Open innovation progress in last three years

About 18 months ago, the journal R&D Management called for papers on open innovation. This month, the journal has published the resulting special issue, edited by Ellen Enkel, Oliver Gassman and Henry Chesbrough. (No one told me the issue was out, but I found it while updating the Open Innovation website.)

Below is the list of articles. The most striking thing about the nine articles (not counting the introductory article by the editors) is how German the issue is: seven articles by German authors, one from Switzerland, one from the U.K. (and none from outside Europe).

But if you dig a little deeper, what’s more impressive is that almost all of the articles are about Open Innovation. This means there’s a depth of open innovation research and researchers (at least in Germany) producing open innovation research good enough for a good journal like R&D Management.

Having articles about open innovation seem unremarkable. However, if you look at the previous R&D Management special issue in June 2006, five of the nine articles were clearly about user innovation with only passing mention (if at all) of open innovation as generally defined. This is no big deal if you want to argue that open innovation has subsumed and supplanted user innovation, but it is encouraging to draw the distinction if you believe (as I do) that they are related but distinct streams of research.

The most personally gratifying paper was that of Klaus Fichter on innovation communities, which picked up on two suggestions I made for open innovation researchers to expand their focus. One was the call (with Karim Lakhani) to more precisely use the “community” construction in open and user innovation research. The other (in the editor’s closing chapter of our 2006 book) was for a broader range of methodologies and levels of analysis in open innovation research. If open science is supposed to be the cumulative production of shared knowledge, as a researcher it was rewarding to see the work I’d done has had some impact.

It was also nice to see publication of the paper by Christina Raasch and her Harburg colleagues on tangible goods — including “free” beer and open source car — that was presented in a well-attended session at OUI 2009. Congratulations to all for their newly published papers.

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Authors	Title	DOI
Ellen Enkel, Oliver Gassmann, Henry Chesbrough	Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00570.x
Ulrich Lichtenthaler	Outbound open innovation and its effect on firm performance: examining environmental influences	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00561.x
Marcus Matthias Keupp, Oliver Gassmann	Determinants and archetype users of open innovation	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00563.x
Winfried Ebner, Jan Marco Leimeister, Helmut Krcmar	Community engineering for innovations: the ideas competition as a method to nurture a virtual community for innovations	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00564.x
Klaus Fichter	Innovation communities: the role of networks of promotors in Open Innovation	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00562.x
Gordon Müller-Seitz, Guido Reger	Is open source software living up to its promises? Insights for open innovation management from two open source software-inspired projects	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00565.x
Christina Raasch, Cornelius Herstatt, Kerstin Balka	On the open design of tangible goods	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00567.x
Sara Holmes, Palie Smart	Exploring open innovation practice in firm-nonprofit engagements: a corporate social responsibility perspective	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00569.x
Anne-Katrin Neyer, Angelika C. Bullinger, Kathrin M. Moeslein	Integrating inside and outside innovators: a sociotechnical systems perspective	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00566.x
René Rohrbeck, Katharina Hölzle, Hans Georg Gemünden	Opening up for competitive advantage – How Deutsche Telekom creates an open innovation ecosystem	10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00568.x