Incentives and performance measures for open innovation practices

摘要

Purpose – To guarantee alignment between ongoing activities and organizational goals, innovationmanagement theory emphasizes management control and explicit innovation strategies asprerequisites for innovation performance. However, the theory on open services innovationemphasizes individual autonomy and incentives to foster open innovations. The aim of this paper is toexplore this inconsistency.Design/methodology/approach – An explorative research design involving 25 semi-structuredinterviews in five large scale-intensive service firms is explored. Scale-intensive service firms arestrategically sampled for this study since these firms experience tension between open serviceinnovation characteristics and efforts to standardize.Findings – The authors show how individual autonomy facilitates the internal and external networkingrequired in open innovations. However, individualized incentives do not suffice to motivate, mobilize anddirect the collaboration and collective effort needed to ensure successful implementation of openinnovation processes. Innovation performance is a collective effort, and the findings suggest that firms’business strategy works as a collective incentive system.Practical implications – The findings imply that firms should not rely on individualized incentives aloneto implement open innovation processes successfully. The implementation of more collectively orientedincentives is also necessary to motivate the collective effort required to succeed with open innovation.Originality/value – The study extends previous work and shows how innovation practices are collectiveefforts that also involve the mobilization of external resources. The incentives observed have an effect onindividual behaviour, while performance measures, to a larger degree, cater to the collective level. Theauthors present three propositions for further empirical investigation