This section, to mark 50 years since the founding of SDA Bocconi, presents a selection of the ideas advanced by faculty members representing seminal work in management research: relevance, concreteness, scientific rigor, and impact on the community are the four pillars underpinning the path proposed here. The SDA Insight initiative is part of the broader project, “50 Years of Ideas.”
Knowledge is the primary source of competitive advantage in the modern-day economy: this is the view of any number of academics over the past few decades. And we know this to be true when we look at both the digital revolution that is currently underway, which allows us to share knowledge more rapidly and extensively, and the growing complexity of the market environment, which means we need more and more information to reduce uncertainty.
This context (which we quite rightly call a “knowledge society”) presents a radical break from the past: the increasingly global space that companies move in gives rise to new forms knowledge socialization and new possibilities to accrue learning outcomes.
Back in 2000, my study entitled “Communities of Creation: Managing Distributed Innovation in Turbulent Markets” (published in the California Management Review (and awarded the journal’s best paper for that year) underscored the fact that in the network economy, companies can no longer produce and manage knowledge on their own. Instead they face a growing need to cooperate with partners, suppliers, and customers within an ever-expanding ecosystem, activating individual actors based on contingent knowledge requirements.
Mine was one of the first studies to take a deep dive into the topic of knowledge production ecosystems that could leverage digital connections. But this brings up the issue of how to deal with the intellectual property rights on the output of a collective creation process. In this context, the company takes on the role of the orchestrator of a complex system of knowledge co-creation. These considerations later led to a research stream on open innovation and customer engagement in new product/service development, a pathway that was extensively explored beginning in the early 2000s as network technologies were becoming consolidated.
This new creativity governance mechanism, dubbed a “community of creation,” is a permeable system that calls on the company to rethink its borders, gradually blurring the boundaries separating it from its customers, suppliers, and competitors. In fact, each of these groups that the company interacts with has specialized knowledge to integrate into the knowledge creation processes. As a result, innovation takes place outside the individual organization, and shifts toward a community of individuals and companies that work together to create shared intellectual property. Each member of the community can then access and contribute to this knowledge, respecting a clear system for managing intellectual property rights.
All this means that the community of creation allows companies to innovate in a complex environment, maintaining a high level of variety and internal flexibility, and superseding traditional hierarchical governance mechanisms embodied in R&D departments. These mechanisms, which are closed by definition, on the one hand do enable companies to maintain total control over the development process, but on the other prevent them from tapping into the creativity, diversity, and agility of their partners. In a world where innovation and change are the rules of the game, acting individually is no longer the way to play: winning takes a team effort, and the field of play is knowledge socialization to gain flexibility and clinch a competitive advantage.
In today’s sharing economy, crowdsourcing is steadily gaining ground, and it’s become standard practice for companies to activate actors outside their perimeter to fulfill their innovation needs. My paper contributed to advancing managerial practices that are increasingly oriented toward collaboration among different actors and innovation as an open process.
