The Open Innovation Model

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Innovation Management B - Spring 2010

The “open innovation” paradigm and its importance in determining the innovation performance of companies

Antonio Corda

Professor Christine Oughton

Introduction

This theme is of particular interest in an era of growing globalisation and increase in contacts between the different actors in the innovation framework. It is important to remark, that these actor are not just economic entity, but they could have a very different nature; analysing innovation, no matter in which specific sector, during the late 20th (and early 21st) Century, not considering just the traditional players (traditional economic actors, like firms, and institutions), would surely lead to an incomplete and extemporaneous survey.

Furthermore, the radical evolution in generating innovation must be also considered. From the prime role of the personal genius during the 19th Century, which developed his knowledge and/or experience to obtain successful and often radical innovations (e.g. Thomas Alva Edison), to the birth and development of professional innovators, the in-house R&D department of big corporations which produced great part of the inventions and innovations of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, often supported by militaristic needs and requests. Although this last figure and schema is still actual and manifest, it is impossible for us to ignore the emergence of new, different paradigms, on whom this work will be centred. We are introducing the (growing) role of “network innovation” (defined by Chesbrough as the “open innovation” paradigm), which is carried out no more by a single unit in a single enterprise in an hermetic way. We could see this paradigm as the natural evolution of Innovation, which in its growing complexity can no longer be carried out by a single knowledge unit, but by different units in a network (from the single inventor to a network of scientist and engineers in a single R&D division, from a single...