Open innovation in big companies: an empirical study

Abstract

Innovation is recognized by academics and professionals as essential to enhance the competitiveness of organizations and foster their growth. Traditionally, innovation is seen as going mostly just within the company. However, the increasing availability and mobility of knowledge labour, the development of Internet and venture capital markets, as well as the easier to widen the scope to possible external knowledge providers, have weakened the effectiveness of traditional innovation systems (Chesbrough, 2003). Thus, open innovation concept is presented with the essential premise of opening organizational boundaries. The underlying idea is based on the assumption that in a world where knowledge is distributed, companies should not rely solely on its own research and development, but open up their boarders to external knowledge. Therefore, the aim of this study is analyse innovation strategies and practices developed by medium and large companies in order to understand how they enhance innovation within the company or other partners or companies they work for, and what are their perspective on crowdsourcing phenomenon as a practice to potentiate the introduction of innovation in companies. An empirical study was conducted following the Grounded Theory method to collect and analyse empirical data. The results show that companies are starting using some external knowledge in their innovation process though they still have some bias in introducing strategies that uses the global network. At the end of the paper the results are discussed and some future research directions presented