Open Innovation Research

What is Open Innovation?

The use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation. Companies can commercialize internal ideas through channels outside of their current businesses in order to generate value for the organization: examples include spinoff/ startup companies and licensing agreements. In addition, ideas can also originate outside the firm’s own labs and be brought inside for commercialization.

Open Business Models

Enable an organization to be more effective in creating as well as capturing value. They help create value by inclusion of a variety of external concepts and by utilizing a firm’s key asset, resource or position not only in that organization’s own operations but also in other companies’ businesses. By addressing the firm as a whole and restructuring a company’s business model as an adaptive platform, Open Business Models expands upon the open innovation concept.

Open Services Innovation

An escape route from the commodity trap – the decreasing profitability of products as they become commoditized – and a solution for growth, giving firms a significant competitive advantage. But service businesses are not immune from stagnation – like commodity businesses, they too have to raise their game, but they do so in different ways, often by working effectively with products to create platforms.

Current Projects in Open Innovation

Theoretical foundation of Open Innovation

The concept of Open Innovation has been highly popular both in academia and industry after the decade of its first introduction. More importantly, its own definition has evolved as more research has been done. So the Garwood Center puts significant resources into further research in this area. These resources include post-doctoral students, PhD students, visiting scholars, a select number of MBA students, and occasionally undergraduate students. We also host an annual research conference and collaborate with ESADE in Barcelona to host an annual PhD course on open innovation.

Applications of Open Innovation

We look at various applications of open innovation, which include crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, innovation ecosystems, public policies, NGOs, and so on.

Failure cases of Open Innovation

Analyzing previous failure cases of open innovation informs great insights both to practitioners and academics. For example, we run a “business model clinic” session during the Berkeley Innovation Forum to understand and reflect the challenges and barriers of practicing open innovation and extract lessons to learn for future implementations from various industrial contexts and domains.

Empirical evidence of Open Innovation adoption

With a collaboration with the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, Garwood conducts the periodical survey of open innovation adoption among large firms. Surveying large firms in both Europe and in the US with annual sales in excess of $250 million, this survey report presents many important facts that show to which extent and how large firms are now practicing open innovation. The survey will be repeated every couple of years, and is being extended to countries like Japan.

Boundary conditions for effective Open Innovation

In order to practice an effective and efficient open innovation, we look at feasible and realistic boundary conditions to implement open innovation. They include organizational structures, innovation processes, cultural change, top management commitments, business ecosystems, etc.

Open Innovation in various industrial contexts

We study how open innovation is practiced in numerous industries.  Few examples are Automotive, Food/Sustainability, Pharmaceutical, Information Technologies, etc.

To learn more about research in open innovation, please see our Book and Article pages.