Open source innovation networks: exploring high and low-density models

Open Innovation, Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Capital

Research question: In this study we examine whether knowledge management (KM), along with innovation concepts (attitude toward innovation, open innovation, and innovativeness), evokes direct and indirect influences on organizational performance of nonprofit sports clubs. Research methods: A total of 266 valid questionnaires were collected online from board members of nonprofit sports clubs in Iran. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate the relationships between variables. Results and findings: The results indicate that KM has a positive effect on organizational performance via two different sequential mediators: attitude toward innovation and innovativeness, and open innovation and innovativeness. KM has a direct positive effect on sport clubs’ innovativeness and organizational performance. Implications: Nonprofit sports clubs should take advantage of promoting KM processes such as facilitating the development and sharing of new knowledge through relying on internal and external knowledge sources. By doing so, sports clubs can enhance capabilities to exploit external knowledge and foster a positive attitude towards newness and innovation which can help them to innovate more and perform better. The study provides theoretical and managerial implications that help sports clubs innovate and increase multiple aspects of their organizational performance.

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.

Characterizing Circular and Open Business Models in a profit-driven environment through Business Model Patterns

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.

The concept of open innovation has successfully diffused among academicians and policy makers, framing innovation work in the post-bureaucratic era. Much of its initial theorising is built on single case studies of early adopters, but there is still a lack of quantitative studies in specific industries and geographical contingencies. In this paper, we report the results of a survey on open innovation (N = 114 firms), targeting the Swedish bio-pharmaceutical industry. The purpose is to shed light on how widespread the knowledge and practical utilisation of open innovation activities actually are in a particular industry. We find that very few respondents were aware of the open innovation concept, and also that open innovation related activities are, to a large extent, integrated within the ordinary innovation practices. At the same time, the application of open innovation activities relates to whether the firm has an innovation strategy, an own R&D department and has successfully launched innovations.

Although sustainability is a key concern in today’s world, more efforts towards achieving sustainability are needed. User inclusion in the information system design process could enhance the outcome of a system’s action towards sustainability. It is, however, important to understand the design procedure of a system to achieve such goals. A framework denominating as the inclusive innovation framework presented in this paper incorporated analyses from open innovation, universal design, and sustainability to motivate the initiation of internal and external driving factors towards sustainability goals. The derived framework could promote the information system’s enabled sustainable goals by combining the use of universal design principles and the concept of open innovation. A requirement engineering model was also proposed that was interoperable within the three subjects of interest discussed in the paper and was necessary for understanding the application of an inclusive innovation framework. Two use cases were then presented as an illustration for arguing the validation of the proposed inclusive innovation framework. The findings from the use cases indicated that the use of universal design principles along with an open innovation concept could increase information systems’ enabled sustainability goals. This could be done by enhancing a system’s successfulness along with the increased user satisfaction.

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.

Open Innovation remains the process of enabling inflow and outflow of knowledge, ideas, design, plus technologies throughout the organization during the various stages of the innovation process. This Innovation consists of inbound and outbound open innovations, whereby inbound open Innovation is the influx of knowledge, while outbound open innovation remains the outward flow of knowledge. Previously, studies related to open innovation have only focused specifically on the business world, the industrial sector while less focused on strategy and its implementation in the education sector. This study aims to fill this gap by studying open innovation in ordinary day secondary schools due to their significant contribution to development Malaysian education. Based on an open innovation model and a theory of views based on resources, this study will analyse the role of open and innovative innovation activities government support in determining the innovative capabilities of secondary schools. In this conceptual paper, the author develops the conceptual model that will be used in further research activities in education sector and will contribute to a better understanding of open innovation activities and their practices in secondary schools in Malaysia.

In the last installment of this column, I initiated a new series of topics aimed at defining the vocabulary of innovation management. The object is to look critically at the profession's terms of art, exploring their origins and mapping their limitations, to provide new clarity, and in the process restore some of their power. By looking at the terminology at the heart of innovation management and exploring how it has emerged and evolved, perhaps we can also get a glimpse of where innovation is heading. In the first entry in the series, we looked at the concept of disruptive innovation. This time, we're examining another concept whose usage has become confused and, at times, diluted: open innovation. Henry Chesbrough introduced the concept of open innovation in his 2003 book, Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Despite popular conceptions, Chesbrough didn't actually invent open innovation--his book is rich with examples of companies already doing it. Rather, he gave a name to the pattern and defined the paradigm: Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology. Innovation combines internal and external ideas into architectures and systems whose requirements are defined by a business model. He refined that definition in a 2006 book he co-edited, Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm: Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. The key in both definitions is the focus on an approach driven by the business model. As Gene Slowinski and Matt Sagal point out, in their 2003 book and in a 2010 RTM article, that approach must be supported by a set of tools and processes designed to facilitate the relationships--with universities, with researchers, with individual inventors, even with competitors--that are at the core of open innovation. Slowinski and Sagal's Want-Find-Get-Manage model, described in detail by Slowinski in Reinventing Corporate Growth, offers one framework for sustaining collaborative innovation. Chesbrough's assertion--in the books and in a series of journal articles between the two books (including two in the pages of this journal)--that open innovation would become absolutely essential was not wildly speculative; the precursors were clearly in place in the early 2000s. But he could not have predicted the changes to come in the few years after that first work, or the ways in which they would make openness both easier and more vital. Indeed, Innovation arrived on the cusp of revolutionary change. As markets became ever more dynamic and unpredictable, new technology platforms allowed knowledge to circulate ever more freely and far more widely. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Kickstarter all were born after open innovation. Wikipedia, Linux, Google's Raspberry Pi, and other open-source projects revealed the power of mass collaboration to create knowledge through unfettered sharing. And Red Hat and others showed that there was money to be made from open-source platforms. The crowd and the cloud became viable, even essential, tools. Wired magazine introduced the term crowdsourcing to the world in a 2006 article by Jeff Howe, and suddenly innovation had an entire new toolset. All companies had to do was figure out what to do with it. As Kevin Boudreaux and Karim Lakhani warned in a 2013 HBR article on the subject, Crowds are moving into the mainstream; even if you don't take advantage of them, your competitors surely will. All of these developments offered new tools for pursuing open innovation. But what many practitioners and researchers alike have done is conflate these new tools with open innovation itself, either treating crowdsourcing and open innovation as synonyms or suggesting some other kind of equivalence between the two concepts. …

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.

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.

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.