TY - JOUR

T1 - Orchestrating distributed data governance in open social innovation

AU - Gegenhuber, Thomas

AU - Mair, Johanna

AU - Lührsen, René

AU - Thäter, Laura

N1 - Funding Information: This research is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation [grant number 99209 ]. We are also grateful to our learning partners of #WirVsVirus. Moreover, we thank the guest editors, in particular, Lauri Wessel, as well as ROSI (Research Group on Open Social Innovation) and LOST (Leuphana Organization Studies Group) for guidance and feedback on this paper. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors

PY - 2023/3/1

Y1 - 2023/3/1

N2 - Open Social Innovation (OSI) involves the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to generate ideas, and develop and scale solutions to make progress on societal challenges. In an OSI project, stakeholders share data and information, utilize it to better understand a problem, and combine data with digital technologies to create digitally-enabled solutions. Consequently, data governance is essential for orchestrating an OSI project to facilitate the coordination of innovation. Because OSI brings multiple stakeholders together, and each stakeholder participates voluntarily, data governance in OSI has a distributed nature. In this essay we put forward a framework consisting of three dimensions allowing an inquiry into the effectiveness of such distributed data governance: (1) openness (i.e., freely sharing data and information), (2) accountability (i.e., willingness to be held responsible and provide justifications for one's conduct) and (3) power (i.e., resourceful actors' ability to impact other stakeholder's actions). We apply this framework to reflect on the OSI project #WirVsVirus (“We versus virus” in English), to illustrate the challenges in organizing effective distributed data governance, and derive implications for research and practice.

AB - Open Social Innovation (OSI) involves the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to generate ideas, and develop and scale solutions to make progress on societal challenges. In an OSI project, stakeholders share data and information, utilize it to better understand a problem, and combine data with digital technologies to create digitally-enabled solutions. Consequently, data governance is essential for orchestrating an OSI project to facilitate the coordination of innovation. Because OSI brings multiple stakeholders together, and each stakeholder participates voluntarily, data governance in OSI has a distributed nature. In this essay we put forward a framework consisting of three dimensions allowing an inquiry into the effectiveness of such distributed data governance: (1) openness (i.e., freely sharing data and information), (2) accountability (i.e., willingness to be held responsible and provide justifications for one's conduct) and (3) power (i.e., resourceful actors' ability to impact other stakeholder's actions). We apply this framework to reflect on the OSI project #WirVsVirus (“We versus virus” in English), to illustrate the challenges in organizing effective distributed data governance, and derive implications for research and practice.

KW - Management studies

KW - Accountability

KW - Data governance

KW - Hackathons

KW - Open social innovation

KW - Openness

KW - Power

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85147348729&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/48e14898-c950-3bf1-89d6-4d77e65b27ba/

U2 - 10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.100453

DO - 10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.100453

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 33

JO - Information and Organization

JF - Information and Organization

SN - 1471-7727

IS - 1

M1 - 100453

ER -