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In 2008 Joe Justice saw the announcement for the Progressive Insurance X Prize—a $10 million prize aimed at the (im)possibility to build a 100 miles per gallon (mpg) car to road-legal safety specifications. Joe persuaded his wife to use their college grad savings of $5,000 to pay the registration fee. He started the work alone but blogged about what he was doing and what he was learning. Through social networking tools like Facebook and WordPress bloggers who shared his interest learned about his project. Some of these people joined Joe in his endeavor to tackle the challenge. Only three months later, Wikispeed had been formed. It counted 44 members in four countries, and had a functioning prototype which was entered in the X Prize competition. In 2010 they came in 10th in the mainstream class, outrunning more than one hundred other cars from well-funded companies and universities around the world. Following the press reaction to the success of team Wikispeed in 2011 they were invited to showcase their concept car at the Detroit auto show, the largest motor show in the world. Their car, the SGT01, was put on display in Cobo Hall right next to Ford and Chevrolet. Wikispeed was contacted by more than a hundred people who were interested in joining the team as well as in ordering the prototype. By 2013, more than five hundred people had joined team Wikispeed. They had also sold nine prototypes. The immediate issue of the case study is the decision whether the team should use a pair of existing axles, cut and weld them together to the right length for the next iteration of their prototype or develop their own pair of axles from scratch. More fundamentally, this case study looks at the way team Wikispeed used tools from the world of software development like modularity, which they call object-oriented architecture, scrum, and extreme manufacturing (XM) to organize their innovation efforts.

Depending on the scope of the course, the following teaching objectives can be emphasized: to discuss ways of how to coordinate product development efforts in the absence of traditional hierarchies; to understand the conditions when distributed innovation processes can be used in industries with physical products; to understand the key elements of agile development: modularity, scrum, and extreme manufacturing; to examine the principles and potential limitations of agile development for hardware development; to understand the roadblocks to agile product development in large established organizations.

Are you familiar with one of the following situations? You have developed this great strategy for your company, your product, or your department but for some reason, it does not get heard. You have a good team, but there are some who just do not seem to join forces and leave you out in the rain when the situation calls for action. There is your boss, a nice guy, but somehow he seems immune to all your efforts of convincing him of this new idea that you want to implement. Situations like this are common for managers on all levels. They make us feel powerless. They make us feel struck in the inertia of our organizations. They might make us see ourselves as victims of the circumstances we are operating in. When trapped in situations like this, we start blaming others for their incompetence or our company for its laziness or complacency. Situations like this tell us about the influence that we have on others and their influence on us: This is what this book is all about.

This paper summarizes the findings from a series of interviews between October 2012 & February 2013 with people at New Zealand companies that were founded in order to commercialize an innovation internationally. The interviews focused on the steps the companies had taken to commercialize their innovation on the international market and the issues they had faced in the process.

We analyze incidence and evolution of patent thickets. The paper provides a modeling framework showing how competition for patent portfolios, complementarity of patented technologies and hold-up affect patenting. Predictions are that technological opportunity reduces patenting in complex technologies, while increasing patenting in discrete technologies. Competition has the opposite effects. The predictions are tested using European patent data in a panel with 2,074 patenting firms in thirty technology areas over fifteen years. A new measure of technological complexity is applied. GMM estimation results confirm the predictions of our preferred model. Patent thickets are found in nine out of thirty technology areas.

© 2013 The Editorial Board of The Journal of Industrial Economics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Insbesondere Sozialkompetenz und personale Kompetenz zeichnen erfolgreiche Führungspersönlichkeiten aus. Dieses Buch unterstützt sowohl junge als auch erfahrene Führungskräfte in der Analyse ihrer eigenen Motive, Werte, Emotionen und Persönlichkeitseigenschaften sowie deren Wirkung auf den Führungserfolg. Zielsetzung ist es, einen authentischen Führungsstil zu entwickeln und eigene Stärken zu erkennen und auszubauen. Best-Practice Beispiele und Fragen zur Selbstreflexion unterstützen den Transfer der Inhalte in den Unternehmensalltag.