Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit http://www.informs.org MANAGEMENT SCIENCEAbstract. Entrepreneurs increasingly use reward-based crowdfunding to finance innovation projects through a large number of customer investments. The existing academic literature has predominantly studied factors that drive crowd investments and whether crowdfunding predicts market success. However, we argue that the involvement of customers goes beyond the provision of capital. As investors, customers enter into a principalagent relationship with entrepreneurs. Thus, entrepreneurs are often faced with a crowd of customer investors who try to influence product development. We show that entrepreneurs can benefit from this influence, because customer investors provide some of the support usually received from institutional investors. Greater involvement from customer investors thus increases funding success. This holds when we control for creator ability and project quality. The effect is driven by customers' influence on product development and the reduction in agency costs for prospective customers. We also link the involvement of customer investors during crowdfunding to the crowdsourcing literature and show that its positive effect is augmented by the elicitation of external information through distant search.
Shop-floor employees play a key role in manufacturing innovation. In some companies, up to 75% of all productivity gains are the result of bottom-up employee ideas. In this paper, we examine how employee interplant assignments—short problem-solving jobs at other manufacturing plants within the same firm—influence employee-driven manufacturing innovation. Using unique idea-level data from a large European car parts manufacturer, we show that interplant assignments significantly increase the value of employees’ improvement ideas due to the short-term transfer of production knowledge and long-term employee learning. Both effects are amplified by assignments to plants that have high functional overlap (i.e., plants producing similar products using similar processes and machinery). One implication is that, for the purpose of employee-driven manufacturing innovation, assignments between peripheral plants with high functional overlap can be more effective than assignments to and from central plants. These findings are robust to several econometric tests. Our study provides novel and detailed empirical evidence of manufacturing innovation, and goes beyond previous research on the learning curve (learning by doing) by investigating how interplant assignments affect the value of employees’ improvement ideas (learning by moving). This paper was accepted by Charles J. Corbett, operations management.
Entrepreneurs increasingly use reward-based crowdfunding to finance innovation projects through a large number of customer investments. The existing academic literature has predominantly studied factors that drive crowd investments and whether crowdfunding predicts market success. However, we argue that the involvement of customers goes beyond the provision of capital. As investors, customers enter into a principalagent relationship with entrepreneurs. Thus, entrepreneurs are often faced with a crowd of customer investors who try to influence product development. We show that entrepreneurs can benefit from this influence, because customer investors provide some of the support usually received from institutional investors. Greater involvement from customer investors thus increases funding success. This holds when we control for creator ability and project quality. The effect is driven by customers' influence on product development and the reduction in agency costs for prospective customers. We also link the involvement of customer investors during crowdfunding to the crowdsourcing literature and show that its positive effect is augmented by the elicitation of external information through distant search.
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