Many firms rely on their suppliers as a major source of innovation, and they harness the innovation potential of their supplier base by organizing procurement (or innovation) contests. Extant research on contests has mostly assumed that suppliers compete on even grounds in a procurement contest....

Organizations engage in search when they innovate. Search is typically performed by multiple group members who are knowledgeable about parts of the search problem, but rarely understand all decision variables. Search theory has shown that team members therefore need to coordinate their work....

This paper introduces an approach to identify styles in product designs. We first built a theoretical foundation on what a style is and how designs are configured into styles. On this basis we executed a graph-clustering algorithm to identify styles in a population of design patents filed in the...

Problem Definition: Is teamwork better than working alone for creating breakthrough inventions? We challenge the widely accepted affirmative answer to this question.Academic/Practical Relevance: Extant research has consistently found that lone inventors significantly underperform teams in...