Estructura Curricular

Already one year after Chesbrough’s initial book on Open Innovation, Gassmann and Enkel (2004) further explored this rapidly emerging concept and took a process perspective on Open Innovation. Based on a case study of the IBM Industry Solution Lab in Zürich, they demonstrated that the locus of the various innovation activities is decoupled into three parts. First there is the locus of knowledge creation, the locus of innovation (indicating applying the idea/knowledge/technology and transforming it into an innovation), and the locus of commercialization (product development or exploitation of the innovation). Gasmann and Enkel (2004) argue that one of the major contributions of Open Innovation is the insight that the locus of innovation and the locus of knowledge need not necessarily be the same. The fact that the locus of innovation shifts during the innovation development process also implies the existence of knowledge transfers. Moreover, by distinguishing a locus of knowledge creation, a locus of innovation and a locus of commercialization, Open Innovation also acknowledges the fact that innovation is a process, something we gathered from the previous chapter. The shifting locus of innovation is also something that will be dealt with in the next chapter on User Innovation.

Research into these transfers lead to the identification of three core Open Innovation processes: outside-in (enriching the company’s knowledge base through integrating customers and suppliers and through external knowledge sourcing), inside-out (getting pecuniary returns for transferring ideas/knowledge/technologies to the outside environment), and the coupled process, which combines both inside-out and outside-in processes by working in alliances with complementary partners (Gassmann & Enkel, 2004). West and Bogers (2013) argue that the outside-in or inbound process has received most research attention and ascribe this to the fact that this process builds further on a large body of prior research. They see three different research angles on this inbound process: how firms obtain external innovation, the role of innovation created outside the firm by individuals, and research on open source software (including open source communities).

Instead of outside-in and inside-out, exploration and exploitation are also sometimes used (van de Vrande, Lemmens & Vanhaverbeke, 2006). These are concepts introduced in the context of organizational learning and refer to the relation between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties (March, 1991). Purposive outflows of knowledge or knowledge exploitation implies innovation activities to leverage existing technological capabilities outside the boundaries of the organization, whereas purposive inflows, or knowledge exploration, relates to innovation activities to capture and benefit from external sources of knowledge to enhance current technological developments (van de Vrande et al., 2009). The coupled process can then be seen as a form of simultaneous exploration and exploitation between two companies or organizations. Interestingly, Enkel et

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al. (2009) equal the coupled process to co-creation with complementary partners that engage in simultaneous outside-in and inside-out processes through alliances, cooperations and/or joint ventures. The description of this third reciprocal process ‘softens’ the Open Innovation concept, as Bogers and West (2012) note that the strong focus on firm success in most Open Innovation literature gives Open Innovation more parallels with the vertical integration model than compared to other perspectives on distributed innovation, such as open source or cumulative innovation, which are more a form of ‘open collaborative innovation’. The occurrence of the ‘coupled process’ and the description of it as being an act of co-creation can also be seen as an example of the apparent convergence between Open Innovation as conceived by Chesbrough and open, collaborative innovation as conceived by von Hippel (cf. chapter 4). Chesbrough and Bogers (2014) note the signs of convergence of both perspectives into a larger, holistic research domain drawing on the notion of distributed sources of knowledge for innovation. Gassmann et al. (2010) even state that “User Innovation is one of Open Innovation’s best-researched part fields”, which takes this idea even one step further, but implicitly suggesting that Open Innovation is the ‘master domain’. However, as we already argued in the previous chapter, we see distributed innovation as the underlying phenomenon, and both Open and User Innovation as derivative paradigms, taking different perspectives on the phenomenon. Building further on this line of reasoning, we regard Living Labs as an innovation approach, born out of past European experiences and practices (cf. chapter 5) that unites elements from both paradigms into a network based vision on innovation that drives on knowledge and technology transfers between the involved actors.

Van de Vrande et al. (2006) relate three organizational capabilities to these processes: absorptive capacity for the outside-in process, multiplicative capacity for the inside-out process and relational capacity related to the coupled process. These capabilities were later extended and partly renamed by Lichtenthaler (2008; cf. infra). This process view on Open Innovation sheds a different light on the literature on R&D spillovers (Arrow, 1962; cf. supra), in which these knowledge spillovers or leaks were regarded as threats to the innovation process. The proposed framework also builds further and extends the work on absorptive capacity (Cohen & Levintal, 1990, cf. supra). Chesbrough and Bogers (2014) argue that the Open Innovation concept deals with purposively managing the mechanisms and characteristics of such spillovers. Moreover, these spillovers are seen as an essential part in the Open Innovation strategy of a company or organization, something which they see as differing from any other innovation theory. Regarding these three main Open Innovation processes, some Open Innovation research has considered outbound commercialization of a firm’s technology (e.g. Lichtenthaler & Ernst, 2007), but the large majority of Open Innovation research has focused on the inbound process, in which firms source external knowledge to reduce cost or increase opportunity related to innovation (cf. Dahlander &

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Gann, 2010; Enkel et al., 2009). Such research identifies a variety of external stakeholders as possibly valuable sources of knowledge for innovation, such as suppliers, customers, competitors and universities (cf. Chesbrough, 2003, 2006; Christensen et al., 2005; Laursen & Salter, 2006). However, the third process, coupled innovation, has received only a limited amount of attention in research (Gassmann & Enkel, 2004), and is sometimes not even mentioned at all. Bogers (2011) dedicated some attention to this phenomenon in his work on what he called the ‘Open Innovation paradox’, also referred to as the ‘information paradox’, or the blurry boundaries between sharing and protecting. The fact that this is still an issue indicates that there is an imbalance in terms of knowledge and research data regarding these processes. This is surprising, as Chesbrough and Crowther (2006) propose that in a fully open setting, firms combine both technology exploitation (inside-out) and technology exploration (outside-in) in order to create maximum value from their technological capabilities and other competencies. However, it remains unclear how this ‘maximum value’ can be attained.