Welcome to the December 2012 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. This month's editorial theme is Recent Research. The articles in this issue come from researchers in the Technology Innovation Management program (TIM) and the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

In the first article, David Hudson, PhD candidate in the Sprott School of Business, examines employees who use their own consumer IT (e.g., tablet computers, software programs) to help them do their jobs, and he argues that firms should consider this behaviour as entrepreneurial effort. Creating value by combining personal IT assets with firm assets is consistent with entrepreneurship theory, although this link has not been previously formalized. The article has relevance to other researchers, but the article also highlights the implications of the findings for managers.

Next, Jyrki Suomala and five co-authors from Finland – including Mika Westerlund, a faculty member appointed to the TIM program and Sprott – present neuromarketing research that examines the subconscious responses of customers to marketing messages presented at various points along a simulated buying process. The study suggest that neuroimaging techniques can help researchers not only further understand the buying process, but also gauge customer responses to new product and service concepts beyond what can be achieved with traditional market research and customer satisfaction surveys.

Derek Smith, a graduate student in the TIM program, highlights the challenges and opportunities presented by an increased use of electric vehicles and the subsequent increases in power demand that will follow. Beyond a simple increase in overall demand, electric utilities have difficulty predicting the timing and location of a mobile demand. Smith provides background on the key dimensions of the problem and then proposes a disruptive and innovative solution that provides real-time mobile communication of the power requirements of electric vehicles and other mobile high-power devices. He argues that the solution would substantially change not only how electric utilities manage their infrastructure and do business with their customers, but it would also open up business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Aparna Shanker, a recent graduate of the TIM program, presents her research into the value of open source software as perceived by enterprise customers. Through a synthesis of existing literature and interviews with managers and leaders of enterprises, Shanker developed a model of customer value creation. This research identifies the points of value that the suppliers of open source software should focus on, and it points to the need for marketing strategies that can demonstrate this value to enterprise customers.

Ludovico Prattico, another recent graduate of the TIM program, identifies the power centres of open source software foundations using content analysis techniques applied to the foundations' bylaws. Six open source software foundations were examined  (Apache, Eclipse, GNOME, Plone, Python, and SPI), and the results show how power is distributed among three groups (Members, Chairman/President/Executive Director, and Board of Directors) in each of these foundations.

This issue also includes a report on a recent TIM Lecture by Gordon Freedman, CEO of Power Trip and lawyer at Freedman & Associates. Freedman shared his views on intellectual property paradigms, which are based on his experiences as an entrepreneur, lawyer, and patent and trademark agent. The event was held at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, on November 8th, 2012.

In the October issue, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of the TIM Review, and I highlighted the significant growth and diversity of readership we have experienced. The TIM Review is nearing 6,000 unique visitors per month, with substantial readership distributed across the Americas (49%), Europe (23%), and Asia (22%) (McPhee, 2012). Here, I would like to recognize some of the articles that have proved particularly popular since October 2011.

Table 1 ranks the most popular articles published in the 12 issues between October 2011 and September 2012, based on traffic to timreview.ca over this period. This method strongly disadvantages more recently published articles, so the table also includes five trending articles that would appear in the main list if only recent traffic were considered. If you missed any of these articles when they first came out, I encourage you to add them to your reading list. Our full archive of articles back to July 2007 is available on our website.

In January, we look forward to the first issue of 2013. The editorial theme is Open Source Sustainability, and the guest editor is Maha Shaikh, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom.

As always, we welcome your feedback, articles, and suggestions for future themes. We hope you enjoy this issue of the TIM Review and will share your comments online. Please also feel free to contact us directly with feedback or article submissions.

Chris McPhee
Editor-in-Chief

Table 1. Most popular TIM Review articles published from October 2011 to September 2012*

*The rankings are based on website traffic to timreview.ca from October 1, 2011 to September 30, 2012. The list also includes 5 recently published articles (denoted by ↑) that would appear in the main list if only traffic from June 1, 2012 to November 30, 2012 were considered.