Open business models in the services industry

Abstract

During the last couple of decades, managing businesses and industries have undergone a huge metamorphosis. This transformation resulted from several global phenomena that caused managers of enterprises to change the way they ran their business. An interesting model of dealing with these challenges is open innovation.

So far, research on open innovation was limited to product-oriented industries and high technological companies in particular, but not much is known about how innovative systems could be introduced in services. Nevertheless, open business model innovations in services are interesting to look at, because the sector has become one of the dominant economic powers and is looked at as one of the most promising areas for future economic development (Küpper, 2001). This thesis is one of the first explorative investigations on open innovation in services and offers some extending ideas on the initial theories from Chesbrough (2011) and Hulzebos and Pieplenbosch (2011). This res