The Art of Open Innovation

y journey with Open Innovation started with the incorporation and first association with the Service Science Factory, University of Maastricht. I went on to complete my doctoral dissertation on open innovation from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad focusing on success factors at a project level for Information Technology firms across India, Europe and Australia.

Advances in technologies, increased computing power, improved manufacturing techniques, and easier access to global markets have prompted organizations to innovate. As a response, organizations tend to invest more in internal Research and Development (R&D). However, it is impossible for any organization to acquire all the essential knowledge for the required innovations in a sector in which it operates. The concept of open innovation is contrary to this view of internal R&D and as defined by Prof. Henry Chesbrough - is a “paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology” and based on the concept of availability of abundant knowledge outside the organizational boundaries.

Even though the concept of open innovation has received much interest among management practitioners and researchers, there are no concrete views on how to do it right. The critical success elements of partnership and open innovation (few key insights summarized below) were found to differ based on the innovation objectives such as development of breakthrough innovations, improved technology transfer time, and faster time to commercialize.

1. When the innovation objective is faster technology transfer across Ideation and Development phases specialized partnerships were found to be preferred
2. Partner Collaboration Intensity (a measure developed to compute number of partners, duration of collaboration and contributions from the partners) had a positive correlation with technology transfer speed across ideation and development phases while it was found to be play no considerable role in the commercialization stage.
3. The only open innovation parameter improving the commercialization time was variety of partners involved in a network such as academic, research, and marketing partners.
4. Open innovation was found to play a major role in breakthrough innovations. All parameters such as partner variety, number of partners, phase openness and intensity of collaboration had a positive correlation with the occurrence of breakthrough/disruptive innovations.

The results highlights open innovation as the solution when a disruptive innovation is targeted for the market and it also gives opportunities even for small firms who envision innovation in their processes, products and/or services when it cannot leverage on its on internal R&D capabilities.

My published working papers at IIM, Ahmedabad research and publication may be referred for the detailed analysis and results.

Degree of Openness and Project Performance: A Multi-Country Empirical Assessment of Information Technology (IT) Innovation Projects

Exploring Openness in Information Technology (IT) Innovation Projects

Processes, Strategies, and Performance Aspects of Open Innovation in Information Technology Sector - Insights from Experts

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