What Skills for Multi-Partner Open Innovation Projects? Open Innovation Competence Profile in a Cluster Ecosystem Context

Abstract

Industry 4.0 and the turbulent environment have rendered increasing interest in open innovation that extends from the bilateral transmission of expertise to multilateral platform collaborations. Open innovation ventures are seen as intricate collaborations that require the commitment of numerous partners during the lifetime of the project. In order to examine the specific competence of open innovation teams, we set the research question as follows: What individual competencies facilitate the exchange of knowledge in open innovation projects? We explored the theoretical framework of open innovation and collected information from a nation-wide, cross-industrial set of OI projects from three high-performing clusters, facilitating a total of 102 OI projects to identify open innovation competence dimensions, thus creating a novel profile. The outcomes showed that competencies facilitate the exchange of knowledge in open innovation ventures in distinct ways. Our findings showed that open innovation competence can be captured using a profile with the dimensions of creativity, entrepreneurship, communication and networking, open-minded thinking, risk-taking, and self-efficacy in digital skills. These dimensions of the open innovation competence profile are necessary for cluster project set-up. This analysis demonstrated that components of the open innovation competence profile could be paramount in understanding the underlying factors in the success of collaborative innovation projects.