Open innovation: Organizational practices and policy implications

Abstract

Over the last decade, open innovation has impacted and enhanced firms’ collaboration strategies and public policy programs. This new ‘paradigm shift’ emerged from businesses’ needs to recover from the dot-com crash and to adapt to changing circumstances in a global recession. In this new wave of innovation, companies refocused on organic growth and on their customers and consumer markets to enrich their business units and new corporate venturing initiatives. Also, open innovation gained importance in firms’ innovation strategies as technology and idea markets became a path to commercialize undeveloped solutions via licenses and patents. Moreover, given the need for innovation systems that require the collaboration among firms both on local and international levels, governments are designing new programs and strategies to capture the benefits of investment in R&D programs. This doctoral thesis addresses the aforementioned issues and provides a multi-level research framework comprised of seven complementary research articles. These provide a broad perspective on open innovation, from the project level to the innovation system level of analysis, each analyzing a unique area in enough depth to provide a high level of insight, and guidelines which may be valuable to managers and policy makers in the future.