An Accounting Perspective for Defining Open Innovation Models in Science Based Industries

The paper suggests an accounting-based methodology for defining open innovation business models, by analysing investments and divestments of intangibles, either in separate transactions (trading) or within business combinations, mergers and acquisitions (incorporation). The framework is applied to a sample of 274 science based companies in bio-pharmaceutical and technology hardware & equipment industries. Results show that bio-pharmaceutical companies do not adopt either of the two models because their open innovation strategy is far more oriented to revenues and costs. On the contrary, technology hardware & equipment companies mostly rely on incorporation as a mean for absorbing know-how and intellectual capital from outside. The paper contributes to the existing research by suggesting metrics for open innovation, in both inbound and outbound dimensions, which are capable of describing different business models.