Tian Heong Chan

Research has demonstrated that certain team composition factors—high expertise similarity, high network cohesion, and mixed‐gender teams—have predominantly negative effects on the teams’ invention outcomes. Yet these factors have also been shown to improve team coordination, which should (in theory) lead to better invention outcomes. We address this tension by highlighting the need to consider the invention's integrality, which increases task interdependencies among team members and thereby strengthens the positive relationship between team coordination and invention value. We hypothesize that (i) the main effects of these team composition factors reduce a team's invention value but, more importantly, that (ii) invention integrality positively moderates those effects. We support these claims with evidence from utility patent data filed in the United States during the period 1983–2015.

Exaptation refers to the emergence of novel functionalities in existing products. Exaptations frequently arise in the context of users who creatively modify (or hack) existing products to accommodate new needs. Here, we examine how product-first (compared with problem-first) search affects the occurrence of exaptations. In a product-first search, the user identifies the product to be hacked before seeking a viable need. In a problem-first search, the user has a defined problem before seeking a viable solution. We argue that users are more likely to achieve exaptations following a problem-first (compared with a product-first) search. Indeed, with problem-first search, they are less likely to face functional fixedness, and they can leverage their greater awareness of problems that may not have readily adaptable solutions, which leads them to generate exaptations. Using a novel data set comprising user hacks of IKEA products, we present evidence that hacks originating from a product-first search are less likely to generate exaptations than hacks originating from a problem-first search. We also show that this difference is mitigated when the user has hacking experience or when the IKEA product being hacked is more modular. We also explore how the mitigation happens. Increased hacking experience appears to reduce functional fixedness; meanwhile, increased product modularity increases the likelihood that users will make serendipitous discoveries leading to exaptations. We contribute to the growing literature on exaptation as a source of novelty and discuss the implications of this phenomenon for managing user innovation. This paper was accepted by Sridhar Tayur, entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding: Financial support from the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund [Tier 1 Grant 251RES1907] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4486 .