ABSTRACT
Large companies typically lose their innovativeness after sometime as new procedures and regulations aimed at strengthening key business processes in a growing organization simultaneously seem to stifle innovation. In order to manage these innovation/commercialization processes, large corporations have over time developed various organizational units that serve a boundary spanning role in order to get access to ideas, technology, innovations, and competencies. From the perspective of the large corporation, FirstBuild is a boundary-spanning innovation unit that opens up for structural ambidexterity by both reaching out to a large community of makers and benefitting from its links to engineering resources in the mother organization. The co-creation concept has increasingly been used for various innovation processes, including inputs from users, lead-users, and makers. The employees need to be socially capable and well connected in order to fulfill the task of bringing their innovations back to the GE Appliances business units.
