A Digital Platform connecting Academia and Small Businesses: An opportunity for Knowledge Management Experiments

Digital transformation is one of the biggest phenomena of this decade. One enabler of this revolution was cloud computing. Today, software engineers can deliver software as a service (SaaS), which is accessible to users through the Internet. Slack, Shopify, and Dropbox are examples of successful SaaS. We are experiencing an emergence of numerous small web applications with easy-to-use features for specific domains such as project management, accounting, resources management, customer relationships, and so forth. Thus, SaaS has been recognised as particularly well suited for the digital journey of small enterprises. However, surveys conducted by governmental agencies reveal a low adoption rate of SaaS by small enterprises in traditional sectors such as construction, services, and dealership. Previous studies have highlighted a lack of top management support, a weak relative advantage perceived, and a lack of knowledge as the key reasons for this low level of adoption. Whilst academic research defines these critical factors, it has not found potential solutions to mitigate them. Thus, this thesis presents two exploratory studies to enhance the adoption of digital practices by small traditional enterprises (STEs). A first study explored the value of leading collaborative projects between students and STEs about the assessment of SaaS solutions. A secondary objective of this initiative was the design of a platform acting as an open innovation platform. A three-year study allowed the completion of thirty-nine projects and the testing of two different platform designs. The feedback from students demonstrated the value of a well-structured platform composed of different management models for each project phase. Furthermore, 67 per cent of the STEs involved on the platform acknowledged the value of such collaborative projects. However, the collaborations did not improve top management support, and projects tended to stagnate because of various organisational factors. A second study, using a mixed-methods research design, was performed to explore the relations amongst the organisational factors acting as enablers and barriers to the digitalisation of STEs. The objective was to improve understanding of TSEs' situation and devise a proposition to enhance top management support. An academic contribution of this study was the design and application of a conceptual framework combining organisational factors from the literature on dynamic capabilities, organisational inertia, and intellectual capital. The combination of the qualitative observations and quantitative results highlighted the importance of the sensing and leadership capabilities for STE directors. They also revealed the mediator effect of the relational capability on the development of these latter. Therefore, this thesis makes important contributions to the literature on open innovation by defining a new field for leading knowledge management experiments. It also contributes to develop a comprehensive overview of the organisational factors affecting STEs' adoption. A further major contribution is the potential value of the digital platform to innovate the services of practitioners, such as governmental agencies and consultants, that support STEs on their digital transformation journey. In conclusion, this research is valuable in opening the discussion about potential innovations that might reshape the relationship academia-business.

From Seminar to Lecture to MOOC: Scripting and Orchestration at Scale

Stian Haklev

This dissertation investigates the design of large online courses from the pedagogical perspective of knowledge communities. Much of the learning sciences literature has concerned itself with groups of up to 20-30 students, but in universities, courses of several hundred to more than a thousand students are common. At the same time, new models for life-long and informal learning, such as Massive Open Online Courses, are emerging. Amidst this growing enthusiasm for innovation around technology and design in teaching, there is a need for theoretically grounded innovations and rigorous research around practical models that support new approaches to learning. One recent model, known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), engages students in the co-construction of a community knowledge base, with a commonly held understanding of the collective nature of their learning, and then provides a sequence of scaffolded inquiry activities where students make use of the knowledge base as a resource. Inspired by this approach to designing courses, the research began with a redesign of an in-service teacher education course, which increased in size from 25 to 75 students. This redesign was carefully analyzed, and design principles extracted. The second step was the design of a Massive Open Online Course for several thousand in-service teachers on technology and inquiry, in collaboration with an affiliated secondary school. A number of innovative design ideas were necessary to accommodate the large number of users, the much larger diversity in terms of background, interest, and engagement among MOOC learners, and the opportunities provided by the platform. The resulting design encompasses a 6- week long curriculum script, and a number of overlapping micro-scripts supported by a custom- written platform that integrated with the EdX platform in a seamless manner. This thesis presents the course structure, including connection to disciplinary principles, its affordances for community and collaboration and its support of individual differentiated learning and collective epistemology. It offers design principles for scripting and orchestrating collective inquiry designs for MOOCS and higher education courses.

University of Toronto2016

Institutions and Incentives in Knowledge Production and Diffusion: From Science to Innovation

Charles Chadi Ayoubi

This thesis presents four essays providing novel empirical and theoretical insights on the incentives and institutional structures that favor knowledge production and diffusion. The first two studies analyze these processes in the realm of scientific research, while the last two essays evaluate broader applications with vast social welfare implications. The first essay (chapter 2) of this dissertation, in collaboration with Michele Pezzoni and Fabiana Visentin, exploits a dataset on all applicants to a prestigious Swiss grant to explore a central process in academic life: the application for funds. The results suggest that scientists applying to a grant significantly increase their publicationsâ quality and quantity, learn more, and extend their collaboration network. Beyond the effect of applying, receiving the research funds increases the probability of co-authoring with co-applicants, but it does not have any additional effect on other scientific outcomes. These results justified the title of the chapter since, as it is the case in the Olympics, in research grants, âthe important thing is not to win, it is to take part.â The second essay (chapter 3), also in collaboration with Michele Pezzoni and Fabiana Visentin, uses the same empirical context to explore the determinants of knowledge flows among collaborating scientists. The chapter proposes a novel methodology based on journal references to track knowledge flows among researchers working together. The results suggest that geographical distance does not significantly affect the knowledge flows between team members, but the cognitive distance separating two members does. More specifically, there is an inverted U-curve effect of cognitive distance on the learning among team members: the higher the distance between two scientists in terms of subjects studied, the more they exchange knowledge, up to the point when the distance becomes detrimental because they have too little common ground to communicate. The third essay (chapter 4), in collaboration with Boris Thurm, goes beyond the exploration of the determinants for scientistsâ knowledge production and diffusion to delve into the incentives of all individuals to exchange knowledge. The chapter has two major contributions. First, it acts as a literature review of the empirical evidence on non-financial incentives for knowledge diffusion, such as social recognition, career prospects, and moral considerations. Second, the chapter proposes a simple economic model with heterogeneous agents holding both selfish and moral motives to derive some novel policy implications. The last essay (chapter 5), in collaboration with Dominique Foray, delves into a specific case of knowledge diffusion, the integration of machine learning technologies in healthcare. The analysis suggests that machine learning has the potential for spurring innovation in healthcare but faces several institutional levers. Collecting quantitative data on patents and publications, and qualitative data on hospitals, the results show that machine learning affects healthcare in different ways than older information and communication technologies. The apparition of new business models encourages tech giants to enter the healthcare sector. These patterns have the potential to increase social welfare by reducing externalities in terms of innovation complementarities, but they pose new challenges such as competition policy and human capital formation.

EPFL2020

Creative-Learning Innovation Cycle - CLIC

Vincent Nassar

WHY do certain leaders’ management of organizational resources encourage creative people engaged in New Product Development (NPD) to achieve high performance, on time, while other leaders’ practices foster frustration and delays? In this research project I attempt to understand the WHY and HOW of leaders’ management of organizational resources in the context of Csikszentmihalyi’s phenomenon of Flow. Flow is most likely to occur when people perceive a balance between the challenge of a situation and their professional abilities to deal with the challenge. “Being in the flow” increases peoples’ focus and attention, the latter being a prerequisite for high creativity, on the tasks and problems at hand and boosts their commitment to deliver their projects on time. Following the above-mentioned reasoning, I assume that if leaders manage organizational resources to create an optimal balance between challenging situations and the skills of their creative people, these managerial practices would likely result in enhancing the output of the NPD process, and decreasing the delays, or, in other words, accelerating the NPD cycle. To explore this research question, first, I developed a conceptual model called CLIC: “Creative-Learning Innovation Cycle”. The CLIC is characterized by its uniqueness in highlighting the impact of the feedback received from the commercialization process on the managerial practices of leadership for creativity of the components of the work environment. The work environment directly affects the state of flow of creative people, and, subsequently, both the quality and speed of their learning and creativity processes. The CLIC combines Sanchez’s model of an organization’s learning process, Amabile’s componential theory of creativity, and, Csikszentmihalyi and Bakker’s State of Flow concept. Second, I tested the CLIC through two main research methods. I conducted exploratory and action research with a successful global innovation manager and two companies wrestling to accelerate their NPD processes in a changing work environment. The two companies deal with components and technological innovations. They differ in size, continent and products. Both companies innovate products related to health issues in an industry where high regulatory requirements are imposed. I also conducted a lab experiment in which 27 Masters students (18 males, 9 females) who were enrolled in an “Innovation Management” course voluntarily participated. The mean age was 23.5 years. The academic language was English. The exploration of the CLIC model in the course of conducting the comparative studies among the successful global innovation manager, the two companies, and the results of the lab experiment led to the emergence of a new theory about flow in work situations and organizational resources management. The theory defines and prioritizes five organizational resources that have to be managed during the NPD stages to let creative people experience a “state of flow” during their work. The foundation of the theory is that, following the impacts of feedback received from the external world, leaders’ managerial practices of organizational resources affect the state of flow of the people involved in the NPD process in an inverted U shape. Based on this inverted U shape and, as per the CLIC model, this theory prioritized the following five organizational resources to manage flow during the NPD stages: v A. Planning stage 1. Involving creative people in early market feedback during the planning stage would enhance their work absorption and their attention on the problems they are facing. B. Development stage 2. Putting creative people in direct communication with all the people who interact with the product and bring meaning to it, 3. Extending on a rational basis the time lines proposed by creative people, 4. And integrating the customer in the NPD process, mainly during testing phases, are likely to positively influence the intrinsic motivation of the creative people during the development stage. Hence, creative people would be committed to reach their goals by deploying their expertise to its utmost level without counting their working hours. C. Commercialization stage 5. Allow creative people to directly solicit and experience feedback from the VOC during the commercialization stage. This could constitute an enriching and joyful experience for them. In sum, the prioritization of these organizational resources during the NPD stages might constitute a beneficial roadmap to the managerial practices that should be used by leaders. The application of this theory by the leaders would regulate the balance between a challenging situation and the skills of the creative people, so the latter might be in the “state of flow”. Probable effects may be a boosted and an accelerated outcome of the NPD process, leading the organization to thrive in this seldom static world. Some leaders knew WHAT to do and HOW to enhance the creativity of their collaborators. However the understanding of the WHY that drives these managerial practices needed additional elucidation. This research project attempted to provide a potential answer to “WHY” leaders’ practices might enhance or hinder their collaborators’ state of flow; and, in finding the answer, it was thought that leaders and their collaborators may simultaneously enjoy work and savor life.

EPFL2012