Collaborative Innovation: Creating Opportunities in a Changing World

Today’s business environment is characterised by fast and frequent change, which is often difficult to predict. As a consequence, companies need to continuously invest in the development of new business to remain competitive. However, due to the increasing complexity of the environment, internal development is often not enough, and collaborative innovation is becoming more important. There are three areas that warrant our attention. First, interest among employees and organisations to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives raises questions around the management and support that is needed to foster these initiatives and how to best organise internal corporate venturing. Second, the increasing number of start-ups provides opportunities for existing companies to tap into emerging technologies and business areas through corporate – start-up collaboration. Third, the changing nature of work provides an opportunity for existing organisations to rethink the relationship they have with their employees and to find a way to benefit from the increased flexibility of their own and other’s workers. I will raise a number of research questions in these areas and provide directions for future research in the field

Walking the knowledge tightrope

With “outside knowledge” looking increasingly attractive as a means of growing a business, firms need to be more skilful in identifying how, when and where they collaborate with external knowledge partners

External technology sourcing: The effect of uncertainty on governance mode choice

This study examines the effect of external and relational uncertainty on the governance choice for inter-organizational technology sourcing. We develop a number of hypotheses about the impact of environmental turbulence, technological newness, technological distance and prior cooperation on the choice between different governance modes. Data about external technology sourcing transactions in the pharmaceutical industry do not provide evidence for a continuum from less to more integrated sourcing modes. However, we find that the ranking depends on the type of uncertainty, indicating that firms tackle different types of uncertainty with different governance modes.Open Innovation, Corporate Venture Capital, Mergers and Acquisitions

The owner-market fit and responses to competing logics

This study investigates how the owner identity of media organisations affects their response to competing professional and market logics. To this end, a qualitative comparative multiple case study was conducted in the European news media sector. Our findings suggest that not only owner identity, but also the field position of the organisation is associated with particular market choices and the priority that is given to one market over another. This in turn has consequences for the degree of tension between coalitions with competing logics. Additionally, we find that the best owner-market fit for prioritising the democratic role of the press is a journalist employee cooperative that mainly serves a subscription market. Previous research on logics has addressed the role of ownership but did not include customer and employee cooperatives. Therefore, our findings provide important new insights.</p

Open innovation in SMEs: Trends, motives and management challenges

Although evidence for open innovation practices has been provided for large MNEs, they have not yet been analyzed systematically for SMEs. This paper presents the results of a survey among 605 Dutch innovating SMEs. The results show that SMEs are increasingly adapting open innovation practices. Moreover, they indicate a difference in the adaption to open innovation between manufacturing and services firms, and between larger and smaller SMEs. Larger SMEs adapting more quickly and in a more structured and professionalized way to open innovation than smaller ones. The survey furthermore shows that SMEs generally pursue an open innovation strategy to realize market-related objectives such as meeting customer demands, or keeping up with competitors. In addition, the results show that the most important barriers respondents face are related to the organizational and cultural differences when cooperating with other partners. Other serious barriers are administrative burdens, financing and knowledge transfer problems.

Closing the Innovation Performance Gap:Open Innovation in Military Bureaucracies

This article explores the effects of open innovation on innovation performance in military bureaucracies. While the understanding of how bureaucratic organizations can benefit from open innovation is still limited, this study discovered that open innovation can have a negative effect on innovation performance. However, leveraging an innovative culture can lead to improved innovation performance in organizations characterized by high levels of structure and hierarchy, especially those where secrecy and security are of vital importance.</p

Additivity and complementarity in external technology sourcing: The added value of corporate venture capital investments

Innovating firms often invest in a number of different technology projects, in different stages of development, using a wide range of distinct technology sourcing modes, such as strategic alliances, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions. Recently, firms have also gained an increasing awareness of the potential benefits of corporate venture capital investments. This paper investigates the particular role of corporate venture capital investments in the technology-sourcing portfolio of firms. More specifically, we focus on the extent to which corporate venture capital investments are additive or complementary to other modes of technology sourcing when explaining the innovative performance of firms. The results indicate that corporate venture capital investments are particularly beneficial for the innovative performance of firms when they are used in combination with other technology sourcing modes