Abstract
Food machinery SMEs have been essential constitutional actors in Thailand’s food industry. Their participation in food innovation is considerably recognized. However, their innovation logics and practices remain poorly understood. To understand the role of open innovation (OI) in this change, specifically the OI logics and practices in new product development (NPD), the food-machinery framework has been chosen to analyze 109 NPDs in 2 Thai food machinery SMEs. This model identifies the various flows of knowledge between the different actors. The results demonstrated the new OI practices being absent from previous typologies, and six distinctive patterns within the same framework. These alternatives were revealed through the distinction between laboratory and industrial scales. The refined model demonstrated the ability of Thai SMEs to adjust OI logics and practices to the nature of the collaborative strategy associated with each NPD. Finally, the results exposed some Thai SMEs switching their business from generic machinery companies to innovation intermediaries.
Highlights
Thailand has been recognized as an agricultural country
The finding of open innovation (OI) logic; the inbound or outbound dominance of the applied OI logic depends on the purpose of each new product development (NPD) and on the nature of the partners involved
The OI logic adopted in 59 NPDs required a coupled OI logic inbound dominant (Group 1, 2, and 4), while 11 NPDs required a coupled OI logic outbound dominant (Group 3)
Summary
The food industry (FI) is one of the most prominent drivers for the Thai economy. In 2019, Thailand was ranked the 11th most significant food products exporter in the world. The Thai Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (OSMEP, 2020) reports that food products exported from Thailand are mostly primary and raw in nature. Products are recently more frequently found in the form of ready-to-eat (RTE) food products. The proportion of RTE foods to freshly produced foods was 35:65 in 1988 but was increased to 50:50 in 2016. This moderately increasing ratio suggests that new product development (NPD) and food technologies have high levels of participation in this industry
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