Open innovation in telecom

On another website, someone remarked they were working on an article on “open innovation initiatives in the telecom industry.” I said to myself: “Wait a minute, hasn’t someone already done that?”

It’s that a new study isn’t needed, but as a reviewer I would sure expect the author to know this before submitting. Worse case, a research design that doesn’t add to what’s already known could be hard to publish.

Sure enough, I found four papers: two in journals, two in book chapters.

• Dittrich, Koen and Geert Duysters. 2007. “Networking as a means to strategy change: The case of open innovation in mobile telephony,” Journal of Product Innovation Management, 24 (6): 510-521. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5885.2007.00268.x
• López Berzosa, David, Manuel Lorenzo, Carmen de Pablos Heredero and Gonzalo Camarillo, “Practising Open Innovation in the Mobile Industry,” in Carmen de Pablos Heredero and David López, eds., Open Innovation in Firms and Public Administrations: Technologies for Value Creation, Hershey, Penn.: IGI Global, 2012, pages 209-220. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-341-6
• Maula, Markku, Thomas Keil and Jukka-Pekka Salmenkaita. 2006. “Open innovation in systemic innovation contexts,” in Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West, eds., Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241-257. http://www.openinnovation.net/Book/NewParadigm/Chapters/12.pdf
• Rohrbeck, René, Katharina Hölzle, Hans Georg Gemünden. 2009. “Opening up for competitive advantage – How Deutsche Telekom creates an open innovation ecosystem,” R&D Management, 39, 4, pages 420–430. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9310.2009.00568.x

There may be others, but these are clearly positioned in their titles as being about open innovation in a telecom setting. (OK, so the Maula et al requires you to go to the title page to see that the 3rd author was then a Nokia employee.)