Information Technology Reference
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and network-centric practices. As firms adapt to more openness, boundaries blur
between intra- and inter-organizational teams. Challenges surface regarding how to
manage new relationships within the firm as well as those with customers, suppliers,
and even competitors involved in innovation. The authors characterize closed and
more open innovation models and compare and contrast factors facilitating the use
of each of the models. They explore the role of the team, a pivotal force spearhead-
ing innovation, and the role of IT in supporting both teams and teamwork. While
IT makes it possible to structure, facilitate, and manage open innovation, increasing
demand for alternative and more adaptive innovation models will spur an increased
demand for new forms of technology that can make it all possible. Through in-depth
case study analysis and an extensive review of the literature, the authors examine the
key factors that are likely to shape innovation success in the future. The chapter ends
with several suggestions for future research on this topic.
In Chapter 8, Priya Nambisan focuses on the role of online health information
technologies in facilitating collaborative service innovation in the healthcare sector.
In the past few years, consumer participation in health care has increased signifi-
cantly with the ready availability of medical information on health web sites and
the ability to interact in disease-focused online health communities. Importantly,
such consumer participation also involves creating new knowledge based on con-
sumers' direct experiences with particular diseases and treatments - new knowledge
that could lead to new or improved services. Such consumer-driven service inno-
vation has assumed critical importance as most healthcare organizations come
under considerable pressure to enhance the value they offer to their consumers
(or patients). The author argues that an important task for value-driven health-
care organizations is to facilitate consumer-driven service innovation in health
care through appropriate use of online health information technologies. The author
adopts a knowledge creation perspective and proposes a theoretical framework
that explains how health web sites and online health communities together can
facilitate creation of innovative service ideas through knowledge socialization,
combination, externalization, and internalization. Implications for future research
on the role of IT in service innovation in health care are discussed. The impli-
cations for strategies and practices adopted by healthcare organizations are also
examined.
In Chapter 9, Ikenna S. Uzuegbunam focuses on IT-based virtual ties that assume
importance in the development of complex product systems (CoPS). Specifically,
the author examines the value of “virtual embeddedness” in the context of firms
that develop CoPS. The development of CoPS usually involves many firms work-
ing together. Firms may choose to maintain arm's length relationships with their
partners. But often they must coordinate product development through more embed-
ded interactions because of the intricate nature of systems development in CoPS.
Although embeddedness can be socially constructed, the rise of Internet and digital
technologies have given way to the emergence of a new form of embeddedness -
virtual embeddedness, which provides CoPS firms with unprecedented opportuni-
ties for learning economies in the process of product development. Based on a new
typology of virtual embeddedness in organizational space, the author argues that
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