An Ecological Approach to Understanding How Diversity affects Collaborative Innovation during Open Strategy Development

摘要

Open Participation is a still-evolving method for creating greater inclusion of various actors in a strategy making process. One approach to implementing open participation is using Open Innovation Challenge crowdsourcing platforms and practices to solicit novel strategic ideas from crowds of diverse stakeholders. However, industry analysts are identifying significant concerns about the effectiveness of this approach since the ideas generated are often not as innovative as desired. One potential source for these concerns may rest with how the diversity in the crowd is collaboratively engaged to help evolve innovative ideas. More specifically, since the extant literature is mixed about the relationship between diversity during collaboration and innovativeness, we addressed the question of whether different forms of diversity encountered in different ways and times would affect the innovative ideas generated. By integrating the management and conservation biology literature on the relationship between diversity and innovativeness, we developed a concept called "evolutionary diversity in open innovation" which is composed of thread-level and system-level diversity. From the management literature on diversity, we developed the concept of "thread-level diversity", i.e., diversity within the current collaboration of interacting participants within a thread affects whether an individual in that thread is able to generate an innovative idea. From the conservation biology literature, we developed the concept of a "system of collaboration" in which diversity both facilitates and sets limits on current collaborations to foster innovative ideas. Data from an open strategy-setting challenge offered by USAID indicated that both system-level and thread-level diversity forms help to explain the innovativeness of the idea. These findings have implications for the design of Open strategy practices, and for theorizing about the relationship between diversity and innovation in collaborative contexts.