Editorial Opening up the innovation process: towards an agenda

Cisco is regarded as one of the world’s most innovative companies. It does very little research and acquires most of its technology from external sources. After Solow (1957) had found innovation and technical progress to be the main drivers for economic growth, researchers and managers associated the establishment of a strong internal R&D capability with innovativeness. Inventions, after all, were generated by a company’s own researchers, the firm’s own engineering department realized the transition of ideas to commercial products, and the diffusion and exploitation of innovation was driven by the innovating firm itself. This was the paradigm according to which innovation was likened to a national treasure used to gain temporary monopolistic profits. Companies rarely resorted to sharing innovative results as a means to generate competitiveness – rarely in the early pre-competitive phase and not at all during commercialization. In the last decade, stronger global competition led to the labour sharing and cooperation between firms’ innovation processes. In most industries, agility, flexibility, and concentration on core competencies are now regarded as sources of competitive advantage. The ‘do-ityourself’ mentality in technology and R&D management is outdated. Conversely, outside-in thinking deliberately builds on external sources of innovation. Opening the firm’s boundaries to external inputs in a managed way enables companies to realize radically new product innovation. Recently, the strategy to access knowledge resources externally has been emphasized, as knowledge is growing faster and clusters of highly specialized knowledge are globally dispersed. External sources of knowledge and innovation have become increasingly relevant (Porter and Stern, 2001). New information and communication technologies (ICT) have reduced the perceived distances between the actors of the innovation process while enabling integration of customers and suppliers into the design and development process. In addition, the technological success of open source software, such as Linux and Apache, has played an important role in spreading open innovation thinking. The propensity to cooperate on R&D projects has increased since the 1980s yet reached a new peak during the 1990s. As firms replaced their internal R&D activities more and more by contract research and external development, the academic community (e.g. Rigby and Zook, 2002; Chesbrough, 2003a) began to emphasize the opening of the firm’s boundaries to outside innovation. Answers have been sought regarding the managerial implications of this shift in focus. Is open innovation ‘the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology’ as Chesbrough (2003b) stated? This special issue aims to contribute towards structuring the topic and opening up a new debate. In the following, some drivers and patterns of the process of ‘opening up’ innovation are discussed.