From Ideas to Impact: The Process and Promise of Democratized Innovation in Healthcare

Decentralized, distributed systems of innovation and production are becoming ever more economically and strategically important. This has prompted a surge of interest among strategy and organizations scholars, with rich bodies of work emerging around open innovation, platforms, ecosystems, the sharing economy, user innovation, and more. One recent, yet understudied manifestation of this broader trend is the maker movement, which refers to collaborative communities of amateur and professional fabricators and tinkerers that have emerged over the past two decades. The goal of this symposium is to explore the technologies and practices associated with this community from a processual perspective, specifically in the context of healthcare innovation. We do so by showcasing cutting-edge unpublished work from top scholars publishing in the areas of technology, organizational learning, and entrepreneurship. These papers adopt different theoretical perspectives and levels of analysis to explore a set of closely-related, under-researched, and important questions: How can teams use “democratizing” technologies to identify new opportunities, and how can emergent organizations enact those ideas to create value? How do distributed, collaborative network structures emerge, and how does knowledge flow through them over time? Collectively, these papers draw insights from user innovation and the maker movement context to advance research and theory on entrepreneurship, legitimacy, ecosystems, and organizational emergence. Following the four papers, an expert discussant will synthesize emergent insights, and we will conclude with an exercise in “democratized innovation” of our own, using a group exercise to crowdsource a collective future research agenda. How maker tools can accelerate ideation Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia Pandemic makers: Emergent networks of citizen crisis response Presenter: Russell E. Browder; U. of Oklahoma Price College of Business Presenter: Angela Forgues; U. of Wisconsin Presenter: Stella Seyb; U. of Oklahoma Presenter: Howard Aldrich; U. of North Carolina Emergence of a grassroots ecosystem in response to the PPE supply crisis Presenter: Douglas Hannah; Boston U. Presenter: Ya-Ching Huang; Boston U. Stoking the flames of innovation: Differential knowledge contributions in medical imaging Presenter: Uisung David Park; Syracuse U. Presenter: Shinjinee Chattopadhyay; U. of Illinois Presenter: Sonali Shah; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign