Designing the Organization for User-Driven Innovation
Peter Keinz, Christoph Hienerth, Christopher Ulrich Lettl · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2012
There is increasing consensus among practitioners and academics alike that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from producer-centered and internal innovation processes towards user-centered and open innovation processes. This paradigm shift induces significant changes to the organization design of producer firms. Even though the research field of user innovation has been developing over a period of more than four decades, there have been only occasional intersections with the research field of organizational design. In this paper we aim to provide an integrated perspective of the two research fields. We first discriminate different user innovation strategies by distinguishing two dimensions: The number of users that are involved in the innovation efforts of a focal producer firm and the sustainability of user involvement. This allows us to (1) distinguish four different user innovation strategies that a focal producer firm can employ, and to (2) identify the corresponding challenges for organization design based on the framework from Burton and Obel (2004). We then analyze the implications of each of the four user innovation strategies on key dimensions of organization design. Our analysis reveals that user innovation approaches that are executed as “one shot games” primarily affect the human components of organizational design. We also argue that the more a focal producer firm aims to involve users into its new product development efforts on a sustainable basis, the more it needs to complement changes in the human components with changes in the structural components of organizational design. We conclude with an outlook on symbiotic producer-user ecosystems and the corresponding implications for organizational design.