Preventing open innovation failures: A managerial framework

Abstract

Open Innovation (OI) is an increasingly popular approach that companies adopt to remain competitive. However, the challenges and complexities entailed by the OI should not be underestimated. These could lead to OI failures and strong negative repercussions for the company. Despite this, literature on the causes of failure of OI is still in its infancy, and results are scattered and fragmented. In this study we perform a systematic bibliometric review of the literature on the causes of failure of OI, to analyse its evolution and to provide a framework to help managers understand and prevent OI failures. We identify ten categories of causes of OI failure to be included in a seven-components framework. This adopts the perspective of the firm and investigates both internal and external causes of failure. Internal components include strategy, business organization, knowledge and Intellectual Property (IP) management, management, and resources. External components discuss the causes of failure related to inter-firm collaboration and the influence of environmental factors. Finally, by leveraging the results of the review activity, we provide some interesting suggestions for future research.