Sabine Brunswicker

Open Innovation in Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises (SMEs): External Knowledge Sourcing Strategies and Internal Organizational Facilitators

In this paper we explore how small and medium‐sized enterprises () engage in external knowledge sourcing, a form of inbound open innovation. We draw upon a sample of 1,411 and empirically conceptualize a typology of strategic types of external knowledge sourcing, namely minimal, supply‐chain, technology‐oriented, application‐oriented, and full‐scope sourcing. Each strategy reflects the nature of external interactions and is linked to a distinct mixture of four internal practices for managing innovation. Both full‐scope and application‐oriented sourcing offer performance benefits and are associated with a stronger focus on managing innovation. However, they differ in their managerial focus on strategic and operational aspects.

The open innovation research landscape: Established perspectives and emerging themes across different levels of analysis

Abstract 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 scholars – having 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 organisational-level phenomenon – across multiple levels of analysis. While our 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.

A Fad or a Phenomenon?: The Adoption of Open Innovation Practices in Large Firms

OVERVIEW: We surveyed 125 large firms in Europe and the United States with annual sales in excess of

Beyond Open Innovation in Large Enterprises: How Do Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) Open Up to External Innovation Sources?

250 million to examine the extent to which large firms are now practicing open innovation. Our results showed that open innovation is not a passing fad: 78 percent of the firms report practicing open innovation, none have abandoned it, and 82 percent of those practicing open innovation report that it is practiced more intensively today than three years ago. We also asked about specific practices for “outside-in” and “inside-out” open innovation. We found that customer co-creation, informal networking, and university grants were the three leading inbound practices in 2011; crowdsourcing and open innovation intermediary services were rated lowest in importance. Joint ventures, selling market-ready products, and standardization were the three leading outbound practices; donations to commons and spinoffs were least frequently used. We also found that large firms are more likely to receive freely revealed information than they are to provide such information.

Managing Open Innovation in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)

The existing literature on open innovation mostly concentrates on large firms. Little is known about the role of open innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this paper we explore how SMEs engage in open innovation search. We draw upon a new survey of 1,489 SMEs. Results highlight that SMEs purposively open up to external innovation inputs. We identify variations in how SMEs search for external innovation inputs and empirically classify five strategic types of open innovation search. While these five strategies can be found in different industries, size and age classes, results suggest that a SME’s open innovation search strategy is conditioned by its organizational context. We also find that these strategies significantly differ in their ability to improve innovation performance as well as their internal organizational requirements for managing innovation. Our study indicates that both a demand-driven and a widely diversified search strategy can improve the success of SMEs in launching innovations. The latter can even enhance their ability to capture financial value from innovation; however, value capture requires a higher proficiency in managing innovation internally.

The Adoption of Open Innovation in Large Firms: Practices, Measures, and RisksA survey of large firms examines how firms approach open innovation strategically and manage knowledge flows at the project level.

Over the past years, open innovation has gained wide attention in literature on innovation. However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been excluded from the mainstream discussion in open innovation. Very recent studies confirm that open innovation is increasingly important for SMEs but also suggest that findings from research on large firms cannot be simply transferred. This chapter aims to explicate the concept of open innovation in SMEs with a particular focus on services and tourism SMEs drawing upon and expanding recent empirical research. First, it discusses the specific nature of open innovation in SMEs and the particular facets of the tourism sector. Afterwards, it presents an overview of different modes of open innovation in SMEs. Against this background, the chapter conceptualizes the internal dimensions of managing open innovation in SMEs by drawing upon recent research on internal organizational facilitators and practices for open innovation. It concludes with recommendations for future research on open innovation in SMEs in the tourism sector.

Cocreating Value from Open Data: From Incentivizing Developers to Inducing Cocreation in Open Data Innovation Ecosystems

OVERVIEW We present a large-sample survey of open innovation adoption and management in large firms, a follow-up to a previous study. We repeat some of the survey measures from the first survey, finding that open innovation continues to be widely practiced in about 80 percent of responding firms. Outside-in open innovation is more often practiced than inside-out. In other words, large firms are net takers of free knowledge flows, in part because they are concerned about IP protection for outbound knowledge. When we added new measures to examine open innovation at the project level, we found that firms selectively manage knowledge flows into and out of projects and are formalizing processes as they move from problem definition to execution. We conclude with observations about the organizational challenges and risks of shifting to an open innovation approach.

Transparency as design choice of open data contests

Open governmental data available via platforms like data.gov have earned a place in the innovation agenda of governments and local authorities alike. To successfully make use of these sources, governments around the world experiment with competitive virtual contests or challenges to ignite the creativity of developers and hackers and motivate them to turn this data into novel digital applications. However, such efforts don’t seem to be sustainable. Applications developed in such contests regularly fail to ignite the continuous use by the end users. We argue that governments need to adopt an ecosystem perspective facilitating cocreation within the diverse open data innovation ecosystems of developers, producers, and users in order to foster the generativity needed for continuous value creation. However, various tensions among actors appear along the way. Taking a paradoxical view towards ecosystem tensions, we propose a socio-technical infrastructure that supports ecosystem generativity by addressing latent tensions in the “breeding zone” of an open data innovation. The infrastructure supports generative responses to these tensions in three ways: creating virtual trading zones, supporting the duality of stable and dynamic roles, and providing technological affordances for fluidity. This framework could set the stage for future research, encouraging system designers and policymakers to foster cocreation in open data innovation ecosystems.

Creating impact in the digital space: digital practice dependency in communities of digital scientific innovations

Open data contests have become popular virtual events that motivate civic hackers to design high performing software applications that are useful and useable for citizens. However, such contests stir up controversy among scholars and practitioners about the role of transparency, or more specifically, the unrestricted access and observability of the applications submitted throughout the contest. In one view, transparency may reduce performance because it causes excessive replication, whereas another view argues that transparency can encourage novel forms of reuse, namely recombination. This article proposes a new perspective towards transparency as a design choice in open data contest architectures. We introduce a 2‐dimensional view towards transparency, defined as observability of information about each submitted (a) solution (how it works) and its (b) performance (how high it scores). We design a sociotechnical contest architecture that jointly affords both transparency dimensions, and evaluate it in the field during a 21‐day contest involving 28 participants. The results suggest that the joint instantiation of both transparency dimensions increases performance by triggering different kinds of recombination. Findings advance literature on sociotechnical architectures for civic design. Furthermore, they guide practitioners in implementing open data contests and balancing the tension between individual versus collective benefits.

Re-Use and Patterns of Digital Innovation in Open Crowds

Modern science has become collaborative and digital. The Internet has supported the emergence of scientific digital platforms that globally connect programmers and users of novel digital scientific products such as scientific interactive software tools. These digital scientific innovations complement traditional text-based products like journal publications. This article is focused on the scientific impact of a platform’s programming community that produces these digital scientific innovations. The article’s main theoretical argument is that beyond an individual’s contribution efforts to these innovations, a new social structure affects his scientific recognition through citations of his tools in text-based publications. Taking a practice theory lens, we introduce the concept of a digital practice structure that emerges from the digital innovation work practice, performed by programmers who jointly work on a tool. This digital practice creates dependence forces among the community members in an analogy to Newton’s gravity concept. Our model represents such dependencies in a spatial autocorrelative model. We empirically estimate this model using data of the programming community of nanoHUB in which 477 nanotechnology tool programmers have contributed more than 715 million lines of code. Our results show that a programmer’s contributions to digital innovations may have positive effects, while the digital practice structure creates negative dependency effects. Colloquially speaking, being surrounded by star performers can be harmful. Our findings suggest that modeling scientific impact needs to account for a scientist’s contribution to programming communities that produce digital scientific innovations and the digital work structures in which these contributions are embedded.