Innovation and Creativity in Organizations

Componential Theory of Organizational Creativity and Innovation

The most important premise of this theory is that work environments have an impact on creativity by affecting components that contribute to creativity, which represent a basic source for organizational innovation (Amabile, 1997). There are three major components contributing to individual or small team creativity: expertise, creative-thinking skill, and intrinsic motivation. In contrast, the main components of the wider work environment that influence employee creativity are organizational motivation to innovate, resources (including finances, time availability, and personnel resources), and managerial practices, such as enabling challenging work and supervisory encouragement (Amabile; Amabile & Conti, 1999). This model has received some empirical support in terms of the role of its motivation component as a psychological mechanism underlying influences from the work environment on employees’ creativity, though the other components have not received as much research attention as the motivation component (Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham 2004; Zhou & Shalley, 2010).

Interactionist Perspective of Organizational Creativity

The interactionist perspective of organizational creativity (Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993) stresses that creativity is a complex interaction between the individual and his or her work situation at different levels of organization. At the individual level, individual creativity is the result of antecedent conditions (e.g., biographical variables), cognitive style and ability (e.g., divergent thinking), personality (e.g., self-esteem), relevant knowledge, motivation, social influences (e.g., rewards), and contextual influences (e.g., physical environment). At the team level, creativity is a consequence of individual creative behavior, the interaction between the group members (e.g., group composition), group characteristics (e.g., norms, size), team processes, and contextual influences (e.g., organizational culture, reward systems). At the organizational level, innovation is a function of both individual and group creativity (Woodman et al.). This has been one of the most frequently used conceptual frameworks in emphasizing the interactions between the contextual and individual factors that might enhance or inhibit creativity at work (Shalley, Gilson, & Blum, 2009; Yuan & Woodman, 2010; Zhou & Shalley, 2010).

Model of Individual Creative Action

Ford (1996) argued that employees have to consider between two competing options—to be creative or to undertake merely routine, habitual actions. According to this framework, there are three groups of factors that might influence this decision: sensemaking processes, motivation, and knowledge and skills. Individual creative action is thus argued to be a result of the joint influence of these factors; in the case of any of them being lacking, an individual would not engage in creative action. The motivation to initiate a creative or habitual action is further determined by goals, receptivity beliefs (e.g., expectations that creativity is valued—creative actions are rewarded), capability beliefs (e.g., expectations that one is capable of being creative or confident in creative ability), and emotions (e.g., interest and anger as facilitators of creativity, whereas anxiety constrains creativity). Although this model has not attracted as much research attention as the componential or interactionist frameworks have, perhaps partly because the model is complex and hence it may be challenging to empirically test it as a whole, portions of it have received some empirical support over more recent years (e.g., Janssen, 2005; Unsworth & Clegg, 2010).

Theorizing on Cultural Differences and Creativity

The question of whether there are differences in creativity in different cultures has significant implications for management practice, international business, and economic development (Morris & Leung, 2010; Zhou & Su, 2010). However, theorizing and research in this regard have lagged behind practical needs. This significant research-practice gap has led to repeated calls for greater research attention on cultural differences and creativity (Anderson et al., 2004; Shalley et al., 2004; Zhou & Shalley, 2003), especially on similarities and differences in creativity between the East and the West (Morris & Leung).

Regarding individuals’ creativity, theorizing has focused on cultural differences in individual creativity, such as how task and social contexts moderate the relation between individuals’ cultural values (e.g., individualism/collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) and creativity (Erez & Nouri, 2010); how culture moderates influences of leaders, supervisors, coworkers, and social networks on creativity (Zhou & Su, 2010); how culture influences the assessment of creativity (Hempel & Sue-Chan, 2010); and how culture affects the entire process of creativity (Chiu & Kwan, 2010).

Regarding team creativity, Zhou’s (2006) model of paternalistic organizational control derives from international research into cultural differences between work teams in Western and Eastern countries. This point of departure is interesting as it conceptualizes how different forms of paternalistic control at the organizational level of analysis may impinge upon creativity produced by teams embedded in the organizations. In this model, paternalistic organizational control is theorized as the level of control exerted by top management over personnel and task-related decisions within work teams. Zhou suggests that the impact of such control on team intrinsic motivation and, consequently, on team creativity differs in terms of national culture. She suggests that paternalistic organizational control fosters team intrinsic motivation and creativity for teams in the East, whereas for teams in the West, such organizational control acts as an inhibitor of group intrinsic motivation and thus creativity. This is one of the first models published in the mainstream organizational science literature that takes a multilevel approach to directly address the role of national culture as it may influence how organizational control at the organizational level of analysis affects team creativity at the team level of analysis. Even so, empirical examination of it has been rare, perhaps partly because its multilevel theorizing requires that researchers collect data from a large number of teams embedded in a good number of organizations in Eastern and Western countries. On the other hand, conceptual works positing positive impact of teams’ cultural diversity on team creativity have received more research attention and empirical support (Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen, 2009). Consistent with the “value-in-diversity” thesis in the diversity literature, this line of work essentially argues that cultural diversity promotes divergence in teams, and divergence leads to creativity (Stahl et al.).

While the above works largely focus on creativity, the next two focus on innovation.

Four-Factor Theory of Team Climate for Innovation

West (1990) posits four team climate factors facilitative of innovation: vision, participative safety, task orientation, and support for innovation. Innovation is enhanced if (a) vision is understandable, valued, and accepted by the team members; (b) team members perceive they can propose new ideas and solutions without being judged or criticized; (c) there is a stimulating debate and discussion of different possible solutions within the team which at the same time will more likely be carefully examined; and finally (d) team members perceive support for innovation (Anderson & West, 1998; West). This theory has been widely applied in the team innovation research and has received support from both primary and more recently from meta-analytic studies (Hülsheger, Anderson, & Salgado, 2009).

Ambidexterity Theory

Bledow, Frese, Anderson, Erez, and Farr (2009a, 2009b) recently advocated ambidexterity theory to explain the process of managing conflicting demands at multiple organizational levels to successfully innovate. Ambidexterity refers to “the ability of a complex and adaptive system to manage and meet conflicting demands by engaging in fundamentally different activities” (Bledow et al., 2009a: 320). Generally ambidexterity represents successful management of both exploration (e.g., creating new products) and exploitation (e.g., production and implementation of products). In terms of integration of activities, Bledow et al. (2009a) distinguish between active management on one hand and self-regulatory processes on the other and suggest that both are required for the integration of activities performed by subsystems or at different points in time (Bledow et al., 2009b). Some support has already been published for the major precepts of ambidexterity theory (Rosing, Frese, & Bausch, 2011), and this perspective therefore holds potential for future studies, most notably into leadership effects in innovation processes.

Summary

The reviewed theoretical backgrounds are major frameworks in the field of creativity and innovation in the workplace. Some have received more empirical support than others, but they all emphasize the role of different determinants of either idea generation or the implementation of ideas. Perhaps the major omission of these frameworks is that each one of them mainly centers either on the first step (i.e., idea generation) or on the second step of the innovation process (i.e., idea implementation). Furthermore, although different levels of analysis are considered in each framework, some put more emphasis on the team level (e.g., the input-process-output model), while others are more concerned with the individual level (e.g., model of individual creative action). Future efforts toward theorizing should hence aim to develop more integrative frameworks which could encourage more bold multilevel designs to explore factors implicated in both creativity and innovation across multiple levels of analyses. We propose more specific suggestions to develop innovative theoretical perspectives in the penultimate section of this article. Having noted these perspectives, we next turn to consider specific advances in the body of research over the period covered in this narrative review.

Levels-of-Analysis Framework

We organize studies by four levels of analysis: individual, team, organizational, and multilevel. A major summary of the extant research organized by each level, then subcategorized by key variables reported in past studies to have an effect upon creativity or innovation in the workplace, is presented in Table S4 in the online supplement.

Individual Level of Analysis

Studies at the individual level can be summarized under four headings: individual factors, task contexts, and social contexts, with further subcategorizations under each heading.

Team Level of Analysis

Notable advances have also been made at the team level of analysis over recent years (see also Table S4 in the online supplement). Highlighting these developments, two theoretically driven meta-analytical integrations have been published at this level (Hülsheger et al., 2009; Rosing et al., 2011). They also hint at the maturation of the team-level research over the last decade or so. Although there remain far larger literatures at the individual and organizational levels of analysis, research into work group or work team creativity and innovation is particularly valuable as organizations have moved inexorably to more team-based structures and will often be reliant upon teams to develop and implement innovative solutions even where the ideas may have originally been proposed by an individual (e.g., R&D teams; see also, Somech, 2006). Cutting through the aptly described “jungle of inconsistent findings” (West & Farr, 1989: 17), these meta-analytical findings have moved research at this level onwards and have countered earlier suppositions over the relative importance of different variables in work group innovativeness and can be grouped under team structure and composition, team climate and processes, and leadership style.

Organizational Level of Analysis

Also at the organizational level of analysis, Table S4 serves as the organizing framework for our review comments (see online supplement). These are structured under the headings management-related factors, knowledge utilization and networks, structure and strategy, size, resources, culture and climate, external environment, innovation diffusion, and lastly, corporate entrepreneurship as innovation.

Multilevel Research

Only a handful of studies have examined creativity and innovation processes from the multilevel perspective. Liu, Chen, and Yao (2011) investigated three-level data exploring the impact of autonomy support at the higher unit and team level and individual autonomy orientation on individual job creativity. Their findings showed that harmonious passion fully mediated the effects of team autonomy support and team member autonomy orientation on individual creativity and partially mediated the effect of unit autonomy support on individual creativity. Daniels, Tregaskis, and Seaton (2007) looked at the relationships between individual job control and different health-related outcomes moderated by country-level R&D activity as proxy for innovation and controlling for sector-level variability, thus involving three levels of analysis—country, sector, and individual. They found that national R&D activity moderated the relationships between individual levels of control and job dissatisfaction, perceived risk of occupational stress, and absence, respectively, such that these relationships were stronger where R&D activity was higher.

Integrate the Idea Generation and Idea Implementation Subfields

Akin to two siblings who fell out at a family gathering in their distant past, the subfields of idea generation and idea implementation remain doggedly disconnected from one another. Our unambiguous call is for these two disparate subfields to become far more integrated in future. Dominant perspectives, patterns of citation of specific literatures, and inferences to future research and practice have unfortunately developed without sufficient synergy and integration. This is especially regrettable given that the phenomena of creativity and innovation have such clear overlaps, similarities, and the potential for synergy to advance our comprehensive understanding of these phenomena in organizations. Despite this, some recent signs of a reunion and reconciliation between these two subdisciplinary siblings have appeared, and these developments, we believe, are highly beneficial and hold out substantial promise for future research in both subdomains to become more mutually informed and integrated and have more of an impact upon organizations and policy makers (Bledow et al., 2009b). The more that these two subdomains can be integrated by future research efforts, the better.

Need for Theorizing and Theory-Driven Studies

Second, compared with the exciting development of multiple distinctive new theories (e.g., Amabile, 1983; West, 1990; Woodman et al., 1993) at the start of workplace creativity and innovation research, we are struck by the relative lack of theoretical advances across the creativity and innovation literatures in the past decade. This holds true at the individual, team, and organizational levels of analysis but is perhaps less so for the more emergent studies having appeared using multilevel approaches. Although a whole morass of valuable empirical studies has appeared over the last decade, relatively few distinctively theoretical advances have been published within this sheer volume of studies. To invert the title of one article—“stagnant fountains and sparkling ponds” (as opposed to “stagnant ponds and sparkling fountains”; West, 2002a)—characterizes, perhaps marginally unkindly, our impression of this situation. In overview, there have been relatively few theoretical proposition articles, model development articles, or conceptual development pieces over the recent period in our view. Ironically, with the exception of some of the theoretical contributions we discussed earlier in this review (Bledow et al., 2009a; Zhou, 2006; and some notable conceptual articles published in the Academy of Management Review, such as Dhanarag & Parkhe, 2006; Litchfield, 2008; Mainemelis, 2010; Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003; Sheremata, 2004; Skilton & Dooley, 2010), there remains a real need for more, and more radical, theory-building contributions. Some of the most influential theories in the field have been around 20 to 30 years or even longer now (e.g., Amabile, 1983, 1988; West, 1990), and yet more recent theoretical contributions, or for that matter, counterpoint articles critical of existing theories and models, remain notable only by their absence. For a subfield whose raison d’être is to advance understanding of how new and innovative ideas flourish into implemented and valuable innovations, this is both paradoxical and perplexing.

It is not immediately clear to us why this has been the case. Where might future theoretical contributions be most valuable? And in which ways might theoretically driven studies add most notably to our understanding? Here, the most valuable avenues we consider will be to proffer (a) models and theoretical propositions to explain cross-level and multilevel innovation, such as a multilevel model of creativity by Drazin, Glynn, and Kazanjian (1999) to explain the effects of variables at different levels of analysis simultaneously on creativity and innovation; (b) proposition studies that set up empirically testable hypotheses based upon interactions between multiple variables (not merely single “predictor” variables and creativity or innovation as the outcome); (c) theoretical integrations based upon findings from meta-analytical integrations of primary studies; and (d) more radical conceptualizations of creativity and innovation processes and outcomes (e.g., innovation as counterproductive behavior, “dark side” perspectives, innovation as intellectual property right violation).

We consider several of these themes in later calls below, but these overriding directions for theory building we would highlight as having considerable latent potential to advance understanding in this area.

Organization Culture and Facet-Specific Climates for Creativity and Innovation

Linkages between organization culture and climate have remained rather unexplored in creativity and innovation research. Rousseau (1988) called for greater attention to be given to so-called facet-specific climates, referring to climate for innovation as a dynamic construct linked to organizational culture more generally. Several more recent reviews of the organization culture literature support this assertion (Jones, Jimmieson, & Griffiths, 2005; Sarros, Cooper, & Santora, 2008; Sørensen, 2002), yet more needs to be done to explain how culture and climate act as facilitators or inhibitors of innovation within organizations. Organizational-level research clearly suggests that underlying cultures supportive of innovation act as facilitators of change in specific sectors and organizational settings (e.g., Jaskyte & Dressler, 2005; Khazanchi, Lewis, & Boyer, 2007), but what is less clear is how these underlying cultures are manifest as facet-specific climates for innovation.

Innovation Process Research

There has been a quite notable paucity of research exploring the processes inherent in creativity and innovation compared with the plethora of studies evaluating the multitude of so-called antecedent factors to innovation. Indeed, the field appears to have moved away from process research in general despite earlier publications of valuable process models derived from longitudinal, observational studies in real time within differing organizational settings (e.g., King, 1992; Van de Ven et al., 1989). The precise reasons for this are moot, but our impression is that our understanding of innovation processes at different levels of analysis has not moved forward significantly in recent years. This is especially the case for cross-level and multilevel innovation attempts where our understanding of these phenomena could be greatly elucidated by more process research. Here, research could also valuably adopt a “momentum perspective” to examine the effects of changes in key variables over time and how these impinge upon subsequent innovativeness (see, for instance, Chen, Ployhart, Cooper-Thomas, Anderson, & Bliese, 2011). We thus call for reinvigorated attention to process studies using appropriate observational, diary study, real-time case study, and ethnographic research approaches within organizational settings. These in situ approaches, we believe, are potentially valuable to uncover these processes as they unfold in organizations, rather than an overreliance upon large-scale questionnaire designs that appear to be predominant in the field presently (see also Montag, Maertz, & Baer, 2012).

Redress Creativity and Innovation Maximization Fallacy

As long ago as 1981, Kimberly coined the term proinnovation bias to describe the presumption that innovation is a desirable characteristic and that positive outcomes will invariably arise from all forms of innovation. While we agree that both creativity and innovation have inherently positive connotations (What management team, worker, or organization would not prefer to describe themselves as such?), we go further to suggest that these literatures in general now suffer from innovation maximization fallacy. We propose this concept to describe the implicit, untested, and critically suspect set of presumptions that has grown out of proinnovation bias’ remaining unchallenged. Innovation maximization fallacy is that “all creativity and innovation is good; and the more, the better.” This fallacy unfortunately remains implicit and rarely even acknowledged across the creativity and innovation literatures. Instead, it is a naïve and untested assumption underlying many studies, pragmatic texts, and even some scholarly volumes. The implicit (il)logical assumption appears to be that (a) if a factor or variable correlates with innovativeness, then (b) a higher level, or increase on that variable, will lead to higher levels of sustainable innovation. Yet, creativity and innovation are often experienced as disruptive events, do not always benefit all parties affected, and may be initiated in response to distress-related stimuli, and excessive innovation may be counterproductive to other aspects of individual, team, or organizational performance (Anderson & King, 1993).

Of course, the logical extension of innovation maximization at any level of analysis would be perverse and dysfunctional: individuals, teams, and organizations continuously changing and reinventing ever-new ways of working but failing to routinize any innovation or to perform routine tasks and responsibilities at the core of organizational success. Just for the sake of visualization, imagine such an organization based upon maximizing all of the factors correlating with innovation we have reviewed at all levels of analysis (if that were possible). Would this be viable and sustainable, let alone lead to successful performance? We would suggest not. Rather, this would inevitably lead to highly dysfunctional job roles, team working structures, or even entire organizations incapable of handling routine task performance demands and that may be fundamentally unstable and uncompetitive (see also Bledow et al., 2009a). Past research has failed to critically examine the underlying assumptions implicit in innovation maximization fallacy. That one variable or another has been found to correlate with creativity or innovation does not imply that increases in this variable will necessarily increase innovativeness or that such increases are always desirable. Instead, the crucial issues here are the context for creativity, the contingencies surrounding innovation, and how innovation processes coexist with routinized processes within any organization, subunit, or individual work role (see also Priem et al., 2012). The latter point, in our view, holds out greatest promise to further research in this area; study designs need to examine relationships in real time between the performance of routine tasks and creativity and innovation processes at different levels of analysis.

A recent study provides initial empirical evidence that examining consequences of creativity and innovation holds much promise to move the field forward. Specifically, Gong, Zhou, and Chang (2013) investigated how riskiness orientation (i.e., the tendency to make large and risky resource commitments concerning entry into new businesses or markets), realized absorptive capacity (i.e., capabilities to transform and apply new knowledge), and firm size influence the employee creativity–firm performance relation. They found that employee creativity was negatively related to firm performance when riskiness orientation was high, positive when realized absorptive capacity was high, and more positive in small than large firms.

Taken together, future research is called for to redress the proinnovation bias but also to debunk the myth that all innovation is good and more creativity and innovation is better for organizational performance (see also Anderson & Costa, 2010). For instance, studies are called for that explore situations where innovations were implemented but subsequently were abandoned because they were deemed unsuccessful, where innovation attempts have negative but unintended consequences, where individual-level work role innovations may even be seen as counterproductive behavior, where too much innovation may be detracting from more general overall job and team performance, or where the outcomes from alternative interventions to stimulate innovation are compared empirically. All are examples of where studies in this vein countering innovation maximization fallacy would be valuable.

Senior Management Team and Intervention Studies

There has been a marked absence of research into senior management team (SMT) innovation or of studies adopting truly intervention-based designs to examine the causal effects of planned changes upon innovativeness over the period of our review and, in fact, historically. Both issues strike us as potentially highly valuable for present and future research as both possess notable prospects for robustly affecting organizational practices and the management of innovation processes in workplace settings (Anderson, Herriot, & Hodgkinson, 2001). However, only a handful of studies have examined innovation at the level of the SMT (e.g., Alexiev, Jansen, Van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2010; Smith & Tushman, 2005; West & Anderson, 1992, 1996) amongst the mass of studies examining creativity and innovation at lower levels in the organizational hierarchy. Both the generation of ideas purely at the level of the SMT and the receipt and treatment of ideas by SMTs proposed upwards to them have received scant attention in the innovation literatures to date despite the crucial position held by senior managers to facilitate or stifle innovation. One literature that we believe could valuably inform such research is the newly emergent area of cognitive processes and strategic decision making in SMTs (Hodgkinson, 2001).

As regards intervention studies, our comprehensive review failed to locate a single adequately conducted and reported study that employed a genuine intervention design at any of the levels of analysis considered (although some experiential case studies are written up in the wider organizational development literature). Here, we call for fully functional, pre- and postmeasurement designs, preferably with the use of experimental and control group designs in real life organizational interventions with the express aim of improving individual-, team-, or organizational-level innovativeness. We foresee such intervention studies at the individual and team levels as being the most feasible to conduct, not least to give direct empirical evidence on the efficacy of a range of creativity training techniques that have mushroomed in the consultancy arena (see also Epstein, Schmidt, & Warfel, 2008).

Leadership Style in the Creativity-Innovation Cycle

Our review noted some studies at different levels of analysis that unambiguously confirm the importance of leadership style. However, research in this area was more limited than one might have supposed, especially given the pervasive importance of leadership to innovation outcomes (Bledow et al., 2009a, 2009b; Chen et al., 2013). Whether at the level of individual supervision, the work group, or higher level strategic leadership within an organization, effective leadership for innovation is paramount. We thus view this topic area as particularly important but so far rather neglected in empirical studies. Far more could be done to elucidate the effects of leadership style and behavior upon creativity and innovation in the workplace and, in particular, effective leadership styles at different stages in the innovation cycle. How do leaders handle the competing demands of routine task management and simultaneously trying to manage innovation processes? Is it really possible for leaders to fundamentally modify their behavior dependent upon stage in the innovation cycle? How can a CEO or board of directors most effectively influence organization strategy and culture to facilitate innovativeness? Again, Table S6 (see online supplement) sets out more questions in this regard. These, and other vital issues regarding the effects of leadership upon innovation, remain largely open for future research to explore and explain.

“Dark Side” Approaches and Studies

An intriguing but to date underresearched issue concerns what has been termed the “dark side” of innovation predictors, processes, and outcomes (Anderson & Gasteiger, 2008a, 2008b; Janssen et al., 2004). Past studies reveal variously that innovation attempts can be provoked by negative work role evaluations and moods (Binnewies & Wörnlein, 2011; Bledow, Rosing, & Frese, 2013), that experienced conflict may provoke innovation, that innovation is perceived in progress and in situ as conflictual, and that its outcomes may be both positive and negative in terms of team cohesion and objective clarity (e.g., Chen, Liu, & Tjosvold, 2005). Binnewies and Wörnlein, for instance, use a diary study method to examine the effects of negative affect, job stressors, and perceived job control on the innovativeness of a sample of interior designers. They found that job control moderated the relation between negative affect and daily creativity. This more qualitative approach, we believe, holds promise to open up both the dark sides to innovation attempts and the process as it unfolds over time. As Anderson and Gasteiger summarize, “Truly, there is a dysfunctional aspect to innovation, less visible or managerially appealing, but an aspect nevertheless that has surfaced repeatedly across empirical studies” (2008b: 422). Such dark side research also counters any uncritically assumed positive antecedents and processes of innovation, but this perspective further has the advantage of contributing to our understanding of workplace innovation phenomena “warts and all.” Future research, we suggest, should therefore attempt to model both the positive and negative sides to innovation, and integrative models should encapsulate these in ways that allow them to be considered in relation to innovation antecedents, processes, and outcomes.

Role of Customers in Employee Creativity and Innovation

Much existing theorizing and research on social contexts for employee creativity and innovation has been confined within organizational boundaries. For example, researchers have studied how supervisors and coworkers facilitate or inhibit employee creativity, and we have reviewed many of such studies. However, with a few exceptions, little attention has been paid to how actors outside of the organization—customers, clients, professional bodies, cross-boundary networks, and so forth—influence employee creativity and innovation (see Operti & Carnabuci, 2014). This view is consistent with the demand side of the innovation that has been explored in relation to technological innovation (Priem et al., 2012). Yet, our review found a dearth of studies that have examined the causes, processes, or effects of cross-boundary innovation from the outside in. Future studies could examine these outside-in influences regarding how and why employees engage in creativity and innovation, but we see particular promise in relation to customer-driven innovation attempts.

Role of the Internet and Social Media in Creativity and Innovation

Technological advancements, especially the near-ubiquitous penetration of the Internet, may have the potential to fundamentally alter how creativity and innovation are fostered and managed by organizations. Indeed, many organizations are already using these technologies to foster idea generation and dissemination, but our impression is that management science research has, if anything, lagged behind practice. Given the increasing tendency of geographically dispersed teams, the importance of the Internet in creativity and innovation management should be examined in much more detail. Compared to traditional face-to-face teams, such virtual teams are faced with specific challenges, such as time zone dispersion and high member heterogeneity, which most likely pose specific requirements on their innovative attempts (Gajendran & Joshi, 2012). Furthermore, we know little about how other social media (e.g., Facebook, mobile texting) affect creativity and innovation. Work is also needed to examine the concomitant advantages and disadvantages of open-source innovation, that is, innovation that is coproduced by its users.

Future Research Design Imperatives

In addition to these main avenues of focus for future studies, there are two pressing imperatives regarding research design—the need to meta-analytically integrate the increasing volume of primary studies and the need to expand the numbers of cross-level and multilevel study designs.