Performing Openness: How Innovation Performance, Organization, Crowd and Platform interact in Open Innovation

The contribution of this paper is to propose that OI theory and practice need to consider how platforms perform relations of accountability and in doing so develop a further understanding of the sociomateriality of accountability. The paper develops a performative theory of openness. It shows how an influential and widespread theory of radically distributed organizational forms performs a global technology company. While recent streams of research (e.g. Lakhani, et al., 2013; Komberger, 2016) suggest that the context of distributed innovation shifts the unit of analysis of organization design from the individual firm to networks of actors organized on platforms, we find that the focal firm still remains a key conceptual parameter, which in turn makes it difficult to capture the suggested radicality of 'Open Innovation' (OI). The article uses empirical materials from a spiral case study of the design of, and implementation of OI. Drawing on performativity theory the paper studies how the achievements and values created in OI are measured in practice. Both digital platform designers/providers and an organization implementing OI are included in the context in order to analyze the case holistically. The ostensive definitions by OI scholarship explains causal models where OI elements predict value creation for the firm. Innovation intermediaries recognize both "OI" and "open collaborative innovation" since their digital designs are an ecology of devices that can enact and afford for both. The question of openness, is from a performative perspective, a matter of how peers, in different situations, mobilize OI elements on platforms, how these OI elements are bent, connected and allowed to do certain things but not other things We show, that in practice, the firm has to take into account the performance of the external crowd, and at times put resources into its training and education. In heterarchy distributed authority is assumed to be facilitated through lateral accountability, whereby the traditional principles of vertical authority no longer hold, but rather, managers and their team members can be accountable to multiple units, or teams, across the organization. Our case material shows that the ecology of devices and their performative struggles, afford for such distributed authority and lateral accountability. As the paper consolidates theory by Scott & Orlikowski (2012) the contribution adds to a growing body of studies that shows that apparatuses such as platforms are performative. It also investigates platform organization critically by discussing the limits of accountability in heterarchies