European Trends in Business Incubation Through open Innovation Approach

Abstract

The open innovation (OI) is the actual framework for exploiting external resources and wider networks in doing innovation instead of just operating with in-house resources. Business incubators ensure networking and facilitate OI collaborations both inside the incubator among entrepreneurs and outside with external stakeholders. The purpose of the qualitative study is to identify the European trends in business incubation through OI approach by setting two main tasks – 1) identify business incubation trends and 2) validate these theoretical findings by conducting the empirical study in Latvia business incubators and 3) draw the conclusions for business incubation practitioners in order to improve business incubation from OI perspective. The qualitative research methods applied – 1) literature review on business incubation trends, OI approach in business incubation such as service provision, online and onsite incubation, tenant OI competences and strategies, co-creation and collaboration and 2) the empirical qualitative research in Latvia business incubators by conducting incubator management (13) interviews. The results proved that the main national trends dominant and present in Latvian business incubation are corresponding to the European trends, namely, 1) incubators are serving as OI partners and are recognized by tenants as access providers to external resources ands networks; 2) networking as facilitating activity of the inside-out and outside-in OI strategies; 3) tenants’ OI strategies and motivation as well as variety of OI partners (experts, mentors, clients, companies, researchers, universities) promote the better incubation results in terms of ideas validated, product developed, companies created and innovation implemented. These results are in line with the main findings on European trends from a literature review perspective. This article provides national findings on OI application in business incubation as the empirical novelty for business incubation practitioners, academia, entrepreneurship support policy makers and tenants internationally detecting the crucial role of OI activities applied in business incubation and incubators as OI partners. Business incubation trend analysis through Open innovation approach is a novelty of this research. Key words: open innovation, open innovation strategies, business incubator, business incubation trends, value co-creation Acknowledgement This research was conducted within the project “Open Innovation, No1.1.1.2/VIAA/3/19/426” funded by Postdoctoral Research Support Aid programme of Latvia.