A Framework for Cross-Industry Innovation: Transferring Technologies between Industries

Abstract

Cross-industry innovation (CII) aims to reuse existing solutions by leveraging the innovative power of partners’ knowledge from another industry. CII is a key concept for identifying and adapting potential (disruptive) innovations and technologies and gains importance in recent years. To enable CII in companies, we examine the topic holistically. First, we summarize the existing literature, including frameworks of CII. Second, we conduct expert interviews in order to consider also the practical perspective. We then consolidate the results into a framework with a structured procedure and detailed methods, which can be used by companies. Our contribution has several implications for practice and research. For practice, we derive five recommendations for actions for companies that already use or plan to use CII. For the scientific community, we summarize the state of research on CII and present our framework, which can serve as a starting point for further research.