Corporate Open Innovation Research Articles

Accelerating corporate innovation ecosystems: The exprivia business incubator case study

Large enterprises and start-ups collaborate to adopt Open Innovation (OI) strategies and to develop digital technologies. In this setting, Business Incubators (BI), which connect large firms and startups, are now vital to the Corporate Open Innovation Ecosystem (COIE). A single case study method was adopted for the multinational company Exprivia, operating in the ICT sector. The results show how Exprivia created a COIE through an innovative BI pilot project to operationalize OI and promote knowledge collaboration between companies, universities, and start-ups. Strategic implications for large organizations involves defining OI strategies based on Corporate BIs to sustain growth and profitability.

Do relationships matter?—Director networks and corporate open innovation

This paper examines the impact of a firm's important social relationship, director network, on its open innovation. By matching the director network data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2018 with manually collected data on joint patent applications, we conduct an empirical study and explore the possible influence mechanisms. The results show that the director network has a significant positive impact on corporate open innovation. The conclusion still holds after endogeneity treatment, propensity score matching estimation, and other robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that director networks promote more R&D cooperation among firms than firm-university and firm-research institution R&D cooperation; director networks have a more positive impact on the R&D cooperation activities of non-state-owned firms compared to state-owned firms; moreover, in terms of the type of director networks, independent director networks have a significantly higher positive impact on firms' open innovation than non-independent director networks. It is further found that director networks can facilitate firms' participation in R&D collaborative activities by alleviating firms' financing constraints and reducing transaction costs. This paper enriches the research related to social relations expanding firm boundaries. The findings provide some references for firms to further develop open innovation activities and the construction of innovation systems.

The impact of board capital on open innovation with the moderating effect of executive equity incentives

As a predominant global innovation paradigm, open innovation constitutes a pivotal means of enhancing firms’ innovation performance. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly concerned about strategies to strengthen open innovation, but previous research has overlooked corporate governance factors. This study empirically investigates the impact of board capital on corporate open innovation using data from Chinese listed firms (1999–2009) within the resource dependence and upper echelons theory framework, employing the fixed effects model for panel data and the hierarchical regression method. Findings reveal that the breadth and depth of board capital positively affect the breadth of open innovation, though not significantly the depth. Additionally, executive equity incentives enhance the relationship between board capital and open innovation breadth. Robustness checks support these findings. Notably, board capital’s impact is more pronounced in large enterprises and high-technology industries. This study offers practical insights for firms to prioritize board capital considerations in fostering open innovation initiatives.

Systematic Literature Review: The Role of Innovation and Competitive Advantage of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises as Mediation Variables

Systematic Literature Review (SLR), which focuses on the role of innovation and competitive advantage as mediators of various factors on the performance of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), is still relatively rare. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the factors that affect competitive advantage and the role of innovation mediation and competitive advantage in influencing MSMEs performance. This study utilized Google Scholar as a database. Of 500 studies, 400 were excluded according to the title and abstract, and 100 were screened for eligibility, resulting in 41 studies included for review. This study showed that there were 45 factors that affected competitive advantage and 15 factors that affected sustainable competitive advantage. This study also found that innovation variables, including marketing innovation, innovation, green innovation, and corporate open innovation, mediated various factors influencing competitive and sustainable competitive advantages. Also, competitive advantage was able to mediate the relationship between several factors that affected the performance of MSMEs. These findings provided a reference for future research to analyze innovation as a mediating variable for the relationship of various factors to competitive advantage. This finding also provides information that for MSMEs to survive in globalization, they should have a competitive advantage to be competitive. Thus, the factors in this study can be used to strengthen the competitive advantage of MSMEs and improve their performance.

Organizational Agility, Open Innovation, and Business Competitive Advantage: Evidence from Culinary SMEs in Indonesia

Some problems that are often faced by small and medium industry players are the low ability of SMEs to explore opportunities, and the low ability of SMEs to innovate in business. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the influence of organizational agility and open innovation on competitive advantage in culinary SMEs in Medan. This study used quantitative methods. The subjects in this study were employees and owners of the culinary industry in Medan City as many as 218 respondents. The sampling technique is carried out by accidental sampling method. The data was processed by structural methods of modeling equations, and using the IBM Amos Program. The results showed that there was a positive and significant influence between organizational agility and corporate open innovation. The findings also prove that organizational agility and open innovation can predict the competitive advantage of the culinary industry in Medan City positively and significantly. The results also found that open innovation mediates the influence of organizational agility on the competitive advantage of the culinary industry in Medan. In other words, open innovation is proven to significantly mediate those that form or create strong links between organizational agility and competitive advantage. We provide suggestions to improve organizational agility, and unlock innovations in the culinary industry in Medan City to improve business competitiveness.

Exploring the effects of director network on open innovation: the moderating role of CEO short-sightedness

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the effects of director network on open innovation. As an informal institutional arrangement, the director network is an important source for the enterprise to obtain external information, which provide resource basis for open innovation. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) as the top of management team could make short-sighted decisions for personal interests; this paper also investigates the moderating role of CEO short-sightedness between director network and open innovation.Design/methodology/approachThis paper takes 4,102 Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2020 as the research sample. By introducing network centrality and structural hole to measure director network and using data mining to extract key words related to CEO short-sightedness from annual reports, this paper constructs several multiple linear regression models to analyze the impact of director network on open innovation and the moderating role of CEO short-sightedness.FindingsThe analysis finds that director network can facilitate corporate open innovation. Enterprises can acquire more external resources in high centrality and structural hole of director network and promote ability for corporate open innovation. The relationship between director network and open innovation is negatively moderated by CEO short-sightedness. When the level of corporate governance and analyst attention is high, the negative effect of CEO short-sightedness on the innovation effect of directors’ networks is suppressed.Originality/valueThis is the first empirical paper to investigate the promotion effect of director network on open innovation as well as the negative moderating role of CEO short-sightedness. The findings bring new perspectives to the open innovation and enlightenments for practical activities from social relationship aspect.

A Note on Corporate Open Innovation: Engagement with Startups

This Note summarizes our findings based on an exploratory and initial global research study of best practices for organizations employing open innovation business model strategies. We utilized an expert interview approach to develop a survey that was taken during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was meant to assess open innovation strategies and tactics, particularly focused on partnering with startups and emerging companies. We worked with a cohort of Corporate Accelerator Forum (CAF) members (as experts), prior to a more extensive survey of corporations concerning their engagement with startups. Our experts included key leadership from Techstars, Bayer CoLaborator, and Illumina Accelerator. We plan a broader, more extensive survey of national and international companies as a follow up. Our results highlight and provide commentary on current industry practices and trends during the Covid-19 pandemic, and have applicability to the biopharma, MedTech, and digital medicine/health markets.

An Open Innovation Framework for collaborative food product design & manufacturing

One of the most debated topics in actual global literature is Open Innovation. However, there are still many questions that have not been answered respecting the modern industry. One of them is the link between the corporate Open Innovation practices and the industrial structure of mature industries. Specifically, the food industry is a mature industry where its profit margins are thin and its R&D failure rate for new products is very high. Both facts indicate that a decent return on development investments cannot be provided and that the food industry still cannot rely on its traditional way of thinking and innovating. In addition, this sector recently perceived its end-users to be wary of radically new products and changes in consumption patterns. Hence, the main aim of that industry is to design new food products that consumers will buy and at the same time ensure that these products will reach them in time and at adequate quantity. Through a proposed conceptual framework which integrates a collaborative and shared knowledge framework based on “Open Innovation approaches”, we propose to work with both customers´ data and selected partners to design new food products that offer an integrated sensory experience of food and packaging, encompassing customization, healthy eating, and sustainability.

The Evolution and Impact of Anonymous Preference in Online Communities

Open platforms are swiftly developing the capability to capture and display collective preference from the diverse opinions of online participants. Corporate open innovation communities, like Dell Idea Storm, have encouraged thousands of participants to submit and vote on ideas, but anonymous voting can lead to erratic and unproductive conflict between the community and the corporation. As the identity of participants in these systems becomes less salient, identifying individual preferences within the collective becomes increasingly difficult for other participants, and the ability to lead the collective preference, or to learn from and follow identifiable others, becomes systematically impossible. Thus, there is a practical need to understand how anonymous collective preference evolves, and a theoretical need to explore the effect that potentially unique evolution patterns have on the final collective preference. Utilizing 19.8 million preferences by 43,136 participants of reddit.com over 2 ...

HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICES AND OPEN INNOVATION

The human side of open innovation (OI) has not been extensively studied; however, when companies develop new products or services, it is essential to foster corporate innovativeness, and managing personnel is a key to this. Human resource (HR) practices are an essential means by which companies can influence and shape the skillset, attitudes, and behaviour of individuals to do their work and can systematise the work of the whole organisation. In this paper, we aim to contribute to understanding the role of HR in open innovation, by analysing the HR practices in companies operating under an open innovation approach. We test our model with the PLS-SEM method, using Smart PLS software. Our findings suggest that personnel education is essential in supporting corporate open innovation strategies. Internal motivation systems prove to be valuable assets to support internal and external openness in OI implementation. High appreciation of personnel and its value to company are important for increasing external and internal openness.

Context-Aware Creativity Support for Corporate Open Innovation

This article discusses how creativity in corporate Open Innovation processes can be supported by IT, especially regarding the situative long- and short-term social context of users. Therefore, the authors first define and formalize a model for creative processes. From evidence gained through qualitative interviews with managers from companies of the German ITC sector, they derive insights on creative situations and contexts as well as the current state of IT support for creativity in these companies. On the basis of these insights and guided by the design science methodology, the paper shows the development of a social-software based creativity support system and infrastructure. Furthermore, the authors discuss how appropriate IT tools can incorporate situative and social contexts for creativity support. Examples are a tabletop-based interface for co-located creativity and a web-based, mobile-enabled interface for distributed creativity. As a partial evaluation of the ideas, the article concludes with an experimental comparison of different interfaces to a non-IT scenario.

The impact of open IP platforms on IP-strategy norms in life sciences

In the biomedical fi eld multiple stakeholders may collaboratively develop, package and build transactions around technology. This is often referred to as open innovation, open biotechnology or open source R&D. Intellectual Property (IP) and IP rights play important roles in collaborative platforms but little research has previously assessed the impact that such platforms exert on corporate IP-strategies. A case study was therefore conducted of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), CAMBIA Biological Open Source (BiOS) and the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV). Our results impact managerial decision-makers at pharmaceutical, biotech and agriscience companies intending to implement corporate open innovation and IP strategies.

Attributive Idea Evaluation

This article introduces a new idea evaluation method, named “Attributive Idea Evaluation” (AIE), for corporate open innovation communities. AIE aims on the contextual integration of all employees’ knowledge and is based on twenty attributes. Assigning these attributes to ideas facilitates intuitive evaluations. Ranking different ideas is enabled by enclosing corresponding numerical values, correlating to success potential. The method generated convincing results when utilized to evaluate innovation ideas within a large German service company, fulfilling most of the requirements for evaluating ideas in early phases of the innovation management process. Additional discussions with the participants and an expert interview confirmed AIE’s utility, usability, and reliability.

Avatar-based innovation: Consequences of the virtual co-creation experience

Virtual worlds, such as the prominent Second Life (SL), offer unprecedented opportunities for companies to tap the innovative potential of consumers and consumer communities. Despite the potential, the studied corporate open innovation initiatives fail to attract sustained engagement among co-creating participants. The underdeveloped state of these islands in terms of innovation tasks and the lack of knowledge about how to attract innovative avatars raise key concerns about the nature of the experience avatars have on corporate sites. In a quantitative study we examine the importance of the experience in encouraging active participation in the innovation tasks. When participants experience an inspiring, intrinsically motivating, involving and fun co-creation experience, they participate more intensely. Prior research on virtual new product development is extended to the virtual world context and insights of the virtual co-creation experience serve as guidelines for the conception of avatar-based innovation initiatives.