《《Principles of distributed innovation》.pdf

Karim R. Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta The Principles of Distributed Innovation “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” is known as Joy’s Law in the high-tech industry. Attributed to Sun Microsystems co- founder Bill Joy, this “law” emphasizes the essential knowledge problem that faces many enterprises today, that is, that in any given sphere of activity most of the per- tinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge for those charged with the innovation mission is to find ways to access that knowledge. The causal explanation of Joy’s Law is provided in the seminal work of econo- mists Friedrich Hayek and Eric von Hippel on the distributed and sticky nature of knowledge and innovation. Hayek1, in 1945, arguing for the importance of the market economy, emphasized that at the macro level knowledge is unevenly dis- tributed in society, and that centralized models for economic planning and coor- dination are prone to failure due to an inability to aggregate this distributed knowledge. Thirty years later, micro-level studies by von Hippel2 began to suggest that in many industries users were the originators of most novel innovations. Users’ dominant role in originating innovations reflects the fact that knowledge is not only distributed but also “sticky,” that is, relatively difficult and extremely cost- ly to move between locations, thus shifting the locus of innovation to where it is the stickiest.3 Users generate functionally novel innovations because they experi- ence novel needs well ahead of manufacturers, and manufacturers develop dimen- sion of merit innovations (that improve the performance of existing features) because they specialize in producing products for the mass market.4 Joy’s Law is exacerbated by the explosion of knowledge in most sci