International Institute on Innovation, IT Management and Entrepreneurship. Services on business models, ecosystems, digital transformation efforts.

22 September 2010 | Posted by Innova Institute

Research on Open Innovation, from buzzword to reality check?

The emergence of the Open Innovation concept has received attention from both practitioners and academics. The Open Innovation Center in Berkeley has made significant efforts in gathering examples and experiences from the early adopters to inspire more organizations to embrace the Open Innovation revolution. At the same time, the academic community journals have published special issues devoted to Open Innovation (see R&D Management Open Innovation special issue) and conferences are assigning specific tracks to foster research in the area (see upcoming ISPIM 2011 conference).

Picture by Tom Magliery - Some Rights Reserved (by-nc-sa/2.0)

At La Salle Innova Institute we have been exploring the phenomena from different perspectives. In this post we would like to share the insights of a Master Thesis that has looked further at the features of open innovators to shed some light on how it is being implemented. Valenzuela's (2010) master thesis highlighted that: firstly, most of the companies that are public endorsers of Open Innovation were being pushed by their global competitors to increase their innovation pace and reach; secondly, they focused most of their efforts on widening their funnel productivity including external partners, and increasing the permeability of their innovation processes to be more open to outside ideas; and finally, open innovators owned the complementary assets to capitalize on their improved innovation capabilities. Therefore, well known examples of Open Innovation adoption analysed in the research (Phillips, P&G, Italcementi, HP, Deutsche Telekom, Kraft) pictured a combination of innovation management abilities and company assets not easy to replicate by smaller competitors (Valenzuela 2010). The insights from the research pose a question on the Open Innovation mandate, are smaller firms (such as SME) able to benefit in a similar manner from the Open Innovation adoption? Are you currently involved in an Open Innovation project in your company? Please feel free to share your ideas and comments. References:

Share

Comments

Helpful blog, bookmarked the website with hopes to read more!

Add new comment

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
11 + 3 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.