Abstract

Over the last decades, management scholars have largely investigated several aspects related to Open Innovation Processes – OIPs that concern the beginning, the diffusion and the future developments of the phenomenon, its typologies, its linkages with strategies and business models, its implementation, and even errors to be avoided when managing them. However, there is one aspect that seems to be underexplored and this deals with the involvement of top management.OIPs, like all the other managerial activities, need to be planned and defined ex ante; implemented, launched and managed; analyzed ex post. Thus, a decisional process – pertaining the activities to be carried out, human resources to be involved, criticalities to be avoided and results to be exploited – needs to be managed. Accordingly, the research question posed herein is: How do top managers handle OIPs?In order to respond to the above research question, a case study is presented hereinafter. This case study deals with an OIP launched by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), one of the top ten global carmakers, and concerning the car of the future. In particular, through this case study, it is rebuilt and analysed how FCA top managers have handled the whole OIP.By leveraging on the achieved results, the paper speculates on the strong commitment that top managers need to put in practice if they aspire to make OIPs successful.

Highlights

  • Undoubted relevance achieved by open innovation – OI (Chesbrough, 2003, 2004) has driven management scholars to investigate the phenomenon in reference to several aspects

  • By leveraging on a single case study, related to a pilot OIP managed by one of the top ten global carmakers, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA), the present paper aims to investigate and conceptualize the relevance of top management involvement in OIPs

  • Before launching the pilot OIP, four direct interviews were conducted with FCA top managers involved in the OIP (May-June 2015)

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Summary

Introduction

Undoubted relevance achieved by open innovation – OI (Chesbrough, 2003, 2004) has driven management scholars to investigate the phenomenon in reference to several aspects. Instead, have investigated the typologies of OI (Phillips, 2011); still other scholars have focused their attention on the impact that OI can have according to already implemented strategies (Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007) and already adopted business models (Frankenberger et al, 2014). Even if some scholars argue that top management contribution to innovation is limited because of the nature of their jobs (according to Hambrick et al (2005) it is a top level involvement that does not support innovation in a straight way), other scholars – most of them – have underlined their positive impact on building innovation capabilities (Felekoglu & Moultrie, 2014; Wang & Dass, 2017)

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