L05 A: How open is innovation? A retrospective and ideas forward Linus Dahlander

Question 1

The article distinguished between four kinds of open innovation. State the four kinds and categorize them:

Answer 1

Inbound:
(1) sourcing
(2) acquiring

Outbound:
(1) Selling
(2) Revealing

Question 2

Changes in recent years have altered our thinking about open innovation. What kind of developments are we talking about?

Answer 2

(1) technological developments
(2) Organizational developments
(3) Societal developments

Question 3

Technological developments

Answer 3

(1) Technologies that generate and handle troves of data enabled firms to implement new kinds of business models that rest on firm’s ability to generate and handle massive amounts of data.

(2) Technologies that mediate interaction (APIs and logic services) openness enables collaboration and value creation for some, but can lead to exploitation and value destruction for others.

(3) Technologies that automate decision-making use of machine learning to ease selection burden on humans when sourcing ideas (with e.g. crowdsourcing).

(4) Technologies that expand search (crowdsourcing and crowdfunding) access to distant and distributed knowledge has expanded at impressive rate, but also comes at a cost of selecting between alternatives.

(5) Technological developments and new questions data are becoming core to any business (data-driven business models and open services innovation) including policies for using and sharing data.

Question 4

Organizational developments

Answer 4

(1) Platforms as creators and mediators create value by connecting unconnected groups, which allows the platform owner to pursue an extremely effective division of innovative labor that is heavily dependent on incentivizing and organizing input from several stakeholders.

(2) Practices to reveal internal ideas .

(3) Legal devices that expand and narrow search. Legal issues of ownership and control continue unabated

(4) The drive for corporatization of commons

(5) Accelerators to obtain ideas from the outside

Question 5

Societal developments:

Answer 5

(1) Adjusting to global developments (e.g. Brexit and trade wars between US and China make it more difficult to collaborate across nation states).

(2) Relying on open innovation in times of crisis crises may stimulate exploration and shape collaborations between previously disconnected partners how lasting are these collaborations?

(3) The need to address wicked problems (climate change etc.)

(4) Big science and citizen science