Distributed Innovation in the Education of Future Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Information technologies have facilitated distributed and collaborative forms of innovation over the last decades. It has become increasingly easier to share information at low costs and to search for information with high accuracy, including matching people, projects, and resources. The training of entrepreneurs and managers should reflect these developments by incorporating the concepts associated with distributed innovation into the curricula of management schools. Open innovation (Chesbrough 2003, 2006) advocates business models that in-license and out-license technologies, knowledge, and ideas, while external sources play an equal role to internal sources in the organization, and the research and development departments in particular. The private-collective model of innovation (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003) explains the emergence of knowledge as a public good and recognizes that a distributed group of individuals (such as users) can contribute to a common goal and innovate, given that their benefits from the innovation exceed their private efforts. While the open innovation model focuses on firms and the private-collective innovation model on the broader market or institutional environment, these concepts share the conviction that knowledge can and will cross organizational boundaries at different stages of development towards a final product or service and that key contributions to an innovation may originate from outside the firm.