The Organizational Design Community featured Professor Christopher Lettl, Director of the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, for a webinar titled “Designing Organizations for User Innovation” on Monday, December 9, 2013 at 7.00 PM (CET). The springboard for this webinar is the article “Designing Organizations for User Innovation” by Peter Keinz, Christoph Hienerth, and Christopher Lettl, published in the Journal of Organization Design.
You can find the abstract, a short video introduction, and full text article here.

There is increasing consensus among practitioners and academics alike that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from producer-centered and internal innovation processes toward user-centered and open innovation processes. This paradigm shift induces significant changes to the design of organizations. Even though the research field of user innovation has been developing over a period of more than four decades, there have been only occasional intersections with the research field of organizational design. In this article, we aim to provide an integrated perspective of the two fields. We first identify major user innovation strategies. We then derive the implications for each user innovation strategy on key dimensions of organizational design.

Participants included scholars from various education institutions such as Stanford University or Duke University and executives from various industries including for example NASA.