Electronic services delivered over the Internet are gaining importance in the business world. This area has seen an increase in scientific interest over the past years under the labels “Internet of Services ” and Web-service ecosystems. The paper develops a conceptual framework of actors and their roles in an open innovation system for a networked ecosystem of Web-services. The framework illustrates how open innovation can be implemented in a Web-service ecosystem to increase innovation performance. Simultaneously this research closes a conceptual gap in current reasoning about Web-service ecosystems that neglects innovation processes. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by two case studies of Web-service ecosystems in which the framework was used to identify gaps in the implementation of open innovation processes. Our research results identify specific functions to support innovation processes.

Business value networks offer new opportunities and chances for innovation-related cooperation. This paper introduces a new innovation process and framework which has been developed in the Texo use case 1 of the Theseus project 2 and which provides a comprehensive yet flexible approach to support multi-stakeholder innovation projects in business ecosystems. One major aim of the proposed framework is to involve communities into innovation projects as has been proposed within the idea of “open innovation”. Les réseaux business value offrent de nouvelles possibilités pour la coopération liée à l'innovation. Cet article présente un nouveau processus d'innovation ainsi qu'un cadre, développés pour le cas d'utilisation Texo 1 du projet Theseus 2, qui fournissent une approche complète et néanmoins flexible permettant de gérer les projets innovants à acteurs multiples dans les écosystèmes économiques. Un des objectifs principaux du cadre proposé est d'impliquer des communautés dans les projets innovants, comme cela a été suggéré par l'idée d ' «innovation ouverte». 1.

“Crowdsourcing ” is currently one of the most discussed key words within the open innovation community. The major question for both research and business is how to find and lever the enormous potential of the “collective brain”. This research in progress paper provides an approach for finding and leveraging innovations for an ERP Software company among its user base. This is done by designing an IT-supported ideas competition within the SAP UCC (University Competence Center) User Group to use the potentials of the collective intelligence of this crowd. The German SAP UCC User Group consists of about 60,000

Open Innovation is a phenomenon that has become increasingly important for both practice and theory over the last few years. The reasons are to be found in shorter innovation cycles, industrial research and development’s escalating costs as well as in the dearth of resources. Subsequently, the open source phenomenon has attracted innovation researchers and practitioners. The recent era of open innovation started when practitioners realised that companies that wished to commercialise both their own ideas as well as other firms ’ innovation should seek new ways to bring their in-house ideas to market. They need to deploy pathways outside their current businesses and should realise that the locus where knowledge is created does not necessarily always equal the locus of innovation- they need not both be found within the company. Experience has furthermore shown that neither the locus of innovation nor exploitation need lie within companies ’ own boundaries. However, emulation of the open innovation approach transforms a company’s solid boundaries into a semi-permeable membrane that enables innovation to move more easily between the external environment and the company’s internal innovation process. How far the open innovation approach is implemented in practice and whether there are identifiable patterns were the questions we investigated with our empirical study. Based on our own empirical database of 124 companies, we identified three core open innovation processes: (1) The outside-in process: Enriching a company’s own knowledge base through the integration of suppliers, customers, and external knowledge sourcing can increase a company’s innovativeness. (2) The inside-out process: The external exploitation of ideas in different markets, selling IP and multiplying technology by channelling ideas to the external environment. (3) The coupled process: Linking outside-in and inside-out by working in alliances with complementary companies during which give and take are crucial for success. Consequent thinking along the whole value chain and new business models enable this core process.

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In this paper we focus on understanding how the business environment influences strategy formation in organisations. This is relevant as there is little guidance on how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be better managed in the wake of dramatic economic changes such as caused by the dot-com bust. The aim of this study is to investigate how CIOs strategise while coping with the increasing ubiquity and complexity of ICT on one hand and hyper business pressures on the other. We were keen to gauge the shifts in tenor and tone of ICTs perceived value and the associated strategising process in the wake of the dotcom bust, with a view to inform the practical matter of managing ICT for value more effectively in future boom-bust cycles. Our findings suggest that recent changes in market conditions, as well as in the trust bestowed on technology as an agent for radical change, have had serious consequences for the perceptions of risk, strategy and ICT investment. The CIOs in our study described the dot-com boom-bust transition in terms of a shift from a higher-risk, top-down technology led approach to strategy which was centred on killer applications towards a lower-risk, bottom-up, organic approach which is aimed at providing open, business user driven enabling infrastructures. We suggest that such a shift from the ‘design ’ and ‘planning ’ school of strategy formation towards a more ‘environmental ’ and ‘configuration ’ one maybe necessary to manage ICT in the current context, where professionals need to increasingly accommodate multiple perspectives for discerning value and cultivate ‘value skills ’ to support the ongoing conversations.

ABSTRACT. Information economics provides important tools to articulate an economics analysis of the governance mechanisms for the generation and exploitation of localized technological knowledge. A variety of hybrid forms of knowledge governance ranging from coordinated transactions and constructed interactions to quasi-hierarchies can be found between the two unrealistic extremes of pure markets and pure organizations. The notion of localized technological knowledge as a highly heterogeneous dynamic process characterized by varying levels of appropriability, tacitness, unpredictability and indivisibility, which take the forms of complementarity and modularity, cumulability, compositeness, fungeability, helps to grasp the logic behind the variety of knowledge governance mechanisms at work. The analysis of transaction, agency and communication costs provides basic guidance to elaborate an integrated framework able to understand the matching between types of knowledge and modes and mechanisms of knowledge governance both in generation and exploitation.

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at Boston University, ETH Zürich,

Internet-based information sharing among different partners of the value chain enables collaborative business. Beyond, applying ambient technologies provides new opportunities for gathering information ubiquitously from various sources including physical objects, e.g. the movement of goods or cars, and virtual objects, i.e. the information trails created through customer interactions. Granting public access to this wealth of ubiquitously gathered information favors an unprecedented climate of innovation fostering the collaborative development of new value-added services by external developers and even customers. We call this Ambient Business. In this context, the paper reveals empirical evidence and an appraisal of the emergent trend towards Ambient Business. Further more we at hand point out how to ensure arbitrary access to information about physical products and virtual objects by introducing the concept of the Open Object Information Infrastructure (OOII). As result new and innovative knowledge intensive products and