Processes, strategies, and performance aspects of open innovation in information technology sector - insights from experts

Abstract

Open innovation paradigm considers that in order to advance technologies and markets, firms can and should leverage internal and external knowledge, ideas, expertise, and paths to market. This is in contrast to the traditional or closed model of innovation management, where organizations usually leverage the in-house capabilities for innovations. Even though the concept of open innovation has received much interest in management research, majority of the studies on open innovation to date have been mostly exploratory in nature. We used semi-structured interviews to gain experts’ perspective on open innovation concepts in the Information Technology (IT) sector. Twenty four interviews were conducted with top management executives in IT firms across India, Europe, and Australia over a period of eight months. A content based analysis of these interviews using open coding was used to investigate experts’ perspective of open innovation, strategic relevance of open innovation, and industry perception and trends of open innovation adoption. We developed a framework to classify open innovation projects based on the market knowledge strategy, innovation objective, and stage of the project. We also analysed the existing openness and open innovation project performance measures as perceived by these experts.