Abstract
In recent years, the phenomenon of open innovation has been on the rise in established firms, especially in terms of collaboration with startups. While the success factors of open innovation endeavours have been researched intensively, how collaborations are established is not well understood. Furthermore, there is a lack of research regarding asymmetric partnerships in open innovation, occurring when incumbents and startups collaborate. This study used a qualitative research design to approach the question of how incumbents select startups as partners in open innovation. The data incorporate the perspectives of both incumbents and startups along with the views of external experts. The findings are consolidated into a process model of partner selection for open innovation.
Highlights
Transactions and organisational processes that have traditionally taken place within a single organisation, such as research and development, the manufacture ofThis is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company
As the aim was to investigate how open innovation partners are selected and how the collaboration is evaluated in situations of extreme dissimilarity between startups and incumbents, only early-stage startups that had fewer than 10 employees were selected
To the best that could be determined based on an extensive literature search, this study is the first to investigate the overall open innovation process of sourcing and selecting the right partner in the context of highly dissimilar partners, namely startups and incumbents
Summary
Transactions and organisational processes that have traditionally taken place within a single organisation, such as research and development, the manufacture ofThis is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. Engaging in joint innovation endeavours can be promising for both the incumbent and the startup organisation Through such a strategic alliance, the startup partner gets access to the incumbent’s financial resources and broader knowledge base (see, e.g., Hite and Hesterly, 2001; O’Connor, 2006) and gains legitimacy in the market (see, e.g., Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven, 1996), while the incumbent organisation may exploit new technologies (see, e.g., Marion and Friar, 2012; Rothaermel, 2001) and spur its own innovation activities by using the startup’s agility and specialist expertise (see, e.g., Hogenhuis et al, 2016). Despite these potential benefits for both partners, the asymmetry between them in various organisational aspects, such as learning processes and organisational compatibility (Das and He, 2006), poses challenges to the partnership (Hogenhuis et al, 2016), thereby making selection of the right partner paramount
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