IT-enabled Adaptive Open Innovation

Lacking efficiency and transparency regarding cross-company collaboration in the field of innovation management often leads to cost intensive and unsuccessful products and services. This is due to the fact that traditional Innovation Management approaches fail in terms of coping with emerging requirements in Open Innovation projects, e.g. the vertical and horizontal integration of strategic partners within and across the company's value network. However, companies are forced to maintain their competitive advantage through a constant and sustainable development of their product and service portfolio. In this context, knowledge workers play an important role in the collaborative advancement of innovative product and service ideas. For that reason, knowledge workers need systematic support regarding both methodological and operational challenges in the field of Open Innovation. The concept of Adaptive Case Management emerged from the necessity to support knowledge workers in unpredictable working environments. Therefore, this contribution shows, both from a conceptual and technological point of view, how knowledge workers can be supported in cross-border innovation projects. The approach is evaluated using an Adaptive Case Management software prototype and the findings on concept acceptance and software usability are presented. 1 Motivation Companies nowadays face increasing challenges of international competition, globalization of markets , and accelerated technological change (Camphausen 2007). To develop and maintain a competitive advantage, these factors need to be taken into account. Companies require to quickly adapt and renew their product and service portfolio to cope with these rising challenges (Hauschildt and Salomo 2011). Therefore, not only traditional innovation management techniques incorporating company internal capacities into the innovation process need to be applied, but also customers, suppliers, and partners must collaborate to introduce successful solutions in the market (Ylimäki 2014). In this context , knowledge workers as main carriers of (cross-company) entrepreneurial know-how play an important role in the field of product and service development (Muscalu and Stanit 2013). Over time, the complexity of products and services increased significantly. More often, they are not designed or created by individuals, but rather in cross-company teams, whose management presents new challenges to companies. In many cases, it is crucial to capture, connect, and exploit the ideas generated by those interdisciplinary teams (Howaldt, Kopp and Beerheide 2011). In particular the reconciliation of early stages of Open Innovation (OI) activities incorporate creative activities (e.g., the idea generation), and are characterized with high knowledge-intensity and unpredictability. Additionally , in these stages it is hard to plan upfront …