There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside‐in process of open innovation, while the inside‐out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge‐intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.

No abstract

No abstract

In cross-industry innovation, already existing solutions from other industries are creatively imitated and retranslated to meet the needs of the company's current market or products. Such solutions can be technologies, patents, specific knowledge, capabilities, business processes, general principles, or whole business models. Innovations systematically created in a crossindustry context are a new phenomenon for theory and practice in respect of an open innovation approach. While the cognitive distance between the acquired knowledge and the problem to be solved was regarded as a counterproductive factor in older research, recent theory regards it as positively related to innovation performance. Following the latest theory, we examine 25 cross-industry cases to ascertain cognitive distance's influence on innovation performance. Our study reveals that there is no direct correlation between a higher or a closer distance and a more explorative or exploitative outcome. Creative imitation through cross-industry innovation rOur major managerial contribution consists of elucidating the cross-industry innovation phenomenon. Management does, however, know that adapting analogical solutions is a valuable complementation of their innovation portfolio, leading to breakthroughs or radical innovation. Nonetheless, we cannot confirm that looking far from established industries increases the value of Creative imitation through cross-industry innovation r

No abstract

The necessity and the advantages of integrating customers into the innovation process are widely recognized. There are, however, inherent risks to customer integration that can be reduced by comprehensive risk management methods. Based on intensive desk research and in-depth workshops with nine companies, this article provides a detailed description of the various risks and offers advice on how to minimize them. Diverse risk management methods theoretical backgrounds are introduced, while examples from companies that have had vast experience with all aspects of customer integration illustrate their practical applicability.

No abstract

Customer integration into the innovation process is about to become a best practice. The leaduser approach has proven to be especially valuable when reducing discontinuous innovation's market risk. Since the theory of customer integration still lacks a concept and processes, this article illustrates how companies can be helped from a practice perspective to implement customer integration and maximize market safety. Triggered by the results of an in-depth case study, we adapted Lettl's explorative model of customers' contribution to the new product development (NPD) process, which was originally developed for the medical technology industry, to engineering companies.