The IfSTO Team will take part in the 2015 annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Vancouver with two articles.

Prof. Dr. Christopher Lettl will present the paper "What drives positive attention on firm-hosted user design platforms? An empirical study of the LEGO DesignByMe platform." together with Prof. Morten Berg Jensen, PhD (Aarhus University) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Hienerth (WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management).

Abstract:
"Firm-hosted IT-based platforms that empower users to generate design ideas themselves offer unprecedented opportunities for focal producer firms. However, most platforms of this variety exhibit the following phenomenon: A large share of user-generated designs receive no attention at all, and only a small percentage of designs manage to surmount the attention hurdle. In this study, we examine the factors underlying this asymmetry. Based on attention theory and literature streams from open innovation and user communities, we argue that positive attention to designs is dependent on a few key variables that form the design profile (“attention attractors”) and on the professional nature of the user group to which an individual user-designer belongs. Due to the typical display processes on firm-hosted user design platforms, we distinguish between two levels of positive attention as outcomes: the initial attention hurdle (from no positive attention to one indication of positive attention) and the accumulated attention hurdle (more than one indication of positive attention). By analyzing 1,600 user-generated designs from a pioneering firm-hosted platform (LEGO’s DesignByMe), we find that inverted U-shaped functions apply to the design profile and that experts are better positioned than hobbyists to overcome the initial attention hurdle. We also find that the variety of information cues influencing initial positive attention is broader than that influencing accumulated positive attention. Our research therefore points to crucial aspects of such platforms for optimizing user design processes."
 
Dr. Christian Garaus contributes a paper with the working title "Fly on the wings of R&D: Path dependence, path creation, and path separation" which he will present together with Mag. Irina Koprax and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfgang H. Güttel (JKU Johannes Kepler Universität Linz).

Abstract:
"Literature concerned with the process of organizational path emergence is split in those approaches focusing on external triggers and those emphasizing the role of agents to shape a firm's trajectory. In order to integrate these contradicting views, we build on the results of a longitudinal qualitative single case study. Our findings shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors that lead to the creation and constitution of a new path. We followed the process of how the new organizational path of FACC - an aircraft composite component supplier - arose from the existing organizational path of FISCHER - a skiing company - in the 1980s. By analyzing the self-reinforcing processes that add to the divergence of the two paths over time and finally lead to their path separation, we contribute to recent calls to focus on self-reinforcing processes as the core of path dependence theory.  By introducing the concept of path separation, the findings also provide an alternative to the upcoming approaches of de-locking and path breaking, which were criticized to deny the path dependence' basic assumption that lock-in as a definite state."