Idea Assessment in Open Innovation: a State of Practice

Open innovation has become a fruitful approach to increasing the potential of innovation in organisations. Similar to traditional innovation, an open innovation approach can be characterised in three phases; namely idea generation, idea assessment and idea implementation/diffusion. While the academic community has begun to provide initial guidance for improving the various stages of the open innovation process, still little is known about how organisations currently assess ideas once they are collected. The potentially vast quantity of ideas collected through an open innovation approach has limited benefits to an organisation that is not able to categorise and assess ideas. Accordingly, in this study we carry out an exploratory survey among 331 managers to obtain a better understanding of idea assessment in practice. Our findings show, among others, that organisations investing in information systems for idea management have a higher satisfaction with the effectiveness of idea assessment, which is, in turn, associated with higher satisfaction with the innovation process overall.