Trend Micro

In 2013 the Cork office of Trend Micro in Ireland set a priority: to accelerate the development of high potential business ideas. Although Trend Micro implements state of the art management practices, as a global organisation the company continually faces the challenge of speeding up new product development to meet fierce time-based competition. In addition, the Cork office wanted to mark their ten year anniversary by becoming recognised as a European innovation hub of excellence. Trend Micro recognised that an internal idea competition could offer a mechanism to increase both the quantity and quality of ideas, encouraging staff to develop brand new ideas and to cross-pollinate their ideas with insights from their colleagues. This strategy benefited not only from new scientific and technological advancements based on their employees’ insights, but also from the ability of the company to recombine its existing knowledge.

The Cork office has approximately 250 members of staff, with the main population being in sales. The remaining employees are involved in various support functions such as IT, Human Resources, legal, finance and customer operations. Trend Micro designed their idea competition initiative to allow for the participation of internal experts across their various functional departments.

In doing so, they sought to promote the following goals:

i. To awaken dormant ideas

ii. To stimulate idea generation from their workforce

iii. To offer feedback to their staff beyond what traditional appraisals would permit As a direct result of the unprecedented success the idea competition experienced during its first year, the decision was made to implement another competition for the following year. The decision makers responsible for doing so hoped that such an

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initiative would develop and accentuate a culture of collaborative innovation within the office. The contest process evolved through the two iterations in terms of the reward on offer, and also the quality of submissions. In its first year, there was a prize fund of €2,000 allocated to the winning idea(s); however for the second version of the initiative, this monetary allocation was replaced with a “developmental trip”. The destination of this trip at the time of the data gathering was left open as it was to be the choice of the winning solver. The aim of such developmental trips was for the solvers to go somewhere to develop their ideas further while also developing personal growth. This arguably works out better for Trend Micro also as it scatters the costs of the prize allocation throughout different departments, without having to budget out one substantial lump sum.

In terms of the sampling strategy for the interviewees, two criteria for selecting participants were identified at the outset:

i. They should occupy roles that make them knowledgeable about the issues being researched

ii. The study participants should be a combination of contest solvers (to validate the influence of social capital), and KDMs of the innovation contest holding managerial positions

The resulting participants are outlined below in Table 3-5:

Interviewee Job Description

Solver 1 (S1) Technical Account Manager

Solver 2 (S2) Renewal and Up Sell Account Manager Key Decision

Maker (KDM) Senior Manager in charge of organisation effectiveness and operational excellence

Table 3-5: List of Participants Interviewed at Trend Micro

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Both solvers interviewed were contest winners through the different iterations of the contest initiative, and subsequently have reaped significant rewards from participating in the initiative. The KDM holds a senior position within Trend Micro and was one of the key figure heads in the formation and implementation of the innovation contest initiative. Each interviewee was interviewed separately, and the interviews began by asking the interviewee’s their own background in the company and the experience they have gathered as a result in order to put them at ease.

Choosing Trend Micro as a pilot case study has a significant role in further assessing the validity, reliability and usefulness of the pre-identified interview questions. Pilot studies however are not merely a pre-test of the interview protocol (Yin, 1984). It also allowed the researcher a further opportunity to review data collection procedures before Phase 2 of case study data gathering was undertaken (Eisenhardt, 1989, Yin, 1994). While investigating the perceived importance of social capital constructs was confined to the pilot study, these questions generated a rich narrative for the subsequent data analysis. The answers stimulated discussion around the very nature of social capital, and as a result, it was decided that these questions would remain in the interview protocol going forward for the case studies. Therefore in contrast to the Phase 0, there were no amendments to the interview protocol needed to be made subsequent to the pilot study.

The analysis of the pilot study revealed innovation contests focus on a variety of characteristics and dynamics within the phenomena, ranging from concrete technical architectures, to socio-cultural processes. Through this analysis three critical measurement variables were analysed as illustrated below in Figure 3-3. While these three measurement variables formed the coding structure for the pilot study, once the importance of social capital was confirmed in this setting the coding schema was subsequently refined to only investigate research questions one and two (nature and mechanisms).

115 Figure 3-3: Coding schema for pilot study

The researcher believes this coding approach is the most appropriate way to capture the complex, idiosyncratic nature of personal experience when it comes to measuring social capital.

116 3.5.3 Phase 2-Multiple Field Studies

Having explored the influence of social capital through the pilot study of Trend Micro, the next step involved building a theory of social capital through the exploration of multiple field-studies. According to Benbasat et al. (1987) this approach is “desirable when the intent of the research is description, theory building or theory testing” while they “ allow for cross-case analysis and extension of theory” (p.373). It is quite useful to consider a multiple-field project as analogous to the replication that is possible with multiple traditional experiments. Taking this point of view, Yin (1984) proposes two criteria for selecting potential sites:

i. Sites where similar results are predicted may be used as “literal” replications ii. Sites may be chosen such that contradictory results are predicted

The identification of both competitive markets and collaborative communities facilitated these criteria, allowing individual investigations while also providing a cross case comparison analysis. Field selection however should be carefully thought out rather than being opportunistic. The platforms selected for analysis (described in Table 3-6) are therefore argued to give the requisite theoretical saturation, encompassing five competitive markets and nine collaborative communities. Similar to the pilot study, two criteria for selecting study participants for the field studies were identified at the outset:

i. They should occupy roles that make them knowledgeable about the issues being researched

ii. The study participants should either hold a managerial position, or be involved in decisions around the contest strategy

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Table 3-6: Platform details used for field studies, including their description, the role of the interviewees, and previous contest examples

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All of the interviewees were considered to be KDMs in their respective platforms; with their roles ranging from CEO’s and founders, to platform managers and solution directors. As such, they were highly knowledgeable, and were in a position to not only witness the varying effects of social capital constructs on their platforms, but also had authority to implement guidelines and practices that (retrospectively for them) promoted them. All interviews were pre-organised and required confirmation of Skype handles and time only. The platforms that were targeted, their description, along with the suitability of the interviewee are illustrated in Table 3-6 above. Interviews on average lasted 60 minutes, which were recorded and subsequently transcribed.

The analysis of these field studies followed a similar structure to the strategy implemented for the pilot study, with the exception of coding for the perceived importance of the construct (as later described in Section 3.6). This was due to the confirmation in the pilot study that social capital was important in these settings.

Further classifications were required however for the field studies, which are further outlined below.

Classification of Platforms

As outlined previously in Chapter 2, IT-enabled innovation contest platforms can be classified depending on common traits exhibited by either platform design or solver interaction. As such, open innovation reflects not so much a dichotomy between open versus closed innovation, rather than a continuum with varying degrees of openness (Dahlander and Gann, 2010). Two categories of open innovation contest platforms were thus selected using the purposive sampling approach, as per Boudreau and Lakhani (2009).

i. Competitive Markets

The first classification involved six IT-enabled innovation contest platforms that exhibited traits of being more directed toward individual solvers working for themselves rather than as part of a collective. Solvers within such platforms have primarily competitive relationships among one another. The platforms analysed in this section, along with the roles of the interviewees are outlined in Table 3-7 below.

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Platform Role of Interviewee CrowdANALYTIX Founder and CEO

Crowding Founder and CEO

InnoCentive Innovation Program Manager

Innoget CEO

NineSigma Business Development Manager

Presans Operations Manager

Table 3-7: Competitive Markets and their Interviewees ii. Collaborative Communities

The second platform classification to emerge from our analysis involved nine platforms. These platforms exhibited traits of the platform being more directed toward collaborative solvers working as part of a community, rather than from an individualistic point of view. IT-enabled innovation contest platforms analysed in this section, along with the roles of the interviewees are outlined below in Table 3-8.

Platform Role of Interviewee

Appirio [TopCoder] Director: Solutions Marketing Battle of Concepts Innovation Manager

Chaordix Founder

F6S CEO

IdeaConnection CEO

Munktell Science Park Open Innovation Manager NASA Tournament Lab Senior Scientific Advisor

PhantoMinds Founder

Skild Founder

Table 3-8: Collaborative Communities and their Interviewees