This book introduces readers to modern organizational concepts and their consequences for working people in the digital economy. Decentralization, networking, the merging of the physical and virtual worlds, and the ever-increasing interaction of human and artificial intelligence are (re) shaping organization and leadership. Digital technologies are changing the coordination of internal and external organizational processes and require new competencies. The aim of the book is to illustrate these interrelationships in a theoretically sound and practical manner. The book is intended for students of business management and practicing business managers alike.

An increasingly popular form of open innovation in the digital age is ‘making,’ where users innovate across multiple disciplines and make products that meet their needs, using mechanical, electronic, and digital components. These users have at their disposal, a wide solution space for innovation through various modular toolkits enabled by digital-age technologies. This study explores and outlines how these users simplify this wide solution space to innovate and make tangible products. Following a modularity theory perspective, it draws on case studies of users and their innovations: (1) Users with initial prototype product designs based on the Internet of things (IoT) from a maker event and (2) users with established product designs from the online community platform Thingiverse. The studies found that users reused the design in the form of existing off-the-shelf products and utilized digital fabrication and low-cost electronics hardware as a ‘glue’ to create physical and informational interfaces wherever needed, enabling bottom-up modularity. They iteratively refined their innovations, gradually replacing re-used designs with own integrated designs, reducing modularity, and reducing wastage. The study contributes to open innovation and modularity with implications on the design of products and toolkits enabled by the digital age.

Purpose Increasing demographic diversity within societies and workforces causes challenges with regard to the innovation performance of companies. By definition, innovation communities nowadays are composed of members with diverse function background and age diversity. The challenging question is how to manage diverse corporate innovation communities. The purpose of this paper is to find out which factors determine the success of corporate innovation communities in times of demographic shifts. Design/methodology/approach The empirical field to answer the research question are three corporate innovation communities in companies of different industries and size. Multiple case study methodology is applied to gather and analyse the data. Findings The study presents an empirically derived framework to structure success factors of diverse corporate innovation communities chronologically in the three phases of preparation, execution and finalization of a community work process. The success factors are described in detail and finally a time sequential guideline for those who are responsible for community management in demographic change is provided. Research limitations/implications It is contributed to the literature on innovation communities and it is shown that innovation communities are not only an instrument to solve innovation tasks but are also a promising means to tackle other challenges of recent demographic changes. As limitation must be considered, that the analysed innovation communities only received corporate support for a short period of time and the supporting organizations operate in manufacturing industries in Germany only. Practical implications The paper highlights that managers need to be aware that diversity in corporate innovation communities per se does not lead to success. Furthermore, a guideline of success factors for managers of diverse corporate innovation communities is presented which highlights important aspects that managers need to consider during the community work process. Social implications Due to demographic shifts in Germany and other European countries, societies in general and workforces in particular have modified. Most pervasive shifts take place with regard to age structures and diversity. Implications how manager could handle diversity successfully are therefore of high relevance for societies. Originality/value This study provides a theoretical understanding of the implications of organizational and age diversity on corporate innovation community management. Extant authors have already focussed on success factors in innovation communities and diverse settings isolated, but have not merged these issues.

Dieses Lehrbuch vermittelt in komprimierter Form die wesentlichen Inhalte des Standardwerkes“ Interaktive Wertschöpfung“ von Ralf Reichwald und Frank Piller. Unternehmerische Wertschöpfung findet heute zunehmend nicht mehr sequentiell im Sinne einer klassischen Wertschöpfungskette statt, sondern interaktiv und iterativ zwischen einem fokalen Unternehmen und externen Mitwirkenden. Vor allem Kunden und Nutzer werden selbst aktiv (Co-Creation). Dies gilt für die Forschung und Entwicklung neuer Produkte und Dienstleistungen (Open Innovation) genauso wie für operative Wertschöpfungsprozesse (Mass Customization). Die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Unternehmen und Externen wird dabei in vielen Fällen anders organisiert. Statt Aufgaben zu verteilen bzw. anzuweisen, reagieren die Beitragenden auf einen offenen Aufruf zur Mitwirkung und selektieren selbst, wann und wie sie sich beteiligen (Crowdsourcing). Die erweiterte Co-Autorenschaft mit Frank Piller, Kathrin Möslein, Christoph Ihl und Ralf Reichwald bildet für die Weiterentwicklung dieses Buches eine neue konzeptionelle Basis.

In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of boundary objects in the process of virtual collaboration. Virtual collaboration is an interactive act that interconnects jointly and voluntarily collaborating individuals that are electronically linked. We regard them as virtual communities (VCs). VCs are characterised by its aim to conduce to shared understanding through an effective use of boundary objects. Artefacts that serve two or more VC members to establish collaboration are seen as boundary objects. The study at hand uses the socio-technical systems theory as a framework to categorise extant research. It draws on the concept of Carlile’s three tiers of boundary objects (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) to further sub-categorise scholarly publications between 2004 and 2014. This leads to an in-depth analysis on the use of boundary objects, its effect on the collaboration process as well as a first research agenda for subsequent endeavours in the field of boundary objects and virtual collaboration._x000D_ Keywords: Boundary objects, virtual collaboration, knowledge management, socio-technical systems theory

Flexible production technologies like 3D printing give users a large solution space to innovate and design. To harness the full potential of these technologies, it is imperative to provide toolkits, with structured and simplified solution space that meets the needs of users with low iolvement. This pa-per explores the manner in which the solution space of 3D printing toolkits is simplified for non-expert users. Toolkit solution space was analysed in 68 toolkits with two perspectives of modularity: 1) Mod-ularity-in-use and 2) Modularity-in-design. First, the solution spaces were categorized in a 2x2 matrix by using the perspective of modularity-in-use, i.e. design questions and design options they offer to users. Second, this categorization and the perspective of modularity-in-design were used to identify mechanisms that simplify toolkit solution spaces. Solution space can be simplified for non-expert users by 1) offering iterative design questions with known design options, 2) using generative algorithms, 3) reusing designs and components from other users and 4) offering ‘meta-toolkits’ for users to create their own toolkits. The meta-toolkits democratize toolkit creation, and simplify solution space for non-expert users, as they design innovative and customizable products, together with expert users, without losing design flexibility.

Within communities knowledge is shared regularly. Although today’s communities can rely on sophisticated collaboration technologies, the sharing of knowledge remains impeded by different social mechanisms. Removing impediments that originate from different understandings between knowledge exchanging individuals has been called boundary management by Carlile. Boundary management can be supported by the use of specific objects. We iestigate collaboration technology as shared object within an organizational knowledge community. In this sense, collaboration technology is conceived as a means to support the spanning of knowledge boundaries. This researchin-progress proposes a design science research (DSR) approach. It aims for designing and evaluating IT-based shared objects which effectively lower boundaries of knowledge sharing. First empirical findings suggest that a collaboration technology that offers a shared space for communication and exchange can provide fruitful support in contexts where syntactic and semantic boundaries prevail. Hence, the design task for CT as shared object in organizational knowledge communities should focus on lowering syntactic and semantic knowledge boundaries.

A key issue in community research is the set of motivations stimulating individuals to participate and contribute voluntarily to communities. This article examines the motivations of employees, who are traditionally not iolved in the innovation process, to (not) participate in organizational innovation communities. Building on an in-depth single case study, we aim to answer the following research questions: (1) What motivates participants of organizational innovation communities to participate? and (2) What motivates nonparticipants of organizational innovation communities to not participate? We find and categorize multiple factors that motivate non-research and development employees to participate and to not participate. Moreover, we find an overlap as well as differences in the set of motivations of participants and nonparticipants. With nonparticipants normally being a large but barely explicitly recognized group, we argue that the found deviations contribute to the understanding of motivations in the context of organizational innovation communities and allow for direct design implications for innovation managers.