Open Innovation: Industrial Application and Demands - a Qualitative Study

摘要

Open Innovation (OI) opens a company's innovation process to its environment in order to enable a purposeful collaboration. Over the last 10 years OI has become an important part within the innovation management in industry and academia. Therefore, we conducted an explorative interview study in 2012 to analyse how and with which results and success OI is applied in industry. The goal was to evaluate benefits and risks mentioned in literature as well as to analyse the utilization of OI-methods, and to identify (so far) unconsidered challenges and potential solution strategies for barriers against OI. Based on this, industry demands in terms of research gaps were derived. Participants of the study in 2012 were 13 German large-scale enterprises (including one SME) from different branches, and with different product/services portfolios and types of customers. In addition to companies with OI experience, we also interviewed companies without OI experience to allow the identification of possible concerns against OI. Though the overall feedback was positive, also some critical feedback, challenges and needs regarding the application of OI were stated. The results of the study are consistent with previous studies but reveal additional challenges and demands which have not been in the focus so far. To evaluate the pre-published results of the study, we conducted a workshop with eight Bavarian medium-scale enterprises from different industries and with different types of products/services and types of customers. These companies had no or only small experience with OI. The goal of the workshop was to identify expectations towards OI as well as concerns against OI, in order to evaluate the results of the interview study. This paper presents the results of the study and the workshop, and derives research gaps and future demands.