The Management Department
Department Seminar Series
Hila Lifshitz-Assaf
NYU
Tuesday, March 13th 2018
Room N231 at 10:00 am (5.00 p.m in Singapore)
Theme: “Navigating Through the Fog of Self-Organizing for Accelerated Innovation:
A Study of Makeathons’ Product Development Process”
A Study of Makeathons’ Product Development Process”
Abstract: “The literature is extensive on “the innovation journey” of new product development processes in traditional forms of organizing that span months or years. Recently, hackathons and makeathons suggest accelerating the innovation process, the “journey,” into a “sprint” of only a few days. Moreover, this accelerated process is self-organized, absent of structure or guidance. The existing innovation literature would expect these ambiguity-enhancing conditions to result in failure to produce new working products. Yet this process often leads to working, innovative products. To investigate this puzzle, we closely study the product development process of 13 projects across two assistive technology makeathons. We find divergent reactions to these conditions that play a critical role in enabling successful development of working products for individuals with disabilities under this extremely limited time frame or not. Some projects navigated through the fog of self-organizing for innovation by “setting a course,” reducing ambiguity, while other projects were “tacking” through the fog, sustaining the self-organizing process and ambiguity. From a temporal perspective, the same time frame was interpreted very differently: the course setting projects compressed time whereas the tacking projects deepened time, perceiving this time frame to be discontinuous to their past and future ones. Only tacking projects were able to produce functioning new products by the end of the makeathon. This study contributes to theories on innovation processes, self-organizing, and temporality."
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