Software Innovation Practices

• Dr. Alexander Richter
• Raffaele Fabio Ciriello

Fostering innovation is an essential task for companies, particularly in the dynamic and constantly changing software industry. The continuous acceleration of innovation rates forces ever more established companies to fundamentally rethink their understanding of innovation. Current trends such as intrapreneurship, open innovation, user-driven innovation and a new employee generation of digital natives are the main drivers of this fundamental change. In simple terms: Today, anybody could be an innovator anytime. This sets new challenges to organizations, as traditional innovation management concepts lose effect in a setting where ideas emerge from all sides.

We focus on two aspects of innovation practices in IT companies:

1. How can organizations support innovative employees in realizing ideas through the proper use of „innovation artifacts“? An innovation artifact is an underspecified representation of an envisaged solution that is used to communicate an idea across intersecting social worlds in a corporate environment. At first, an idea exists only as an abstract conception, an image in the mind of a person. Only when that image meets the realm of reality and becomes a tangible innovation artifact, it is possible to further advance an idea. All kinds of physical or digital artifacts, documents, diagrams, shared methods, visual representations, or prototypes can act as innovation artifacts.

2. We want to understand and improve: How do innovative ideas spread through the social network of an IT-company? This includes supporting employees’ communication, collaboration and networking activities on an operational level and creating an innovative organization on a strategic level.

• Ciriello, R.F., Richter, A., Schwabe, G., 2017. When Prototyping Meets Storytelling: Practices and Malpractices in Innovating Software Firms. Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• Ciriello, R.F., Richter, A., Schwabe, G., 2016. Designing an Idea Screening Framework for Employee-driven Innovation. Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Hawaii, USA.
• Ciriello, R.F., Richter, A., 2015. Idea Hubs as Nexus of Collective Creativity in Digital Innovation. Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Fort Worth, USA.
• Ciriello, R.F., Richter, A., Schwabe, G., 2015. PowerPoint Use and Misuse in Digital Innovation. Proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Münster, Germany.
• Ciriello, R.F., Aschoff, F.-R., Dolata, M., Richter, A., 2014. Communicating Ideas Purposefully - Toward a Design Theory of Innovation Artifacts, in: Proc. of the 22nd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). Tel Aviv, Israel.
• Ciriello, R., Hu, D., Schwabe, G., 2013. Identifying Patterns of Idea Diffusion in Innovator Networks, in: Proc. of the 34th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Milan, Italy.