Is Open Innovation a hype?

Written by Alexander Schroll | 21 February 2009

Tags: Hype | Open Innovation | Threat

Recently, Stefan Lindegaard blogged about "why open innovation is not just a hype". I would like to extend his argumentation a bit further:

Henry Chesbrough created the term open innovation in 2003. Now we have 2009, and open innovation is getting even more popular (and more mainstreamed) than ever before. A hype would usually get popularized a lot faster (e.g. compare with Web 2.0-topics like Myspace or Second World).

Especially the economic crisis makes open innovation even stronger. Companies are forced to cut costs and open innovation enables companies to save expenses in R&D. If we take a look at marketing practices, we see how good buzz marketing (also viral marketing and guerilla marketing) is performing, compared to classic advertising.

A closed innovation initiative

Written by Alexander Schroll | 20 February 2009

Tags: Chesbrough | Closed innovation | Community | Open Innovation | von Hippel

In November 2008 Henry Chesbrough founded an exclusive, members-only club: The "powerhouse Berkeley Innovation Forum". Major companies like Coca-Cola, Kraft, Philips Electronics and others joined the club for an annual membership fee of 10,000$. Members are meeting privately twice a year and communicate over a private online community.

Their official target is to "share ideas on how to meet research and development challenges across industries". But inofficial it is a direct way for companies to communicate with a top researcher in Berkely and the leader on the topic of open innovation.

Open Innovation: Lack of empirical data

Written by Alexander Schroll | 19 February 2009

Tags: Academic | Empirical | Open Innovation | Research | Studies

Current open innovation research has focused on a few selected cases and some empirical evidences, mostly in the USA. We already know the examples of Procter & Gamble, InnoCentive, Xerox PARC, IBM, Dow Chemical, Philips and Nokia. Although these cases are interesting, researchers need broader empirical data on the phenomenon of open innovation.

Since creation of the term "open innovation" by Chesbrough, the model has not yet been empirically examined using a large-scale dataset. As past research is mainly based on case studies or project experiences in single firms, I personally feel a strong request for broad, empirical studies arising in the scientific community.

Is it really Open Innovation?

Written by Alexander Schroll | 18 February 2009

Tags: Definition | Evaluation | Indicator | Measurement | Open Innovation

Since creation of the term "open innovation" by Chesbrough in 2003, it got incredibly hyped. Presumably, this happend because the term "open innovation" summarized a set of socio-political and economic changes, for instance the shift towards the "Attention economy". Open innovation was seen as an umbrella term for several tools and techniques like crowdsourcing, community based innovation, customer integration, lead users or even toolkits and mass customization. These terms became popular just some years ago and "open innovation" seemed to be the perfect umbrella term.