Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the "crowd" of users ("crowdsourcing"), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real-world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm's professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility-in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit-tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm's professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD.

Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsible Research and Innovation by proposing a unifying Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Framework. This framework captures the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of open and collaborative practices along the entire process of generating and disseminating scientific insights and translating them into innovation. Moreover, it elucidates individual-, team-, organisation-, field-, and society-level factors shaping OIS practices. To conceptualise the framework, we employed a collaborative approach involving 47 scholars from multiple disciplines, highlighting both tensions and commonalities between existing approaches. The OIS Research Framework thus serves as a basis for future research, informs policy discussions, and provides guidance to scientists and practitioners.

W ho provides better inputs to new product ideation tasks, problem solvers with expertise in the area for which new products are to be developed or problem solvers from "analogous" markets that are distant but share an analogous problem or need? Conventional wisdom appears to suggest that target market expertise is indispensable, which is why most managers searching for new ideas tend to stay within their own market context even when they do search outside their firms' boundaries. However, in a unique symmetric experiment that isolates the effect of market origin, we find evidence for the opposite: Although solutions provided by problem solvers from analogous markets show lower potential for immediate use, they demonstrate substantially higher levels of novelty. Also, compared to established novelty drivers, this effect appears highly relevant from a managerial perspective: we find that including problem solvers from analogous markets versus the target market accounts for almost two-thirds of the well-known effect of involving lead users instead of average problem solvers. This effect is further amplified when the analogous distance between the markets increases, i.e., when searching in far versus near analogous markets. Finally, results indicate that the analogous market effect is particularly strong in the upper tail of the novelty distribution, which again underscores the effect's practical importance. All of this suggests that it might pay to systematically search across firm-external sources of innovation that were formerly out of scope for most managers.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx

For many years, it has remained unquestioned that developing innovation mainly happens within the boundaries of organizations' own research and development (R&D) or marketing departments, that is, an activity based on using or reusing local expertise. The negative effect of this local search behavior on the novelty of the outcome, however, is one of the reasons researchers and innovation managers are increasingly discussing the idea of opening up innovation processes by drawing on external problem solvers. In particular, problem solvers located in contextually distant but analogous domains (i.e., domains linked by similar problems) are capable of contributing to overcoming local search bias: as they do not suffer from functional fixedness but experience a similar (i.e., analogous) problem, they are capable of coming up with highly novel solutions. In theory, a recently introduced search approach known as pyramiding holds great potential for crossing domain-specific boundaries and identifying problem solvers from contextually distant domains. Although initial practical applications of this search method, for example, in the course of applying the lead user method, provide anecdotal evidence, systematic research on the potential of pyramiding for crossing domain-specific boundaries is still lacking to date. This study addresses this gap by analyzing 1,147 interviews conducted in the course of pyramiding search processes in eight lead user studies. The study found that pyramiding is an apt means of systematically crossing domain-specific boundaries: more than one third of those interviewees who were able to provide a valid referral in their interview performed the creative task of referring into one or more analogous domains previously unknown to the searching organization. The interviewees' levels of expertise as well as their domain origins influence the likelihood of a domain-crossing referral. Moreover, the type of industry in which the search field is located is found to moderate the effect of expertise on the likelihood of a referral into an analogous domain.