Research Interest

My research interest is how to manage uncertainty which is inevitable in

the process of making innovation. Prototyping is supposed to be a method to
reduce the risk produced by the uncertainty, since it supports to acquire
unexpected information from other perspectives and reinforce the network of
stakeholders. In order to involve other perspectives, the process has to be open.
Therefore the extent of openness is important for the efficiency of prototyping.

Aims and objectives

The aim of this research is to give a suggestion to people who are
practically involved in the process of managerial decision making, which seeks
for a clue to decide whether they should take an open approach or a closed one
for managing innovation. In this research, “innovation” means successfully
delivering new ideas, which is not practically applied yet, to market (Cox,
Christensen). In that process, uncertainty is unavoidable and how to manage the
uncertainty is one of the key issues to make innovation (Rodoriguez).

The main objective for achieving the aim is to clarify the power of
openness in prototyping process from theoretical and practical points of view in
order to provide people in management with convincing information.

Firstly, since the key concepts such as openness, prototyping and

innovation are used in various situations, they will have to be organised in a
particular way to make sense in the context of this research. Therefore, it will be
theoretically argued why prototyping is important for innovation and what the
key role is. This research assumes that the key role is to get feedback from
stakeholders. On this assumption, openness is supposed to be needed. The
concept of openness will be overviewed and the significance for prototyping will
be theoretically identified.

To underpin this theoretical assumption, another objective is to collect

practical knowledge from practitioners who have participated in a project using
an open approach.

Context
The importance of innovation for management has been discussed
(Drucker, Boston Consulting Group) , and the design methods used in some
design agencies started to be regarded as a key methodology to accelerate the
process of innovation. In the methodologies, one of the main methods is
prototyping. Also the importance of prototyping has been argued in managing
innovation (Shrage, 2000; Thomke, 2002; Dodgson, 2005) and in design
processes for innovation (Kelly, 2001; Brown, 2009; Lookwood, 2010).

One of the advantages of prototyping is to get feedback from actual

context. This process will inform designers of factors they have not expected,
and reinforce the network of stakeholders. However it is supposed that there will
be a disadvantage since exposing unfinished ideas could lead the risk of being
copied before they exploit the idea. This concern is especially in the boundary of
service design which is difficult to be protected intellectual property laws.
(Lookwood, 2010; Bessant & Maher, 2009). This perspective is based on an
assumption that intellectual property should be protected by laws and endowed
rights. On the other hand, the contribution of intellectual property laws to
fostering creativity and innovation has been controversial (Lessig), and there
have been movements of more open approach for creation (Cesborogh, 2003;
Leadbeater, 2009).

The openness itself has been also discussed in various contexts. “Open”
innovationis argued as an antitheses of traditional R&D (Cesborough, 2003).
Open source is another argument in the context of openness and collaboration
(Leadbeater, Wikinomics). Those arguments are in different contexts, and they
do not mean an exactly same concept, but the intention is in common: to involve
external knowledge resources.

How to take a balance between an open approach and a closed one is still
not clear, and the contribution of this research is to criticise the advantage of
openness from the point of view of prototyping.

Research Methods
The research will be a literature review for scrutinising theoretical contexts
in existent literature, and a qualitative research with semi-structured interviews.
The key concepts for the literature review will be openness, prototyping and
intellectual property.

The interviewees will be practitioners in design agencies such as IDEO,

SemourPowell and PDD; practitioners in service design agencies such as Live|
Work, Engine and Perticiple; providers of open creative resources such as
OpenIDEO, MyDeco and RepRap.

Prediction of the Form of the Final Presentation

Only thesis will be submitted.