Technovation最新文献

When introducing a new product, firms must decide how to differentiate it from competitors through product positioning. In the low-carbon industry, positioning affective features of the products effectively gives firm a competitive edge. By applying blockchain to online product communities (OPCs), firms can gain insights into consumers' affective requirements during product positioning. In this study, we develop a game-theoretic framework to explore how to optimize affective design of low-carbon products with blockchain application. We find that firms' affective product design depends on two conflicting forces. On one hand, blockchain adoption in OPCs enhances estimation precision, motivating firms to provide mass products that meet mainstream marketplace requirements. On the other hand, blockchain implementation improves estimation similarity, inducing firms to target niche markets. The network effect exacerbates these two conflicting forces, and the trade-off between them determines firms' product design decisions. Additionally, we examine the impacts of blockchain adoption on firms' profits, environmental performance, consumer surplus, and social welfare. We discover that blockchain application in OPCs is always socially beneficial. However, blockchain adoption's effect on economic and environmental performance, as well as consumer surplus, is contingent on the significance of the conflicting forces. We further conduct a survey and in-depth interviews to validate these findings.

This paper delves into the intersection of science fiction, creativity, and individuals' backgrounds, with a special emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education. We investigate if individuals with a STEM background show a more pronounced creative impact from watching science fiction compared to their non-STEM counterparts. We conducted an experimental study involving 204 university students from various disciplines, both STEM and non-STEM, randomly assigned to one of two conditions—watching a science fiction TV episode or a non-science fiction episode—followed by a creative task. The solutions proposed by the students were assessed for their level of creativity. Our findings reveal that the students with a STEM background were more creatively impacted by the exposure to science fiction. These insights hold significant implications for educators, policy-makers, and professionals interested in fostering creativity, suggesting the need for tailored approaches based on an individual's background and a potential role for science fiction in stimulating creative thinking.

This article investigates how more than 25 years of combined entrepreneurial activities have not only developed the third mission of an entrepreneurial university but also improved the first and second missions of education and research. The case, Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship, displays how faculty and annual cohorts of student surrogate entrepreneurs taking on university spinoffs, champion pragmatic and moral legitimacy eventually resulting in cognitive legitimacy within the university and beyond. The effects have not only been commercial, making Chalmers University of Technology into a leading European incubation environment, but have also stimulated education and research to become more entrepreneurial. The article introduces an intrapreneurial capability approach to transforming entrepreneurial universities where legitimacy-building over decades around a new entrepreneurial model complements an incrementalist understanding of university development.

The potential of data to circulate across organizations and sectors and stimulate innovation in multiple contexts has been largely acknowledged by practitioners and researchers. This has given rise to a specific form of innovation strategy, “data-push innovation”, which consists of stimulating the use of existing data by third-party actors. However, how to manage such a strategy remains challenging. The paper explores this question by examining the longitudinal case study of an actor that has successfully stimulated the use of Earth observation data by multiple actors over the last 40 years. The paper offers several contributions to research in information systems and innovation management. First, the paper shows that data-push innovation can be fostered through the intentional design of a so-called “fit system” allowing data to be used in multiple contexts. Such a fit system can be built as a generic system, following similar “generification” strategies as those supporting platform or software development but with original patterns to adapt to the specificities of data-push innovation. Second, the paper characterizes the types of “boundary resources” needed to support this process. These boundary resources especially have a two-way resourcing function: they help third-party actors contribute to the fit system development, but they also allow the fit system owner to identify the knowledge boundaries preventing data from gaining meaning in new contexts. Third, the paper reveals an intriguing form of localized and nondominant platform leadership, focusing on gaining generative power rather than controlling power over the platform ecosystem.

Does radical innovation always benefit small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)? This paper explores the potential drawbacks of radical innovation by examining the complex relationship between the degree of innovation radicalness and government subsidies, within the framework of dual-process signalling theory. The study highlights the importance of both signal observability and the costs of signal interpretation in the context of obtaining government subsidies. Although an increase in innovation radicalness may enhance a firm's visibility to governments, it also significantly raises the costs associated with interpreting signals. As a result, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between innovation radicalness and government subsidies. Furthermore, we found a positive moderating effect of political connections, suggesting that signal observability increases with stronger political ties. We tested our hypotheses using data from listed SMEs in China between 2004 and 2019. Our findings contribute to the literature on innovation and SMEs by indicating that the effects of radicalness may represent a case of ‘too much of a good thing’ for firms.

Although the foundational works of ecosystem research recognized the central role of innovation, the current scholarship lacks a more systemic, systemized understanding of how innovation processes take place in ecosystem settings. This lack of a dominant framework that bridges innovation processes and ecosystem fields risks leading to a situation in which crucial problems at the intersection of these two fields remain poorly investigated. Through a systematic literature review, we made a case for rediscovering how these two branches of knowledge can be bridged. As an initial step, we consolidate the literature on these intersections, profile the studies that initially began to establish a bridge between ecosystem and innovation processes, propose a tentative framework for integrating both literatures, and set an agenda for further studies.

Companies face the challenges of attracting solvers and motivating them to dedicate their time and effort to develop solutions in crowdsourcing contests. Previous research emphasizes the importance of crowdsourcing contest design for fostering solvers' engagement. However, even though contests are designed as a combination of various design elements, such as seeker's identity disclosure, seeker's status, contest duration and monetary prize, prior studies primarily focused on independent effects of these elements, ignoring their interdependency. Building our study on the social exchange theory, we adopt the neo-configurational perspective to explore effective designs of crowdsourcing contests and contribute to our understanding of how contest design elements interact to jointly stimulate solvers' engagement. By the means of the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 277 contests, we show that the combination of long contest duration and high monetary prize plays a significant role in attracting solvers to join crowdsourcing contests, while these elements need to be additionally reinforced by the seeker's identity disclosure and its high status to motivate solvers to actually commit to problem solving. In this way, our study provides unique insights about the differences between contest designs that only initially attract solvers and designs that actually motivate them to create value for seeker companies. It fills the gap where previous research failed to embrace the configurational character of contest design, while offering unique guidance to managers who struggle to attract solvers to join and contribute to crowdsourcing initiatives.

Entrepreneurship and technology have been strongly connected over the last decades. The growth of digital technology and external factors have brought entrepreneurs new opportunities and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has reevaluated the relationship between digitalization and innovative business models. Like any entrepreneurial process, entrepreneurs face a complex adaptation process that determines their success or failure. We reviewed 208 articles published in the past decade to identify trends related to the determinants and impacts of digital entrepreneurship pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show trends in the definitions used, the relationship between external and internal factors that enable the exploration of available digital technologies for emerging business models, and the value digital entrepreneurs create for social, economic, and technological developments. Our study proposes a multidimensional framework and discusses challenges and opportunities.

This study examines the impact of quality signals as proxied by third party recognition, videos, photos, GIFs, online presence, and general disclosure; and signals of trust proxied by risk disclosure, location of fundraisers, team effort and recent funding success on reward crowdfunding success. In addition, the analysis investigates and provides new evidence on the moderating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the relationship between the two types of signaling and funding success. Using data from of 21,270 campaigns posted on Kickstarter over the period July 2019 to July 2020, logistic regression models indicate a statistically significant relationship between quality/trust signals and campaigns’ funding success. Interestingly, we find that using diverse multimedia content, providing extensive information disclosure, involving a team of creators and having a track record of previous successful funding are significant determinants of reward crowdfunding success. On the contrary, the use of photos and disclosure of online presence have significant adverse effect on the likelihood of funding success. The findings also suggest that the external shock of Covid-19 pandemic only has significant interactive effects on the reward crowdfunding success for two signaling proxies, viz. Extent of risk information disclosure and external URL presence. Our findings are robust to the Difference-in-Differences model check and a range of other robustness tests.