Network Analysis of Open Innovation

Abstract

The way people innovate and create new ideas and bring them to the market is undergoing a fundamental change from closed innovation to open innovation. Why and how do firms perform open innovation? Firms’ open innovation is measured through the levels of firms’ joint patent applications. Next, we analyze network structures and characters of firms’ joint patent applications such as betweenness and degree centrality, structure hole, and closure. From this research, we drew four conclusions. First, the structure of collaboration networks has both direct and indirect effects on firms’ innovative performance. Second, in the process of joint patent applications, there is a long tail phenomenon in networks of joint patent applications. Third, the number of patents and IPC subclasses together constitute a meaningful measure of the innovation performance of firms.

Harvesting reflective knowledge exchange for inbound open innovation in complex collaborative networks: an empirical verification in Europe

“…In existing literature, the volume of OI is often operationalized and measured by the number of collective patent applications made by interorganizational networks. A relatively recent study comprising a network analysis of OI conducted by Yun et al (2016) also indicated that the number of joint patents submitted by interorganizational alliances are heavily influenced by OI practices, which are shaped by the structure of organizational collaboration networks; the stronger the ties between the organizations, the more collaboratively they perform. Hence, we propose the following research hypothesis:…”