and search for opportunities (organizational intelligence), accommodating new experience (organizational learning), and producing new ideas and things (organizational creativity) so that the group of organizational members can effectively contribute to the organizational well-being? You could answer some questions like these visiting the KMOWL web site.

KMOWL is a Special Interest Group in Knowledge Management that carries out interdisciplinary Research and Development projects as well as Education projects, with the aim of developing systematic and comprehensive approaches to the organizational process of knowledge management. These approaches are to built upon the theoretical and methodological tools developed in scientific fields such as sociology, psychology, management, cognitive scieces, neuroscience and information systems.

That’s right that open innovation refers to the ability of firms to open themselves up to external networks and relationships in order to gain the full potential of their investments in innovation. How creating an open innovation action system and managing innovative projects… maybe the answef for this question is an open innovation business ecosystem…

In this context, prof. PhD Isabel Ramos is cordinating and improving a research crowdsourcing innovation group, that aims to promote the innovation capability of SMEs and economic value of knowledge and creativity of high qualified individuals and small research teams. That´s a open innovation business ecosystem!

A business ecosystem is an economic community crossing many industries working together (cooperatively) and competitively in production, innovative customer service and innovation process.

But we know that crowdsourcing innovation need to be tailored and controlled in all steps.and we think that since platforms are repositories of knowledge, potential contributors need access to build their own business model and value proposition.

Advised by Prof Isabel, Cândida Elisa a PhD Student is researching about knowledge repositories for crowdsourcing innovation.

“A knowledge repository is a system that supports all kind of data, from a variety of heterogeneous sources, such as structured data […] The main functions of a knowledge repository are the capture, storage, maintenance and retrieval of knowledge from all the available sources. These functions must include both the capabilities for assimilating knowledge from outside (such as competitive intelligence systems acquiring information about other companies in the same industry) and capabilities for creating new knowledge from the reinterpretation and reformulation of existing and newly acquired information”. (Cândida Elisa, 2008) .

In this era, generically known as the information age, there is a dramatically need for changing the way companies access information. The Web 2.0 collaborative society, supporting new ways of accessing, exchanging and promoting information, may transform its workers, the knowledge workers, in the basis of a sustainable platform organizations may use to get competitive advantages and innovate. We believe that the management of organizational memory, sustained in its three forms of intellectual capital is, therefore, essential and, up to the moment, difficult to achieve, as no significant and practical results were produced to improve it. Luis Mourão, another PhD Student advised by Prof. Isabel Ramos is improving a research project that aims to develop a systemic approach to allow the diagnose and intervention in organizational memory, seen as a dynamic system, gathering all its components into a useful model capable to provide the knowledge about the distributed capacity an organization has to capture and mobilize knowledge serving as the base to the development of a diagnostic and intervention model in organizational memory, as well as the construction of a prototype to support the monitoring of organizational memory evolution.

What are the risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation brokering, both internal to an organization or externally available by brokering businesses? What should be risk management model for crowdsourcing innovation? What kind of information system should be defined to effectively support the management of risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation?

My PhD research is focused on producing a methodology to manage risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation, delivered by internal or external brokers, and on defining the functional and informational requirements of an information system to support risk management to empower managers preventing and / or mitigating the materialization of risks in innovation brokering services specialized in the innovation needs of technology based firms.

ICICKM 2010 – call for papers

liamaral — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:52:25 +0000

7^th International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management & Organisational Learning
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

11-12 November 2010

Call for Papers:

Case studies and work-in-progress/posters are welcomed approaches. PhD Research, proposals for roundtable discussions, non-academic contributions and product demonstrations based on the main themes are also invited.Important Dates
Publication Opportunity
Papers accepted for the conference will be published in the conference proceedings, subject to author registration. The proceedings have an ISBN and ICICKM proceedings are listed in the Thomson Reuters ISI Index to Social Sciences & Humanities Proceedings (ISSHP) and the Thomson Reuters ISI Index to Social Sciences & Humanities Proceedings (ISSHP/ISI Proceedings).

Abstract submission deadline:	22 April 2010
Notification of abstract acceptance:	29 April 2010
Full paper due for review:	10 June 2010
Notification of paper acceptance(with any requested changes):	19 August 2010
Earlybird registration closes	2 September 2010
Final full paper due (with changes):	16 September 2010
Final author registration date:	7 October 2010

CALL FOR CHAPTERS New!!!!

liamaral — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:06:42 +0000

Proposals Submission Deadline: 4/30/2010

SMEs and Open Innovation:
Global Cases and Initiatives

A book edited by Dr. Hakikur Rahman and Dr. Isabel Ramos, University of Minho, Portugal

Introduction

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in operational and managment aspectos of successful entrepreneurship and value addition within an enterprise….Innovation has been transformed into open innovation, in terms of products, processes and services. Innovations has been transformed into open innovation rather then closed innovation, which seems more traditional. Small and medium enterprises SMEs play a critical role in this transformation of innovation strategies for business promotion, value gain and economic empowerment of a country……. see more

Publisher
This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” and “IGI Publishing” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2011.

Important Dates:
April 30, 2010: Proposal Submission Deadline
May 15, 2010: Notification of Acceptance
August 30, 2010: Full Chapter Submission
September 30, 2010: Review Result Returned
November 30, 2010: Final Chapter

Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe

liamaral — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:52:38 +0000

Crowdsourcing has already had a huge impact on big or small companies. This is a great video by Jeff Howe speaking us about crowdsourcing strategy.

What Kind of Flu is it and how is spreading?

liamaral — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:46:43 +0000

The virus is an influenza A virus, carrying the designation H1N1 and is spreading from person to person. It contains DNA from avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.

Risk and Crowdsourcing Innovation

liamaral — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:11:15 +0000

It is very important for managers identify the risks associated with projects and integration of project results, new processes or technologies, in the business model of the company or group of companies. Risk and uncertainty are inherent in innovation activities where objectives are path generation, i.e. breaking away from path dependencies to create new markets with pioneering technologies (Ahuja, et al., 2001). The risk management process includes the stages of defining management policies, procedures, monitoring practices of the risk life-cycle and of the tasks required to mitigate the risk. The monitoring of the risk’s life-cycle includes establishing the context, identifying, analyzing, evaluating, treating, monitoring and reviewing the risk.

Doing literature review – I

liamaral — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:53:12 +0000

Students have questions about the best strategy to adopt to make a good review of the literature to support their research. So I will describe about my own literature review strategy.

For this research we have mainly chosen to focus on research work that explicitly use the terms open innovation, crowdsourcing and risk management in the title, abstract, topics or keywords. We have also restricted our search to the social sciences, which in the searched databases also includes technology and engineering. Also we have not included industry reports or editorial material. First, we perform an in-depth review of Open Innovation (OI) papers published in quoted scientific journals. We searched the two major databases of management journals and an additional innovation journal not covered by the databases: ISI Web of Knowledge database (Social Sciences Citation Index-SSCI) and Scopus Database, complemented by Scholar Google Current Contents as database.

Since Open Innovation and crowdsourcing concepts are recent, we chose to perform an exhaustive review of the scientific papers published in quoted journals since 2000. Thus, we looked in SSCI and Scopus for any paper containing the following expressions in Social Sciences database, in title, abstract, topic or keywords: open innovation, external innovation, innovation licensing, technology licensing, technology in-licensing, technology out-licensing and crowdsourcing. Then we repeated the same procedures for keywords related to risk management and innovation or risk management and personal values. There are, of course, many researchers that investigate issues closely related to these subjects without using these terms, so we come to their articles through the citations made in the texts obtained by the search engine above and asking for others titles to my thesis supervisors. We have found 58 records for the first search keywords, including 14 book reviews and three proceedings papers , and 3 articles for the keywords “risk management and innovation”. There weren´t any records for the keywords “risk management and personal values”.

Furthermore, a search for books with “open innovation” and “risk management and innovation” in the title was made on the site of Amazon.com to identify books published in the field. We found 20 books about open innovation, including one book review and some short books, and two other books about risk management and innovation (one of them written in German). All books are included in the literature overview.

Using the current method we have a comprehensive analysis of the journal articles published in the databases in the specified time period and about their content. Papers in trade journals and in journals that only refer to original papers were removed. Editorial material was also removed. Book reviews have been listed but are not included in the literature analysis.

I hope that the report of my strategy may be useful to your future works.

What is crowdsourcing innovation

liamaral — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:33:36 +0000

The term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in June 2006 issue of Wired magazine (Howe, 2006) , it describes a new web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals through what amounts to an open call for proposals. In other words, a company posts a problem by an open call and a vast number of individuals offer solutions to the problem. The winning ideas are awarded some form of a bounty and the company mass produces the idea for its own gain. This strategy can be applied in two ways: (1) by internally identifying business problems and needs for innovation felt by individuals, teams and organizational units (seekers) that are then made available to a community of internal and external specialists motivated to provide their knowledge and skills to address those problems. In doing so brings, employees of the company can improve their internal visibility and be empowered in decision processes across the company; (2) by placing the company’s innovation challenges to a brokering service that can find the right people to present the solutions (solvers).