Open Innovation: from OI to OI2

The concept or paradigm of open innovation has gained more and more attention over the last couple of years. Firms see open innovation nowadays as an important capability to build and maintain innovativeness, even in dynamic global markets. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of uncertainty regarding the question which factors determine successful innovation within the open innovation environment. In this regard, based on the dynamic capabilities view, we hypothesise that a firm’s openness, its absorptive capacity and its flexibility primarily determine innovation success in in-bound open innovation environments. To test these hypotheses, we analyse a large scale survey sample of 496 German manufacturing companies from different industries by applying structural equation modelling. As a main result, we find evidence for a positive association between the three mentioned constructs and innovation success.

Open innovation (OI) is one of attractive concepts in innovation management literature. Many firms have been investing their resources and efforts into activities and development programs along with the OI concept to improve their innovation performance. The fundamental of OI concept relies on making the best usage of innovation through either integrating external complementary resources with internal ones or commercialising unused internal technologies to the market or both. Hence, the value creation and value capture in OI involve partnering firms with the perfect blend of complement traits and compatible ones. Given multiple choices of alliances in a technology market, managers are however vulnerable to a risk of selecting inappropriate partners especially external ones. The consequences possibly lead to unsmooth coordinations and failures in the OI activities and projects. Drawing on OI literature, this article presents the understanding of complementarity and compatibility dimensions and discusses the roles of managers in determining the appropriateness of external partners.

Industry 4.0 digital technologies in agribusiness will enable traditional farming systems to migrate to Agriculture 4.0. Open innovation emerges as an enabler for implementing these technologies and increased sector competitiveness. However, there are still doubts and questions about how technologies and open innovation relate to and will drive Agriculture 4.0. This study identified which digital technologies of Industry 4.0 have more adherence to agribusiness, what the barriers and facilitators for using these technologies are, and how open innovation can increase the competitiveness of agribusiness. The results show that of the Industry 4.0 technologies related to agribusiness, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the most prominent. The main barriers are the users’ need for more knowledge and advanced skills, which evidences the need for investment in training operators. Among the facilitators stand the pre-existence of several technologies, which bring with them already defined basic structures, control of the technology, and communication between systems. To overcome the barriers and enhance the migration to Agriculture 4.0, developing devices, tools, systems, software, and machines is essential. More stakeholders, managers, and practitioners may share such opportunities for innovation in agribusiness through the concept of Open Innovation. To benefit from it, facilitators, managers, and practitioners of agribusiness should search for alternatives for their problems with engineering solutions providers.

While the concept of open innovation has drawn the attention of scholars and practitioners alike, it still remains difficult to capture it particularly in a quantitative, longitudinal setting where data about open innovation activities is largely absent. This impedes an adequate assessment of open innovations’ long-term implications for firms’ innovation and financial performance. While researchers have extensively examined the former link, the latter is controversially discussed against the backdrop of the costs and benefits of open innovation but remains largely unexplored. In this study, we develop and validate a longitudinal, text-based measure for firms’ open innovation activities, and probe related performance implications in a longitudinal, cross-industry setting. Combining machine-learning content analysis to create an open innovation dictionary, we analyze the 10-K annual reports of 8,491 publicly listed firms in the U.S. between 1994 and 2016. Our results support our theorizing that curvilinear relationships that take an inverted U-shape exist both between open innovation and innovation performance, and open innovation and financial performance.

Exploring the Scope of Open Innovation: A Bibliometric Review of a Decade of Research

The concept of open innovation has attracted considerable attention since Henry Chesbrough first coined it to capture the increasing reliance of firms on external sources of innovation. Although open innovation has flourished as a topic within innovation management research, it has also triggered debates about the coherence of the research endeavors pursued under this umbrella, including its theoretical foundations. In this paper, we aim to contribute to these debates through a bibliometric review of the first decade of open innovation research. We combine two techniques--bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis--to (1) visualize the network of publications that explicitly use the label `open innovation' and (2) to arrive at distinct clusters of thematically related publications. Our findings illustrate that open innovation research builds principally on four related streams of prior research, whilst the bibliographic network of open innovation research reveals that seven thematic clusters have been pursued persistently. While such persistence is undoubtedly useful to arrive at in-depth and robust insights, the observed patterns also signal the absence of new, emerging, themes. As such, `open innovation' might benefit from applying its own ideas: sourcing concepts and models from a broader range of theoretical perspectives as well as pursuing a broader range of topics might introduce dynamics resulting in more impact and proliferation.

The concept of open innovation, of which open source software is a well-cited example, has grown in popularity over the past decade. Firms engaged in open innovation leverage external knowledge to accelerate innovation and exploit innovation more effectively. One way in which firms can connect with external sources of knowledge is by participating in value networks with a multitude of external stakeholders. Nevertheless, there are few studies of open innovation value networks, with relatively little known about the characteristics that impact such networks. We seek to address this gap by exploring the networking arrangements of eight European firms that have a formal strategy around open source software (OSS). The findings reveal that firms selectively engage in two types of value networks in order to benefit from open collaboration and innovation – one a high-density network comprising a limited number of familiar partners, the other a low-density network comprising a larger number of often unknown partners. Additionally, these networks are influenced by certain characteristics such as the level of commitment, knowledge exchange, the alignment of objectives and governance.

Servitization through open service innovation in family firms: Exploring the ability-willingness paradox

Companies have historically invested in large research and development departments to drive innovation and provide sustainable growth. This model, however, is eroding due to a number of factors. What is emerging is a more open model, where companies recognize that not all good ideas will come from inside the organization and not all good ideas created within the organization can be successfully marketed internally. To date, Open Innovation concepts have been regarded as relevant primarily to ‘high-technology’ industries, with examples that include Lucent, 3Com, IBM, Intel and Millenium Pharmaceuticals. In this article, we identify organizations in industries outside ‘high technology’ that are early adopters of the concept. Our findings demonstrate that many Open Innovation concepts are already in use in a wide range of industries. We document practices that appear to assist organizations adopting these concepts, and discover that Open Innovation is not ipso facto a recipe for outsourcing R&D. We conclude that Open Innovation has utility as a paradigm for industrial innovation beyond high tech to more traditional and mature industries.

Having once been the headquarters of ‘Made in China,’ Shenzhen’s industry is currently undergoing profound change. The appearance of new urban places for technological innovation is reviving the ageing industrial processes of this manufacturing city. It is supposed to transform Shenzhen into the Silicon Valley of hardware. Two groups, one local, the shanzhai community made up of entrepreneurs and companies historically based on a strategy of imitating high-end products, and the other, a more international maker community, are thought to be the main drivers of this change using values of ‘open innovation’. The building of this ecosystem relies largely on practices associated with being open-source. Like in California, open innovation contributed to the creation of resources for the development of a vast high-tech industry. This ethnographic field study shows how, while both communities, the international makers and the shanzhai, draw on open innovation, they do not have the same values. For the shanzhai, open innovation means total deregulation and a kind of coopetition that poorly masks fierce competition. For the makers, open innovation does not entirely eliminate the classic tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ commons in the world of makers. These two communities still rarely collaborate.

The concept of Open Innovation (OI) has breathed new life into both empirical research and industry practice concerned with distributed and collaborative modes of innovating. While much of the empirical literature has emphasised the innovation enhancing benefits, our study extends existing work that has recorded the limits to open innovation. Using a sample of Belgian firms, we document that open innovation leads to higher rates of project abandonment and to lower rates of project completion; the latter suggesting the presence of delays and interruptions. Among other robustness tests, we address the concern that openness could be endogenous with regard to project abandonment. As we also find that higher abandonment rates coincide with lower future firm performance, we conclude that open innovation may have negative effects on firms’ innovation outcomes because of higher rates of project failures and hold-ups.

PurposeThe authors aim to investigate the concept of open innovation, identify different open innovation practices which help describe the continuum between closed and open innovation, and propose a framework that suggests an association between innovation contexts and practices.Design/methodology/approachThe authors first identify the variables to describe innovation contexts and practices. Such variables are developed based on the literature and on a previous paper by the same authors in 2011. Then, they establish an association between contexts and practices, and test it through cases drawn from the existing literature.FindingsThe paper proposes a detailed assessment of open innovation practices and suggests the association between each of them and diverse innovation contexts. A few case examples drawn from the literature prove coherent with the theoretical framework underlying the proposed association.Practical implicationsThe authors' results (and specifically the framework) enhance the organizations' awareness of the open innovation concept and the possible practices to implement it, as well as supporting managers to better select open innovation practices in different contexts.Originality/valueThis paper discusses the concept of open innovation practices to enhance the comprehension of the open innovation concept. Also, to the authors' knowledge, the proposed association between context and practices is original in that there are no similar theoretical frameworks that help organizations selecting innovation practices.

Open Innovation, Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Capital

The development of digital technology has encouraged the adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) as a strategic innovation in various industries, but its application in Indonesia remains limited due to low awareness and a lack of an integrated innovation strategy. This research aims to develop a strategy to strengthen AR technology through the integration of the Stimuli-Organism-Response (SOR) model, the concept of Open Innovation (OI), and Organizational Performance (OP), with a case study on PT. X in the city of Bandung. A mixed methods approach was applied, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis using the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) method to determine the priority of the strategy, as well as Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the relationships between variables. The results showed that stimuli in the form of interactivity, augmentation, and AR aesthetics had a significant influence on internal organizational factors (organisms) and subsequently affected user behavioral responses, including reuse intentions. Meanwhile, open innovation plays an important role in strengthening organizational competitiveness through external collaboration, with inbound innovation being the most dominant factor. The research also resulted in three main strategies: improving interactive features and user experience, developing high-quality visual content, and strengthening collaborative networks through open innovation. The integration of SOR, OI, and OP models has proven effective in shaping a holistic, data-driven AR development strategy. The conclusion states that this approach can increase the adoption of digital technology and make a real contribution to organizational performance and digital economic growth in Indonesia.

This research examines the correlation between Triple Helix and Open Innovation. The study aims to determine: (1) the development of the number of international publications related to Triple Helix and Open Innovation from 2003 to 2023; (2) the mapping of topics related to Triple Helix and Open Innovation based on co-word analysis; (3) the collaboration among authors or researchers related to Triple Helix and Open Innovation. Data collection was done by retrieving publication data from Google Scholar using the "publish or perish" approach with the keywords Triple Helix and Open Innovation within the period of 2003-2023. The data were in RIS/Refman format and analyzed using VosViewer software. The results show that the highest growth of publications related to Triple Helix and Open Innovation from 2003 to 2023 occurred in 2018, with 93 publications or 9.31%. The research findings indicate that the topics related to Triple Helix and Open Innovation from 2003 to 2023 can be divided into six clusters. Based on co-occurrence analysis through network visualization and density visualization, it can be concluded that Triple Helix and Open Innovation are interconnected and have been extensively published. For future research, the authors suggest conducting bibliometric analysis on reputable journal databases or those indexed in Scopus that explore the correlation between Triple Helix and Open Innovation. Additionally, it is necessary to conduct practical approaches such as case studies on the correlation between Triple Helix and Open Innovation within the innovation ecosystem in Indonesia