2007/04/28 16:20 Discussion on Research Priorities

2007/04/28 16:20 Discussion on Research Priorities, Innovation in Services Conference, Berkeley, California, Friday, April 28, 2007, 10:30 a.m.

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

Discussion led by Henry Chesbrough

What are the research priorities?

Theory

• Oxford conference
• Serious debate as to whether there is innovation in services
• Intangible input, intangible output

At the talks over the past 2 days, there was research into innovation, and research into services, but not innovation in services

• Berkeley perspective:  opportunity in IT
• IT is a major input into innovation in services
• Issues in getting to scale, reproducibility

What needs to be done?  Research opportunities and priorities

[Responses]

Distinctions between innovations and inventions.

• Patents?

To the venn diagram of innovation, services, IT, add customer to reflect coproduction

Investments, because not a lot of venture capital in services, due to non-scalability

Vocabulary:  what do we say that is useful to business people

Ecosystem, including public sector, to deal with market failures when we talk about services

Metrics and measurements, to communicate value to management

Value recapture, since we talk of coproduction, but who will make money: which combines to business models

Metrics for quality, productivity

Diffusion models for services rather than products

Adoption process

Services for underdeveloped countries, different patterns

Capabilities, organizational, e.g. IT-enabled innovation services

Need more failure cases, as well as successes

Initialization

Healthcare

Internally-directed and externally-directed services

Practices: product people vs. services people in selling

Business schools would be better to be organized like medical schools, where you have research people and then clinicians

• If someone dies in clinical, it causes research to change
• In business, clinical has been outsourced to consultants, but this causes the breakdown in feedback loop
• e.g. principal agent theory, feedback loop isn't tight
• Then we would need teaching companies, like we have teaching hospitals

1969: SIAR: Scandinavian Institute of Administrative Research ... eventually led by Richard Normann

• Clinical research in management
• Richard Normann wrote the article in ASQ in 1971
• Successful in the 1970s, but then personal conflict
• Cultural school of management

Sustainable development

Intellectual property

Connection to RBV

Broaden information technology to technology