Challenges Ahead E-innovation

Technovation 22 (2002) 761–767 www.elsevier.com/locate/technovation

Challenges ahead E-innovation Ping Lan ∗, Howard H. Du Faculty of Business, University of New Brunswick Saint John, PO Box 5050, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, E2L 4L5

Abstract This article systematically examines the recent efforts made by industry and academia in promoting E-innovation. It finds that industrial initiatives have been hindered by two limitations. One is a lack of an agreeable framework to accommodate the diversity of different usages. The other is a trend toward standardization in E-business applications. The academic efforts have been hindered by the lack of a mechanism to marry the distributed nature of E-innovation with the legacy of a traditional innovation. To overcome the barriers from both supply and demand sides, industrial efforts need to be more focused on figuring out how E-innovation emerges out of interconnectivity, while academic efforts should be more inclusive, so as to incorporate distributed innovation into enterprises’ shifting business operations. It is expected that this exploratory research will attract more systematic studies in establishing theories and developing techniques related to E-innovation.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: E-innovation; Academic and industrial usage; Promotion barriers

1. Introduction Although some efforts have been made to promote Einnovation or online innovation in the last several years, E-innovation has not become a buzzword and gained the momentum that E-marketing or E-commerce currently possess. For example, searching any popular Internet search engine or directory by entering “E-innovation”, usually fewer than two thousand hits turn up. In searching academic research databases such as Academic Search Elite or the Elsevier Science Server, the result is far fewer hits. Few studies can be found (Lan, 2001). It is strange to compare this situation with the role played by innovation in forging the current Networked Economy, or Digital Economy, or Freedom Economy (Fingar and Aronica, 2001; Keen and Mackintosh, 2001). It is also very surprising to look at the phenomenon in view of the E-business environment in which so many things have been changed by the Internet. So, it is natural to ask: 앫 What is wrong with adding an “E” to innovation?

Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-506-648-5572; fax: +1-506-6485574. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Lan). ∗

앫 How has innovation itself been or how is it being transformed in the Knowledge-Based Economy? 앫 Is there real value in promoting or conducting E-innovation? Bearing the above questions in mind, this article aims to examine the recent efforts made by industry and academia in promoting E-innovation. At the same time, it intends to reveal barriers to E-innovation development. It is expected that this exploratory research will attract more systematic studies in this area. They will be able to establish theories and develop techniques related to E-innovation. This paper is an exploratory study. The information used in the paper comes from field surveys, online investigation and various academic surveys. The paper is divided into the following sections. Section 2 examines industrial initiatives in using the term E-innovation and promoting the concept of E-innovation. It reveals a usage pattern of E-innovation in industry through a systematic survey of popular Internet search engines, online directories and relevant websites. It finds that E-innovation is still a quite vague idea among enterprises. They use the term or concept mainly for showing new features of products/services, defining a special field/area, indicating a new capability of innovation, naming a company or a project, and positioning themselves in a new

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battlefield of competition. The orientation behind these usages can be summarized as introducing products/services or processes/organizations for E-business. Section 3 scrutinizes available academic research on E-innovation. Firstly, it displays a gap between industry and academic research in the domain of E-innovation. It argues that academia is lagging behind industry in embracing the changes to innovation brought about by the Internet. Secondly, it examines two streams of academic research on E-innovation. One works on identifying differences between traditional innovation and Einnovation. The other focuses on the distributed nature of E-innovation. Section 4 systematically analyzes barriers to E-innovation development from both supply and demand sides. It argues that industrial initiatives have been hindered by two limitations. One is a lack of an agreeable framework to accommodate the diversity of different usages. The other is a trend toward standardization in E-business applications. The academic efforts have been hindered by the lack of a mechanism to marry the distributed nature of E-innovation with the legacy of a traditional innovation system among enterprises. Based on the previous analysis, the final section discusses the potential for adding an “E” to innovation. It argues that the Internet has been changing and will continue to change innovation in both content and method. Although it may take a longer time for E-innovation to reach its momentum due to its dynamic and interwoven nature, E-innovation may become a big gun in the next round of E-business development.

2. Industrial efforts in promoting E-innovation Searching popular Internet search engines and directories such as Altavista, Google, Lycos and Yahoo for the keyword “E-innovation”, fewer than two thousand hits will turn up. Checking the search results, we can find some familiar names in the list, such as ICL, GE, IBM, Arthur D. Little, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Oracle, etc. These results indicate that E-innovation is not a popular term like E-commerce and E-business, which turn up over a million search findings in a keyword search. However, E-innovation has been used by industry for some time. The term has been quietly incorporated into some enterprises’ operations. In order to gather knowledge about how E-innovation has been used in industry, we examined 1060 search results from Yahoo. It is apparent that E-innovation is mainly used to show new features of products/services (51.6%), a special field/area of E-business (21.5%), a company or a project name (18.7%) and a new capability of innovation and “other” (8.2%). The survey found that about half the industrial usages

of the term E-innovation are related to labeling new products or services. However, most of the usages emphasize that new features are related to the E-business environment. For example, ICL, the European-centered arm of Fujitsu’s global IT services—an E-business services company which employs 20,000 people in 40 countries, uses E-innovation to promote its smart cards, which could reduce online credit card fraud. Bournemouth Council in the UK employs E-Innovation to launch one feature of its website: ‘Ask Bob’, which provides services information about the local community. Cell Consulting, a company specialized in eTransformation, makes use of E-innovation to emphasize the usefulness of its key service eSpin, which consists of eVision, ePortfolio, eConception, and eImplementation. Although many companies treat E-innovation as a frontier, a special field or an emerging area, there is not a commonly held idea about what it is. Some companies apply E-innovation broadly to indicate an area related to the Internet. For example, Forbes organized a forum under the topic Putting an “E” in Innovation in 2000. By its reckoning, innovation occurring in the Internet and E-commerce area is E-innovation, which covers at least B2B E-commerce, E-branding, and real-time information provision. In the mind of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, one of the largest management and IT consulting firms in the industry, E-innovation includes E-services, E-government and many more categories. Oracle argues that E-innovation, which is mainly reflected in creating intellectual property, is becoming one of the most important national assets. Therefore, E-innovation is part of a nation’s security (William, 2000). In contrast to such a broad coverage, some companies use the term in a narrow sense with certain reference. For example, Arthur D. Little, one of the leading consulting companies in the world, develops an E-innovation hierarchy in the area of Supply Chain Management. In its model, there are five levels of E-innovation based on the combination of market innovation, channel innovation, product/service innovation, and business model innovation. The five levels, from bottom to top, are Desperado, Integrator, Architect, Core Focus, and Virtual. Return on Capital Employed varies in the five levels from 4% to 50% (ADL, 2000). Alliance for Converging Technologies, now DigitalL4Sight, designs a matrix using Context (virtual world or physical world) and Content (legacy or new E-content). It locates E-innovation in an area defined by new E-content and the Physical World. It suggests that E-innovation is new innovative content enabled by new technologies. MP3 Format, MP3 Players, and Digitally Encoded Music Databases for instore sampling are all samples of this category (Aitken, 2000). When E-innovation is used to show a capability, it is usually placed in the center of operations, which has a wide linkage and an orientation towards results by hav-

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ing such a capacity. For example, in the Trifinit Networks, an American ISP, E-innovation is presented as the core of its three key E-businesses: Tritinit Services, Tritinit Venture, and Tritinit Online. This arrangement shows that it is E-innovation capacity that drives and supports the continuous evolution of the business. In GE, a popular E-business forerunner, E-innovation is used to refer not only to new features of services/products, but also to capabilities, progress, and results. In its website, E-innovation has replaced innovation. There is a section called GE’s E-innovation in 2000. GE’s achievements in Make, Buy and Sell are systematically listed, labeled as a new three-part e-Business strategy. GE uses this strategy to meet the Internet challenges, and it fully engages all business functions throughout the company. In this section of its site, GE also includes business opportunities focused on internal productivity, external sourcing, and customer transactions. It is not popular to use E-innovation as a component of a company’s name, although a handful of enterprises are doing so. E-Innovation Limited (a New Zealand company) and E-innovation Network (an American company) are evidence. However, a lot of companies use E-innovation as a project name, a department name, or a section within their websites. For example, IBM (Korea) has a section of its website devoted to E-innovation. ECCE TERRAM Internet Services, a German company, uses E-innovation as one of its four streams, which include E-publishing, E-community and E-commerce. The above classification is only a rough indication of the main usages of the term E-innovation. It is difficult to paint an accurate picture due to the interwoven nature of innovation and the overlaps in the term’s usage within individual companies. For example, searching ICL’s website www.icl.com, 68 documents were found using E-innovation extensively. Among them, some involve promotion and some involve classification. However, under the title of E-service, there is also a special section called E-innovation paralleled with Infrastructure, Applications and CRM Integration. Summarizing the above analysis on industrial usage of the term E-innovation, it is fair to say that industry is quite active in meeting the challenges brought about by the Internet and is willing to embrace the new domain of E-innovation. The diversified usage of E-innovation, on the one hand, increases our awareness of E-innovation; on the other hand, it indicate an orientation behind these usages: E-innovation is related to introducing products, services or tools based on IT and for the E-business environment. 3. Academic efforts in promoting E-innovation In contrast to wide industrial usage of the term Einnovation, academic research on this topic is very lim-

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ited. Only a few articles fall into this area. A survey on the Internet and academic databases shows a huge gap between industry and academia in embracing E-innovation (Lan, 2001). For example, search engines produce over a thousand hits of industrial listings. However, only two articles turned up when both “E-innovation” and “online innovation” were entered in Academic Search Elite, which provides full text of over 1530 journals covering the social sciences, humanities, general science, multi-cultural studies, education, etc. No use of the term could be found in the Elsevier Science Server, a database that includes over 1000 full-text academic journals published by Elsevier. It is apparent that academia is lagging behind industry in embracing the term or concept of Einnovation, at least judged by quantity of output. Among the limited academic research that deals with the changes in innovation brought about by the Internet, two streams can be identified. One focuses on differences between traditional innovation and E-innovation. The other concerns the distributed nature of E-innovation. In order to show the differences between online innovation and offline innovation, Rayport and Jaworski (2001) employ previous studies on co-evolution of technology and market (Christensen, 1997, 2000; LeonardBarton, 1998) to examine innovation frameworks and processes in the Networked Economy. They identify five variables: investment required, time-to-market, flexibility, decision-making mechanism, and innovation constraints. They argue that online innovation differs from offline innovation in the following aspects: 앫 investment required to launch new products and services is moderate; 앫 choices about the future of new innovations can easily be made by markets; there is no need to make these choices internally; 앫 first mover imperative can be aligned with gathering more customer input; 앫 launching beta-versions allows for revisioning/customization, actually benefiting the innovator; 앫 a tighter link between technological innovations and performance is demanded by online customers; 앫 online innovation is technology/market co-evolution, due to the fact that (1) market space is underdeveloped, (2) user behavior is not well-defined, and (3) technology has a large influence; and 앫 distributed innovation becomes a fluid, organic process, which links the inside of an organization with the sources of online evolution. In addition to identifying the features of online innovation, Rayport and Jaworski (2001) position online innovation in the field of online implementation. In their model, E-innovation or online innovation, combined

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with a delivery system, consists of online implementation, which enables a firm to continue to execute and adapt strategy in a fast-changing, competitive environment. Against this background, firms can no longer separate innovation from implementation. In contrast to Rayport and Jaworski’s efforts to paint an overall picture of online innovation, Von Hippel (2001) focuses on discussing online innovation practices, with particular reference to participation of users in innovation. Using Open Source software as an example, he argues that user communities engaged in innovation are most likely to flourish when the following three conditions are met: 앫 at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate; 앫 at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations and the means to do so; and 앫 user-led diffusion of innovations can compete with commercial production and distribution. Also dealing with Open Source software development, Kogut and Turcanu (1999) and Kogut and Meitu (2000) suggest that E-innovation is a new model or a new way to conduct innovation. In examining the practices of global software development, they identify two models. One is a traditional model that emphasizes cost and speed. The other is E-innovation or “linuxation”, which emphasizes the effort to improve innovativeness. As the terms suggest, E-innovation results from the fact that Linux is developed by people from anywhere with a Web access. They argue that E-innovation is not only a new way of developing software in a distributed environment, but also a powerful model for future organization of innovation. Furthermore, they point out that the usage of E-innovation is not confined to a particular industry, but occurs in all fields in which cooperation can be arranged by module and there exists a wide understanding of a common language and culture. In the stream of academic research on the distributed nature of E-innovation, Sawhney and Prandelli’s work (2000) further explores the practices of deploying distributed innovation. In their innovation spectrum, the traditional “closed” innovation system is one end, and a completely “open” innovation system—i.e. the open source movement, such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server software—is the other end. In the knowledge economy, the former has no way to renew itself; while it achieve its goal at minimizing disturbances, perturbations, and change, this “machinelike” system tends to wind down and finds it difficult to innovate. The latter benefits from the creativity and collaborative efforts of a large number of participants. However, the lack of strong governance and the absence of coordination mechanisms tend to make such open systems unstable and susceptible to chaos. Based on their

observation that either too closed or too open innovation systems tend to be ineffective in turbulent environments, Sawhney and Prandelli (2000) suggest a third way: “community of creation”. The community of creation is a permeable system, with ever-changing boundaries. It lies between the closed hierarchical model of innovation and the open market-based model. The entire community owns intellectual property rights. A central firm that acts as the sponsor and defines the ground rules for participation governs the community. Within the community, explicit knowledge as well as tacit knowledge can be shared because participants build up a common context of experience, allowing them to socialize knowledge developed in specific contexts. The community functions as a complex adaptive system, changing its configuration as a fractal entity on the basis of the specific contributions it is able to attract and select. It is neither closed nor completely open. The locus of innovation is no longer within the firm; it is within a community of members in an opportunity arena. Every member of the community of creation can access and contribute to the community. However, the community has specific rules for membership, and it needs a sponsor as well as a system for managing intellectual property rights that allows members to extract rents from the intellectual property they help to create. Summarizing the above analysis on academic research on E-innovation, it is apparent that most attention is paid to a new way or model for organizing innovation, which is characterized by its distributed nature. The meaning behind the academic arguments can be interpreted as using the Internet to plan, initiate, conduct, run, facilitate, and/or promote innovation. 4. Barriers to putting an “E” in innovation Reviewing the E-business development process offers a broader background to scrutinize the industrial and academic efforts for promoting E-innovation. There is not a widely agreed upon division of the E-business timeline (Fingar et al., 2000). However, some stages of E-business development can be identified. Pre-1996 is usually referred as Brochureware stage. In this stage, the usage of the Internet was mainly confined to establishing Web presence and publishing company and product information online. At the same time, Intranet was developed to share internal documents, and Electronic Data Interchange was built as a special channel for external linkage. From 1996 to 1998 was an early E-commerce stage in which the Internet was adopted for mass-scale commercial transactions, mainly for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) activities. In this stage, many stand-alone B2C retailers were established. They promoted sell-side transactions while taking advantage of global reach.

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From 1998 to 2000 was a full range E-commerce stage. It was the heyday of dot-com companies. It was also the period of rapid penetration of the Internet, particularly in Business-to-Business (B2B) usage from Eprocurement to full value chain integration. In this stage, various E-marketplaces were established, and various business functions were integrated or being integrated by using electronic media. 2000 and after is a consolidation stage of E-business. After the fading of much hype about E-business platforms, business has returned to basics. More attention is being paid to profitable usage of the Internet, such as saving costs through streamlining business activities and synchronizing different channels by providing better business functionalities. Combining the fluctuations of E-business development and E-innovation promotion efforts, several barriers can be identified. These difficulties can be divided into two categories: problems raised from the supply side and problems raised from the demand side. Judged from the supply side, three problems hinder the development of E-innovation: the lack of a workable framework to differentiate E-innovation from traditional innovation; an inadequate number of organizations running their innovation in a distributed way; and the lack of software tools to support the development of E-innovation. The lack of a workable framework is reflected in the following aspects. Firstly, there is no clear definition of what E-innovation is. In most industrial usages, E-innovation is a label representing a certain novelty. However, there is no clue what this novelty could be, and how the novelty of products/services links to capacity or to a certain area of E-business. Secondly, there is not a bridge to link two orientations of E-innovation promotion. As we have pointed out earlier, the orientation behind industrial usages of E-innovation is to introduce products/services or processes/organizations for the Ebusiness environment, while the orientation of the academic research is to use the Internet to plan, initiate, conduct, run, facilitate, and/or promote innovation. Up to now, there is no mechanism to combine the two streams. Thirdly, there is not a platform for providing a channel for incorporating E-innovation to traditional business functions and emerging business activities such as Knowledge Management, E-learning, etc. The lack of a suitable framework makes it difficult for E-innovation to stand on its own feet. The lack of a large number of enterprises to practice distributed innovation is another supply-side barrier. Although academic research paints a clearer picture about the new innovation, it is highly concentrated on the distributed nature of innovation without much consideration on the contents of innovation. With such a limitation, many enterprises are out of the game, because most enterprises do not pursue a “Linuxation” and do

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not carry boundaryless operations. In this environment, enterprises do not benefit greatly from academic research, while academic research also suffers from a deficiency of cases. In addition to insufficient concept development in Einnovation, there are also technical problems hindering E-innovation, i.e. there is not an appropriate toolkit, particularly a software package, for conducting E-innovation. As we know, that software innovation plays a central role in current innovation. Introducing a solution very often means introducing a software package, and time-to-market is reflected in time-to-software. As long as there is no software to marry E-innovation with enterprises’ legacy system and other activities, it will be difficult to embed E-innovation in the enterprise system. As in the supply side, three problems exist in the demand side: the strong inertia of the closed innovation system, the trend toward standardization in E-business applications, and the difficulty of measuring return on investment (ROI). The strong inertia of the closed innovation system means in all business functions in an enterprise, innovation is one of activities in which it is most difficult to involve outsiders. First, innovation itself is very complicated, although the logic of innovation is simple. Second, innovation is usually a tool, a means, or even a hope to get or maintain competitive advantages. Therefore, it is usually subject to tight control. Third, innovation has been handled case-by-case in a labor-intensive way, so electronic media have not shown much influence for cost saving in innovation activity. Therefore, the legacy in this area still dominates. Standardization in E-business applications means that enterprises are migrating their value chains in an identical way. After a rush to electronic channels, enterprises’ E-business applications show strong cost saving and synchronizing orientations, which are mainly delivered through purchasing pre-packed software. Although this brings integration into an enterprise system, it does not offer incentives to innovation. Difficult measurement of return on investment in Einnovation means a low accountability of E-innovation at this moment. There are two reasons for this low accountability. One is the interwoven nature of E-innovation, which involves not only internal interaction, but also external integration. Therefore, it is difficult to separate the gains of E-innovation from others. The other is the lack of tools to measure the assets flowing through a distributed system, because our accounting toolkits are made for a closed system. The meltdown of dot-com companies has shifted overall management focus from creating functionality back to securing profitability. Given this background, innovation initiatives related to E-business are difficult to finance.

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5. Overcoming the barriers to E-innovation development Combining the above analysis, this section aims to revisit the three questions raised in the Introduction and offer some suggestions for solving certain problems regarding putting an “E” in innovation: 앫 What is wrong with adding an “E” to innovation? 앫 How has innovation itself been or how is it being transformed in the Knowledge-Based Economy? 앫 Is there real value in promoting or conducting E-innovation? Regarding the first question, our idea is that nothing is really wrong with adding an “E” to innovation. Due to the nature of innovation, it just takes a longer time for innovation to be transformed in an E-business environment than for other business functionalities. However, more systematic work on overcoming the barriers will accelerate the transformation process. Examining the efforts of industry and academia in promoting E-innovation, it is apparent that many enterprises are positioning themselves in the emerging field of E-innovation, which could bring new functionalities and new channels for them to compete in a new business environment. Academic research is trying to display or release the power of distributed innovation from the software industry to other sectors. Industry and academia are digging at opposite ends of a tunnel. Because of the interwoven nature and much stronger internal-oriented legacy, the progress at both sides is slow. Therefore, innovation has not evolved to the stage that E-commerce and E-marketing have reached. However, the industrial embracing of E-innovation will lead to a growing academic focus on E-innovation. Thousands of industrial usages of E-innovation provide natural laboratories for studying the combination of the two streams. To accelerate this progress and keep both sides moving in the right direction, industrial efforts needs to be more focused, while academic efforts should be more inclusive. To be more focused means that industry has to figure out how E-innovation emerges out of interconnectivity. To be more inclusive means that academia has to incorporate distributed innovation into enterprises’ shifting of mainstream business operations. Regarding the second question, our responses are that the Internet has been changing and will continue to change innovation in both content and method. Given the stimuli mentioned in Rayport and Jaworski (2001) and other studies, E-innovation has been expanding traditional innovation in two aspects: application and delivery, as exemplified in industrial and academic efforts. These expansions are leading E-innovation to become a more complicated and module-rich platform. The expansions on traditional innovation engendered

by E-innovation are reflected in the changes of innovation usage and innovation delivery. In terms of the usage of innovation, E-innovation shows a feature of bifocus instead of the single focus of the traditional innovation process. Single-focus innovation means that the purpose of innovation is to provide or introduce a new product or service with a new functionality. Bi-focus innovation means that while it provides or introduces a new product or service with a new functionality, it also creates a new channel for delivering a traditional or a new functionality. This indicates that digitalization of traditional physical activities and creation of new value chains or threads play an important role in E-innovation. The expansion of usage makes E-innovation a special function and a new battlefield. In terms of the delivery of innovation, E-innovation shows a feature of dual-effort unlike the uni-effort demonstrated by traditional innovation. Uni-effort means the innovation is conducted or completed within a firm. Dual-effort suggests that an innovation is conducted or completed through both the internal efforts and external efforts of an enterprise. The expansion of E-innovation with regards to delivery makes E-innovation a new catalyst and a new channel for organizing certain business activities both within and beyond the boundaries of a firm. Combining the two expansions, we define E-innovation here as introducing new solutions by using the Internet. Introducing new solutions means providing a new product or service and creating a new channel for delivering a traditional or a new functionality. Using the Internet means to plan, initiate, conduct, facilitate and run an innovation based on information technologies in a comparatively open way. This definition aims to combine the two streams of current E-innovation promotion efforts into a workable framework, which could interface with innovation’s legacy and emerging activities. Regarding the third question, our answer is positive. Putting an “E” in innovation is not a word game or a fashion for putting an “E” in everything. E-innovation indicates the reshaping of innovation as a tool for dealing with uncertainty in an E-business environment. In the current world, interconnected systems, exploded information and collective competition are the unavoidable reality for any business activities. To cope with or survive in such an environment, one has to follow, reap or create migrating values by using appropriate tools. E-innovation has the potential to be such a tool. It is in digital form; it shows the distributed nature of delivery; it decouples traditionally inseparable activities; it dedicates to channel changes; and it deploys different rules. All these features make E-innovation a possible candidate to be a big gun in the next battlefield of Ebusiness development. However, before E-innovation becomes a buzzword, a theoretical framework and a toolkit have to be developed for synchronizing E-inno-

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vation and other business functions and/or activities. The advancing of our understanding of E-innovation will help build the momentum of E-innovation. References ADL, 2000. E-enable Supply Chain Management: A Bare Necessity for Successful Companies (online). Available at http://www.adl.com/services/management consulting/ebusiness/archive/ EScm.pdf. Aitken, C., 2000. From bricks to clicks. Financial Executive (May– June) (online edition). Available at http://www.fei.org/magazine/ articles/BricksToClicks.htm. Christensen, C., 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Christensen, C., 2000. Meeting the challenge of disruptive change. Harvard Business Review 78 (2), 66–75. Fingar, P., Aronica, R., 2001. The Death of “e “ and the Birth of the Real New Economy. Meghan-Kiffer Press, Tampa, FL. Fingar, P., Kumar, H., Sharma, T., 2000. Entreprise E-Commerce. Meghan-Kiffer Press, Tampa, FL. Keen, P.G.W., Mackintosh, R., 2001. The Freedom Economy: Gaining the mCommerce Edge in the Era of the Wireless Internet. McGrawHill, New York. Kogut, B., and Meitu, A., 2000. The emergence of E-innovation: insights from open source software development. Working paper of the Reginald H. Jones Center, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Kogut, B., Turcanu, A., 1999. Global Software Development and the Emergence of E-innovation (online). Carnegie Bosche Institute. Available at http://cbi.gsia.cmu.edu/newweb/1999Sfconference/ Kogut/Kogut.html.

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Lan, P., 2001. A discussion on pioneering a research domain for Einnovation. In: Proceedings of the Atlantic Schools of Business 2001 Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Leonard-Barton, D., 1998. Wellsprings of Knowledge. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Rayport, J.F., Jaworski, B.J., 2001. E-Commerce. McGraw-Hill/Irwin, Boston, MA. Sawhney, M., Prandelli, E., 2000. Communities of creation: managing distributed innovation in turbulent markets. California Management Review 42 (4), 24–54. Von Hippel, E., 2001. Innovation by user communities: learning from open-source software. MIT Sloan Management Review (Summer), 82–86. William, D., 2000. The Birth of the E-nation: An Info-structure Perspective (online). Available at http://www.crmfoundation.com/ art4.html. Ping Lan received his Ph.D. from the University of Strathclyde, UK and currently is an Assistant Professor in E-Commerce and International Business at University of New Brunswick Saint John (UNBSJ), Canada. Prior to joining UNBSJ, Dr Lan worked in Australia, Thailand, United Kingdom and China as an academic, a journalist and an entrepreneur. Dr Lan has published widely. His current teaching and research interests include Einnovation, Technology Management, and International Development of E-business. Howard Du is currently a Research Assistant in the E-Commerce Center at University of New Brunswick Saint John (UNBSJ). He received his Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from Marshall University in the United States. He has worked at Columbia Gas Transmission and Rage Enterprises as a web designer, a database administrator and a systems analyst in the United States before joining the E-commerce Center of UNBSJ. His current research interests include E-innovation, SMEs and international E-business applications.