Interactions for Innovation: Firms, Communities, and Crowds.

Firms benefit when they leverage the innovative efforts of others. Today, firms are leveraging communities of developers, users, accessory providers, and others to generate ideas, solve innovation problems, select among various potential solutions, and accomplish other functions that more traditionally have been performed within the boundaries of the firm. This multi-divisional paper symposium seeks to bring together a set of four diverse yet related papers that address questions that firms are confronting as they engage with external communities and crowds to innovate and accomplish some of their most critical tasks. The symposium gathers a group of research scholars approaching this topic from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. Two of the papers present theoretical approaches and two offer empirical research spanning multiple methods. While each paper addresses a different set of questions, together they are interested in: 1) new forms of interactions between firms and external communities, 2) these interactions in the context of innovation and problem solving, and 3) both strategic and organizational perspectives. By presenting and discussing these papers together, and (consistent with the spirit of the papers) actively engaging symposium participants in the discussion, we can examine this phenomenon through a holistic integrated approach and also identify new potential directions for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]