Research Theme: New Modes of Innovation: Managerial and Strategic Business Practice and Open Innovation

 

Andy Cosh at the Innovation Summit 2010

 

Project Leaders:

Dr Andy Cosh (adc1@cam.ac.uk), Dr Joanne Jin Zhang (Research Fellow) (Joanne.zhang@ukirc.ac.uk)
Researchers: Professor Alan Hughes, Dr Ammon Salter, Dr Oliver Alexy, Michael Kitson, Dr Tim Minshall, Gerald Avison (TTP), Chas Sims (TTP)
Project Period: October 2009-October 2012

To see an overview of this project and its objectives please click here.

Project Progress (as at April 2012)

The project team have continued their work with the unique Open Innovation survey, conducted at the end of 2010.
There has been considerable engagement with business, policy makers and the global academic community to present and discuss the result and ongoing work. Highlights include a NESTA OI report launch in June 2011 as well as presentations at the OECD NESTI meeting, Industrial Fellows Forum and Global Economic Symposium. In addition, we ran a popular interactive session called “Open Innovation: is it a good thing for your organization” at the TSB conference Innovate ‘11. The team also organised a session on open innovation at the UK~IRC’s 2011 Innovation Summit.
To support the use of the survey, the team held a workshop in Cambridge with the presentation of six paper drafts utilizing the OI survey to a panel of external discussants: Prof Ellen Enkel, Zeppelin Univ; Prof Jim Love, University of Birmingham; and Prof Yoshi Nakata, Doshisha Univ.
 

The UK~IRC also hosted and co-sponsoring an evening seminar with Jim Love (University of Birmingham) and Stephen Roper (University of Warwick) entitled “Open Innovation in small firms: positive step or costly mistake?”, building on work supported by NESTA.

The analysis of the relationship between open innovation practices and company performance has led to several papers at advanced stages of preparation for journal submission. These papers explore how firms use of open innovation practices shapes their ability to generate innovations. The first set of working papers shows that firms who engage in multiple forms of open innovation have greater innovative performance than those firms who engage in less broad forms of open innovation. In addition, this work shows that the adoption of open innovation practices among UK firms is profoundly influenced by their past performance, prior investments in R&D and age. These findings have been summarized in several conference papers and submissions to the Academy of Management conference.

In addition, a paper from the project – No Soliciting: Managing Unsolicited Ideas for R&D by Oliver Alexy, Paola Crisucolo and Ammon Salter – is forthcoming for California Management Review. This paper examines the ways organizations can successfully use unsolicited ideas from inventors, customers and others in their innovative efforts, looking the organizational arrangements that support the effective unsolicited ideas programmes among leading multinationals. This work builds on case studies as well as an analysis of the open innovation practices of the world’s largest firms.

Also, Mina, Bascavusoglu-Moreau and Hughes (2012) explore open innovation among service firms. They find that services are more active seekers of external knowledge than manufacturers. Openness is associated with the provision of complex firm outputs which integrate a service component and this holds true not only for services but for all businesses.  When they look at the likelihood that services cooperate with specific knowledge sources, they confirm prior results about the role of customers, but when they consider the relative importance of different sources of knowledge, against expectations, they find that universities and the public research base are relatively more important than customers as a source of external knowledge. The paper contributes to the theory of innovation by identifying the sectoral and firm-specific drivers of external knowledge searching and fills a very significant gap in the open innovation literature through its original quantitative and comparative analyses of open service innovation.

This project is also conducting a series of focused case studies:
 
·         Nelli Theyel  has carryied out a series of interviews in California with clean energy companies about their open innovation practices following interviews with their British equivalents at the end of last year.
·         Joanne Zhang and Andy Cosh are examining the engagement and IP practices of a technology consultancy company.
·         Tim Minshall is working on several related case studies. One project focuses on location and small firm innovativeness in East England. Another focuses on how firms change their location to benefit their innovation. Another examines how two public organisations and two private firms help start-ups from product development to commercialisation.
·         Alan Hughes, Andrea Mina and Jocelyn Probert, as part of the related UK R&D Task force project, are working on case studies aimed at exploring how the UK can maximise the return to R&D at the sectoral level (Pharma, Construction, Digital IT and Energy). 
 

To see the first set of results from the survey were put together in a report, a copy of which you can download here: Open Innovation Choices - What is British Enterprise doing?. 

See the presentation and Q&A session for the launch of the report. 

Events
Events associated with the Open innovation project:

  • 11 October 2011, Innovate'11, Business Design Centre, London. The project team hosted one of the breakout sessions in the afternoon at this event, entitled "Open Innovation:Is it a good thing for your organisation?". The session proved very popular, as it was full to capacity, and was run on an interactive basis with a very participative audience.  
  • UK~IRC's 2011 Innovation Summit, 25 November 2011 held at IBM Hursley. The project team hosted a parallel session on Open Innovation.
  • Open Innovation: New Insights and Evidence Conference is to be held on 25-26 June 2012.

 Previous Project update from October 2011