Open innovation with an effective open innovation team.

Abstract

This master's thesis explores how open innovation teams can successfully support open innovation inside of an organisation. Open innovation is a paradigm introduced by Henry Chesbrough (2003) a decade ago. It expands the innovation potential of organisations by opening them up to new ways of working with external partners. To implement open innovation, many companies rely on a small group of managers named open innovation teams. Although open innovation teams can potentially be vital for implementing open innovation in an organisation, not many articles directly discuss these teams. A thorough literature study and analysis of six open innovation teams enables a better understanding on how these teams are organised to best support open innovation in their companies. A focus is kept on the structure of the team, the task-design, the composition of the team, critical success factors, common problems, performance measurements, and future developments.