3 Ways Open Innovation Companies Improve their Fortunes
The Open Innovation Research Forum, part of the University of Cambridge has released a paper detailing the results of a study of almost 1200 German innovation companies.
According to a report at Open Innovation.eu the scientists behind the paper put forward a hypothesis that there are a number of different innovation-enabling factors that generate greater revenue for organisations that adopt open innovation compared to those that don’t.
“Harnessing the Value of Open Innovation: The Moderating Role of Innovation management” drew on longitudinal, cross-sectoral data from German companies across several sectors. These included mining, food and tobacco, textiles, banking and insurance, housing services, wholesale trade and metals.
Search Openness
The authors define open innovation as the use of “search openness”, that is the use of external sources as an influx for internal R&D. Almost 70% of the surveyed companies said they used one or more external sources, and the paper focused on five of these: customers, research institutions, government, suppliers and competitors.
Then it earmarked four ‘moderating factors’ that could distinguish companies that soak up from these five sources, and those that don’t. These four factors are technology leadership, incentive system, research capacity and cross-functional collaboration.
Overall the paper revealed that the factors more present in open innovation organisations are:
Incentive System
Research Capacity
Cross-Functional Collaboration
“Returns from open innovation are greatest when firms employ a dedicated incentive system for innovation, maintain their own research capacity and advocate strong cross-functional collaboration,” the study explained.
The working paper also concluded that there was no real difference in the benefits from technology leadership between companies that use OI and those that don’t.
Click here to download the full paper.
Reader Comments
Thanks for the pingback and great post on this working paper.
Posted by Jan on February 1, 2012
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