Innovating in the Open lab: Archetypes of OI strategies and capabilities

Editors

Fritzsche, Albrecht; Jonas, Julia M; Roth, Angela; Moslein, Kathrin M

Description

Open innovation (OI) and related businessmodels have captured the imagination oflarge and small corporations alike in the recent few decades. Open innovation is"theuse of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation,and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively"(Chesbrough,2006, p.2). While most firms look at OI as involving external partners in their innova-tion processes and decisions, it is in effect, much more than that. It could be seen asan external form of governance, including partnerships, alliances, markets and con-tracts, contests, platforms, and user/ community involvement in innovation (Felin andZenger, 2014). Such a broad perspective allows for firms to leverage OI and its possibili-ties to access a larger base of knowledge tosolve a broader range of problems, bothwithin the firm as well as its interface with its stakeholders.In this chapter, we argue that firms need specific capabilities to engage in OI.Depending on the capabilities firms possess/ acquire, they adopt distinctly differentOI strategies. We evolve a framework containing nine archetypes of OI strategiesand capabilities, based on the firms'innovation focus areas and resource deploy-ment decisions.Over the past few decades, OI as a practice has gained significant momentum,thanks to a variety of factors: (a) development of technologies that have loweredthe costs of communication across organizational boundaries; (b) assembly of alter-native figurations of communications, incentives and property rights; and (c) theincreasing importance of linking macro-level aspects in problem solving by manag-ers (Felin and Zenger, 2014). The adoption of OI has helped firms transform theirorganizational boundaries into semi-permeable membranes, that allow for easymovement of innovation between the organization's internal innovation processeswith the external environment.

Publication Date

1-4-2020

DOI

10.1515/9783110633665-020

ISBN

978-3110633665

Publisher

De Gruyter

Keywords

Open innovation, OI, Open labs, Business Development, Change Management, Cooperation, Business Management, Business and Economics

Source Link URL

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110633665-020

discipline

Business; Technology and Innovation; Business; Business Administration, Management, and Operations

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