I'm researching the open innovation paradigm from a firm-perspective since more than one year. The first thing I focused on is the empirical evaluation of the open innovation paradigm, in other words: How many companies are actually adopting open innovation, in which industries is it most common and what are the characteristics a company, an industry and a leader should posses for successfully adopting open innovation.
But the other big research question is: Why are companies using/adopting open innovation?
Some guys from twitter discussed this question and came up with an interesting hypothesis:
Companies believe in open innovation
Some companies are adopting open innovation because they believe in it. They believe in open business models and in the added value for the general public which is created for instance through open source software. These companies understood how to compete on a globalized market, they already use crowdsourcing and social media to get in contact with their customers, suppliers, and users. I would think that these companies tend to be small- and medium-sized companies because open innovation could be best cultivated with a flexible, entepreneurial mindset which is often found in these companies.
Companies need open innovation
On the other there are companies adopting open innovation because of a real business need. As open innovation is also about internalizing external ideas and innovation (which is often perceived as "outsourcing" idea creation), it is possible to reduce R&D costs with open innovation. Especially in todays economy companies try to leverage their resources and reduce their costs. These companies are not really interesting in getting into a dialogue with their customers or users. They are more interested in aggregating as much external information (ideas, innovations) as possible. I would think that these companies tend to be bigger in size. A reason may be, that it gets increasingly difficult for big companies to interact with millions of customers.
But of course this is just a hypothesis. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis in an empirical study (even small-scale). If anyone interested in this research topic, please contact me, maybe we can cooperate. Although, it is quite difficult to get valid data on the real motive for open innovation adoption.
At the moment, open innovation is getting a hype. As already mentioned in some of my previous postings, the term "open innovation" gets more and more mixed up with crowdsourcing, co-creation, online collaboration and many more. Hence, it is getting quite difficult to evaluate the motives of companies, as they often don't even know what open innovation exactly means.
Anyway, let's work on this topic in the future. I would be very interested in your comments!
Comments
Some companies BELIEVE in Open Innovation -- they embrace the paradigm -- their R&D is fully based on Open Innovation principles, they are able to leverage external capabilities internally, and willing to share IP with competitors, customers, partners, suppliers, etc. Those companies can be of all sizes (from small engineering firms to the larger pharma groups), but arguably, adopting the Open Innovation paradigm may be easier/faster in smaller companies. Certainly, in these companies, Open Innovation is being discussed at board level.
Other companies NEED Open Innovation to solve their internal R&D shortages. They will apply Open Innovation techniques, most often crowdsourcing, whenever they are stuck, but fundamentally these companies still rely on/believe in traditional innovation principles. They don’t trust the Open Innovation paradigm, but are pushed by pressing needs in idea creation, reduction to practice, or other process areas. The application of Open Innovation techniques is then ad hoc, opportunistic, driven by the need for speed or cost cutting.
Research into the above could benefit from proxies, such as a company’s active usage of Open Innovation principles (external collaboration, crowdsourcing activity, use of patent pools, licensing, creation of joint ventures, co-ownership of IP, etc.) and an analysis of its R&D processes. Interviews could be conducted, especially in companies where Innovation is clearly positioned on the org chart.
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