Are We Actually in the Open Innovation Era? Current Practices of European Manufacturing Companies

During the last decade, many researchers have claimed that we are in the era of open innovation. However,an extensive picture of the actual implementation of open innovation is still lacking. In order to address this, a research project was launched, called Open Innovation Survey (in the following, OIS project), involving five European countries (Italy, Spain, UK, Sweden and Finland). The research project is focused on inbound innovation and it is aimed at identifying the Open Innovation models through which firms open their innovation funnel to their external partners, by means of an extended survey. The paper presents the first tentative results drawn from the survey, in terms of descriptive statistics and cluster analysis, which allows depicting the different innovation models actually adopted in the practice of companies