• Compare current debates around open vs. closed innovation
• Explain innovation-relevant theories with attention to their assumptions, causal dynamics and processes
• Categorize distributed sources of innovation, their characteristics, implications and search approaches for identifying knowledge located in these sources
• Discuss ethical issues, complexities and hurdles surrounding various approaches of open vs. closed Innovation and devise strategic action plans to overcome them

Innovation increasingly takes place through communities and platforms driven by “crowds” of developers and problem solvers. At the same time their outputs and products of the crowd contexts have come to shape the daily life of many of the world’s inhabitants. In some of the most dynamic sectors of the modern economy, such as, apps for smartphones, video games, media content, scientific and technical problems solving, companies’ overall performance already rely on individuals located outside the organization to become crucial sources of modules, ideas, tasks, and procedures. In their attempts to access and leverage these sources of innovation it is now quite common for companies employ more open forms of innovation, and try to “orchestrate” innovative communities. While these “open approaches” have rapidly diffused, creating a wealth of opportunities, it is obviously crucial how companies manage to access and leverage these distributed sources of innovation. From this point of departure, the course will develop the conceptual foundations, frameworks and methods for analyzing the relationships between communities and firms.
 
The course will first give an introduction to distributed sources of innovation (inside and outside organizational boundaries), their characteristics and good-practice examples. An aspect that will particularly be highlighted is the role of users as a source of innovation. The phenomenon of user innovation will be analyzed on the individual (e.g. lead user approach) and the network level (innovation communities). It will be discussed what the interplay between innovation, exploration, exploitation, and search, and the growing importance of efficient search approaches across external sources of innovation is. More specifically, the concepts of local vs. distant search and related search methods for accessing and leveraging innovation-related knowledge in distributed sources (e.g. crowdsourcing) will be introduced. Finally, open vs. closed innovation models focusing on outside-in processes will be introduced and discussed.
 
Then focus will be on firm responses to outside communities’ development activities, inside community processes and dynamics, how to access and leverage innovation communities, how to manage and strategize in this context, and how to foster communities as well as create related fitting business models.