The process of organisational change in open innovation: evidence from high tech firms

Abstract

The open innovation concept has been extensively researched in the last decade and it still ranks very high in the agenda of technology and innovation management scholars. There are a number of questions still unanswered that should be thoroughly addressed to improve our understanding of this emerging innovation management paradigm. This paper leverages recent research analysing the organisational change processes followed by low tech firms to move from closed to open innovation. It adds to this literature by analysing how the organisational change process is administered in four Italian companies operating in high tech industries. Thanks to the analysis, we identify several commonalities between high and low tech firms and we unearth some relevant differences. In particular, the paper stands for the generalisability of previous findings regarding the transition towards open innovation and the potential of reading this process through the lens of Lewin’s theory of organisational change.