The
Management Department
Department
Seminar Series
ANNE-LAURE FAYARD
NYU’S TANDON ENGINEERING SCHOOL
Thursday,
October 11th
2018
Room LE
CLUB at
10:00 am
(4.00
p.m
in Singapore)
Theme: “Organizing
for Open Social Innovation: The Case of OpenIDEO”
Abstract: With increasing large-scale complex
social issues such as poverty, aging, and education facing our world,
cross-sector collaborations, in particular those involving the general public,
have been recognized as crucial to the generation of innovative solutions. Yet,
the success of such collaborations is elusive. Drawing on a 40-month
ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform for social
innovation, I examine how an organization created a diverse global community
and invited its members through sponsored challenges – to collaboratively
generate ideas for tackling complex social issues. Through inductive analysis,
I identify three practices by which the OpenIDEO team developed a participatory platform
for open social innovation: constructing a collaborative community, temporally
structuring interactions, and providing a space for collaborative idea
generation. I show how these organizing practices are crucial to successfully
engage individuals from multiple backgrounds across the globe to
collaboratively problem-solve complex social issues. My findings suggest that
open social innovation might be a productive form of collaborative organizing
for organizations aiming to experiment with new forms of organizational
responses to grand challenges. This work has implications for our understanding
of open social innovation, collaborative spaces for idea generation and the
practices supporting the engagement of diverse communities in tackling complex
social issues.
