This paper reviews research on open innovation that considers how and why firms commercialize external sources of innovations. It examines both the “outside‐in” and “coupled” modes of open innovation. From an analysis of prior research on how firms leverage external sources of innovation, it suggests a four‐phase model in which a linear process—(1) obtaining, (2) integrating, and (3) commercializing external innovations—is combined with (4) interaction between the firm and its collaborators. This model is used to classify papers taken from the top 25 innovation journals, complemented by highly cited work beyond those journals. A review of 291 open innovation‐related publications from these sources shows that the majority of these articles indeed address elements of this inbound open innovation process model. Specifically, it finds that researchers have front‐loaded their examination of the leveraging process, with an emphasis on obtaining innovations from external sources. However, there is a relative dearth of research related to integrating and commercializing these innovations.
Research on obtaining innovations includes searching, enabling, filtering, and acquiring—each category with its own specific set of mechanisms and conditions. Integrating innovations has been mostly studied from an absorptive capacity perspective, with less attention given to the impact of competencies and culture (including “not invented here”). Commercializing innovations puts the most emphasis on how external innovations create value rather than how firms capture value from those innovations. Finally, the interaction phase considers both feedback for the linear process and reciprocal innovation processes such as cocreation, network collaboration, and community innovation.
This review and synthesis suggests several gaps in prior research. One is a tendency to ignore the importance of business models, despite their central role in distinguishing open innovation from earlier research on interorganizational collaboration in innovation. Another gap is a tendency in open innovation to use “innovation” in a way inconsistent with earlier definitions in innovation management. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research that include examining the end‐to‐end innovation commercialization process, and studying the moderators and limits of leveraging external sources of innovation.
(2017) The open innovation research landscape: established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis, Industry and Innovation, 24:1, 8-40, DOI: 10.1080/13662716.2016.1240068 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10. 1080/13662716.2016.1240068 Published online: 07 Nov 2016.Submit your article to this journal This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation (OI). The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several OI scholarshaving a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop on 'Researching Open Innovation' at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on OI, organised at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study OI -originally an organisationallevel phenomenon -across multiple levels of analysis. integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting and integrating various perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorising will be needed to advance OI research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research -particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.
What role do users play during innovation? Ever since it was argued that users can also be the sources of innovation, the literature on the role of users during innovation has grown tremendously. In this article, the authors review this growing literature, critique it, and develop some of the research questions that could be explored to contribute to this literature and to the theoretical perspectives that underpin the literature.
Open innovation is now a widely used concept in academia, business, and policy making. This article describes the state of open innovation at the intersection of research, practice, and policy. It discusses some key trends (e.g., digital transformation), challenges (e.g., uncertainty), and potential solutions (e.g., EU funding programs) in the context of open innovation and innovation policy. With this background, the authors introduce select papers published in this Special Section of California Management Review that were originally presented at the
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.