|
|
|
Organizing Open Innovation: Combining Value Creation and Value Appropriation
|
||||||
|
San Antonio, TX: Aug 15th - Academy of Management 2011 Symposium |
||||||
| Organizers
Alberto Di Minin
Dries Faems
|
||||||
|
Why do we need
one more symposium on Open Innovation ..try this one:
How can firms manage
to successfully
generate
value from open
innovation
strategies and,
|
||||||
|
We have seen a lot of research focused on Open Innovation in the last few years, but we feel that many unresolved issues remain on the table.
Whereas academic scholars are struggling to understand if Open Innovation is really a new paradigm, companies have created Open Innovation positions in their organization, and managers have embraced this term to identify certain type of operations, considering the practical implications, and impact on their companies. Key starting point for this discussion is that opening up organizational boundaries for innovation purposes triggers organizational costs and hence requires new balancing acts to appropriate value and improve performance. Faems et al. (2010), for instance, emphasize that investing in technology alliances with different kinds of partners bring along substantial managerial costs that, in the short term, are likely to exceed the benefits of such Open Innovation strategies. Also, strong indications are present that successfully adopting Open Innovation might require substantial investment in knowledge management systems, building sufficient internal absorptive capacity, deeply turning around fundamental aspects of their internal organization Di Minin et al. (2010). The purpose of this symposium was to contribute to a more comprehensive research agenda which explicitly recognizes that in order to profit from technology and innovation, organizations need to balance value appropriation and organizational costs of Open Innovation strategies. In order to do so, we have brought together a group of distinguished scholars, providing them a platform for discussion of their most recent work on managing Open Innovation. We explicitly encouraged these scholars to connect emerging insight on Open Innovation to the traditional core ideas of strategic management and technology management on value appropriation and organizational costs . The result was a very dense 90 minutes symposium. We here post the presentations scholars made available to the public, gathered in a freezing room of the San Antonio Convention Center.
|
||||||
|
Stefano Brusoni (ETH) & Andrea Prencipe (D'Annunzio Univ.) The two Italian scholars introduced the topic of the relationship between firms’ boundaries and innovation management: a much debated as well as pivotal issue for Open Innovation. They focus on the organizational requirements necessary to manage inflows and outflows of knowledge. They rely on the concept of loose coupling to explain how organizations can combine the advantages of specialization and market-based incentives (openness), with the benefits of integration and scope (closure).
|
||||||
|
Bruno Cassiman (IESE) & Giovanni Valentini (Uni Bocconi) Bruno and Giovanni, in their latest joint work attempt to broaden the scope of existing research on complementarity between internal R&D and acquisition of external knowledge. While the combination of these two activities is recognized by literature, their paper suggest that scholars have failed to fully capture the implications of the Open Innovation paradigm. Two aspects need further consideration: (1) the purposive use of knowledge (2) the presence/combination of both inflows and outflows of knowledge. Hence, they argue that a more valid test of the Open Innovation paradigm should consider the effect on performance of both inflows and outflows of technological knowledge. The complementarity of flows is tested on data from a survey of Spanish manufacturing firms.. with quite surprising results!
|
||||||
|
Wim Vanhaverbeke (Hasselt Univ.) Wim shifts the symposium’s attention on networks of small and medium sized companies operating in low-tech sectors. Through a series of case studies this paper investigates how do these firms create and retain value through Open Innovation practices. How do the benefits of openness overcome the organizational costs of setting up a network of innovation partners? A closer look at possible governance configurations shows the relevance of a shift in attention from technology to business models and new avenues of research on the topic are discussed.
|
||||||
|
Joel West (Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont Colleges) Joel introduced the concept of Strategic Openness as the selective opening of a firm’s control of its technology, innovations and other outputs in order to gain competitive advantage. Through an extensive review of empirical literature Joel identifies commonalities of strategies whose implementation mechanisms are very different, and whose ends are also quite divergent. However, through a new general theory of Strategic Openness it is possible to look at a broader set of empirical evidence under the same perspective. Participants will be offered the opportunity to critically appreciate the analysis of antecedents of this new theoretical framework.
|
||||||
|
Juan Alcacer (Harvard) Juan had the challenging task to conclude the workshop with his comments, coming from outside the Open Innovation field. He offered insightful ideas for each of the presenters, and brought forward some ideas on where to go with our research.
|
||||||
