Universities and open innovation

Last month, UC Santa Cruz held a seminar at the NASA Ames Research Center entitled “Managing Industry-University Partnerships in Silicon Valley”.

I rushed home from a trade show in Las Vegas to be able to hear the seminar. Firms sourcing innovations from universities is certainly open innovation, and it’s something I’m interested in studying someday in a future paper.

The panel included representatives from HP, Genentech and two from UCSC. The first speaker was Lou Witkin of the new HP Labs Open Innovation Office, who moved over after 15 years in HP Lab’s University Relations office. (It was nice to hear that Lou had heard of the book and of course had already met with Henry Chesbrough.) The other speaker was Anna Williamson, a biz dev manager for Genentech who formerly sat on the other side of the table at UC Berkeley.

The two veterans gave a good sense of both why firms get involved with universities and how to make it work. Slides were not available and I was not allowed to tape the event, but I was able to take some notes.

Witkin, in particular, offered a number of specific pointers as to both the motivations and mechanics of making university-industry relations work. One of the most interesting slides was on “The Partnership Continuum”, which mapped a transition of university-industry engagement from career fairs up to sponsored research and major donations. (This slide and some other material also appeared in a January 2008 talk by Wayne Johnson, then VP of HP’s University Relations).

Universities are part of a larger economic ecosystem, which works best if the partnerships are open, collaborative and organized around win-win principles. While American universities are often admired by their European counterparts for strong industrial relations, Witkin said such collaboration is quite common in other countries (such as Brazil and China) where government is more cooperative with industry. He cited John Kao’s book Innovation Nation as a good source for information on how other countries are doing.

Both Wiktin and Williamson emphasized the importance of establishing long-term relationships that span specific projects. Longer-term master agreements reduce the transaction costs that can cause negotiations to take months or even years. Implicit within their comments is that sometimes it can be difficult to negotiate an agreement with major universities.

In fact, universities are creating increasing pressure to view technology transfer not as a way to help business and society, but primarily to capture revenues for the university. In talking with leading academics in the technology management field last week, it was clear that I’m not alone in worrying that the pendulum has swung too far. Talk is that some large firms have shifted from the US and Europe to Russia and other less developed countries, where the negotiations are quicker and less contentious.

Williamson talked about the business reasons why Genentech wants a fairly open hand with known terms in pursuing business opportunities based on licensed technology. Then, with her former University of California hat on, she noted that universities are reluctant to grant such unrestricted licenses for fear that the partner will tie up the technology and not follow through.

Witkin referred to an article on his work with UC Berkeley in improving licensing negotiations, co-authored with Beth Burnside, vice chancellor of research for UC Berkeley. The article, “Forging Successful University-Industry Collaborations,” appeared in the March-April 2008 issue of Research-Technology Management. Another party interested in improving this process is BASIC (Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium), which has published a series of reports on improving industry-university collaboration and specific contributions local research universities can make to industry.

UCSC sponsored the event as part of its ongoing campaign to build friends for its hoped-for business school here. Plans call for the school to be located in the proposed 70 acre NASA Research Park, which would include Carnegie Mellon, Santa Clara, De Anza College and perhaps SJSU. The incredibly valuable land — at the intersection of three freeways and only a couple of miles from Google, Yahoo, Cisco and other tech companies — will someday be reused after the 1994 closure of the Navy’s Moffett Field dirigible base (later ASW base).

UCSC’s plans are ambitious and optimistic, at least if the long tribulations faced in creating the UCSD business school are any indication. But it seems better than even money that some time in the next decade, UCSC will be offering degree-granting business courses at this prime NASA site.

Open innovation best-sellers

Our 2006 edited volume on open innovation from Oxford is now in paperback — reducing the price from $100 to $40 — and predictably sales have improved. (Alas, with the falling dollar, the hardback price has risen to $125).

The book is at #23,227 on the Amazon best seller. By comparison, the paperback version of Chesbrough’s 2003 book is #52,871 on Amazon overall (although that’s five years after the hardback came out).

However, the best selling book on open innovation (#12,804 overall) is Chesbrough’s 2006 book. In discussing his two HBSP books, Chesbrough said that if the 2003 book was to introduce open innovation to R&D managers, the 2006 book was intended for finance and other business types.

The Amazon subrankings are a little odd. Chesbrough’s 2003 book is #10 on “Books > Science > Technology > Innovations,” which makes sense. His later book is also #10, on “Books > Business & Investing > By Publisher > Harvard Business School Press > Strategy Planning”; more strangely, it’s #1 “Books > Science > Technology > Nanotechnology”. Our 2006 book is #1 in “Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Mechanical > Automation,” which is equally strange.

The hardback did much better than Oxford expected, so I have high hopes for the paperback.

Blaming OI for Boeing's woes

Business Week published an article Sunday blaming the Boeing 787 (Dreamliner) woes on open innovation. The article is entitled “Did Boeing Go Too Far In Open Innovation?”



There are many problems with the story’s claimed implications. The title implies that Boeing would be better off vertically integrated. The story is about how Boeing vetted its contractors but not their subcontractors, but the latest problems are due to a center box made by two of Boeing’s three main contractors.

Finally, open innovation is about finding the most innovative or efficient technologies, inside or outside the firm. The global source of Boeing and Airbus are about cooperating with host country desires to transfer technology and spread aircraft manufacturing revenues. For example, Japan’s ANA was the 2004 launch customer for the Dreamliner.

I don’t know what to call this, but it does not appear to be part of an open innovation strategy.

Openly skeptical of open innovation

On Wednesday, an online newsletter published a column “Open innovation – hype v reality”. The column by Richard Hudson mentions this website, but was keying off an OECD-sponsored symposium held last week in Copenhagen.

The symposium has a series of presentations published online, keynoted by Yves Doz, a well-known INSEAD strategy professor. So I thank Hudson for pointing out this workshop (that I hadn’t heard about).

Hudson offers his own definition of open innovation

open innovation is what happens when big companies collaborate on a large scale with outsiders – university researchers, suppliers, small tech start-ups – to get new products or services to market.

It’s not the same as the definitions provided by open innovation researchers — including that of Henry Chesbrough and a few of my own — but it’s certainly compatible with it.

About the only major difference is that Hudson assumes open innovation is only possible by big companies. I suppose the argument is that small companies don’t have the option to vertically integrate, so it’s not really interesting to study what is normal for small companies. A plausible argument, but many of the open innovation strategies for big companies (such as managing communities or value networks) also apply to small companies.

Eventually he gets around to the criticisms:

But the case for open innovation – however defined – is mixed.

Some of the benefits: getting new ideas, finding hot new partners or employees, killing the “not invented here” syndrome, conducting some early market research, pre-selling before the product launch – and, of course, saving money.

But there are costs, too. A company can lose control of its own technology, as it leaks out to partners. It can make it less likely, rather than more, that a new product is genuinely new and original. It’s hard on employee relations; is it a prelude to outsourcing or bypassing? And collaboration can be anything but efficient.

The risk of not having uniqueness is certainly something we all acknowledge: IBM used open innovation to shipped the IBM PC, but many of us (including some authors) consider it a blunder to have ceded control to the Wintel monopoly.

The evidence for the charge of incrementalism is non-existent: many firms have a problem creating slightly improved products, whereas a true OI approach allows search for the most innovative technologies out there.

As for the rest — scaring employees and mismanaging collaboration — of course there are no silver bullets. Much as us strategy profs like to teach great strategies, success is often determined by execution, not strategy formulation; if you don’t believe that, check out Mark Hurd’s bonus.

So while it’s certainly healthy to weigh the pros and cons of any innovation strategy, I don’t think this week’s column has challenged the viability of open innovation.

Considering communities in open innovation

In July 2005, Hank Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and I were wrapping up the manuscript for the Oxford book. We had two drafts of all the chapters from the authors, and were on track to finish the manuscript by August (which eventually proved to be October with hiccups merging all the references).

The problem was, we had no final chapter (Chapter 14). So in July we all met in Berkeley (followed by meetings the following month at Academy and again in Berkeley) to decide out how we wanted to conclude the book.

The original goal of the book was to provide an up-to-date and complete orientation to the academic study of open innovation. The three editors wanted to make the ideas and research approaches clear to those new to open innovation research — particularly doctoral students who were just beginning their careers as innovation scholars.

So for the concluding chapter, we tried to come up with a comprehensive framework for open innovation research by categorizing what had been done and what might be done. One categorization was by research design. I was particularly proud of the classification by level of analysis, as summarized by Table 14.1.

However, it turns out that table (and classification) had an important omission. Last spring, when I went to write my keynote for one of the EURAM tracks on open innovation, I realized that we’d left out communities.

There really was no excuse. I’d been researching open source since May 2000, and even had an open source chapter (Chapter 5) in the book. I’m guessing my problem was that my work (until my paper with Siobhán O’Mahony) was always about the firms, not the communities.

I recently got a chance to correct that omission. The best papers from one of the EURAM 2007 tracks are to be published this May in a special issue of Industry and Innovation (the CBS journal). Karim Lakhani and I were invited to write a concluding paper for the special issue based on our respective EURAM keynotes. In looking through the two PPT decks, the common theme that jumped out was that of community innovation — so that’s what we wrote about.

One goal of this year’s paper was to fill the gap of communities as a level of analysis in open innovation. Another was to make sure that those who study innovation communities will think about how it ties to open innovation. But mainly we wanted people to be more rigorous on how they defined and used the concept of innovation communities.

After Wim and the special issue editors gave us some feedback, we finished the paper a few weeks ago; it should be published later this year. We don’t claim it’s an AMR-style treatment, but hope it will stir thinking by innovation researchers on how to combine the ideas of communities and innovation — and to do so in an open innovation framework.

I’ve posted the PDF on my website and would welcome feedback about what we got wrong (or right).

EU does OI

The European Commission has launched its “Enterprise Europe Network” to help 23 million small/medium enterprises in the EU.

Parts of this seem to be standard EC industrial policy. But there is a wrinkle: recognizing the interdependence of these firms as part of the network of suppliers and complementors for Europe’s large multinationals. As PublicTechnology.net noted:

Finally, many multinational companies are opening up their innovation systems so that the 'Open Innovation' concept is now becoming a reality for business. Many multinationals have established structures to purchase or license innovative products with third parties. Brokering deals with these large companies requires skills, experience and a negotiating power that many SMEs do not possess, despite the potential of their innovations.

So this hits at the fundamental synergy between little companies and big companies, as with biotech startups and big pharma. The little companies (as in Teece 1986) lack the resources to commercialize their internally-generated innovations, while big firms need more and more innovations to grow and their corporate R&D labs are too big, too slow, or too inefficient to generate all that they need.

As a researcher sitting here in the US, a standard problem is that it’s hard to tell whether to take these government initiatives seriously. It reminds me a little of a paper I wrote back in 1994 (published in 1996): Japanese policymakers were reacting rapidly to US “National Information Infrastructure” policy, even though that policy was clearly going to have little impact on how US companies built the Internet.

CFP: Open R&D and Open Innovation

Building on his successful special issue on open innovation in the June 2006 issue of R&D Management, Oliver Gassmann of the University of St. Gallen is now organizing a second special issue. However, this time he’s landed Henry Chesbrough, author of three books on open innovation who is credited with coining the term. The two are joined by a third co-editor, Ellen Enkel of UniSG, who (AFAIK) is the only academic other than Chesbrough whose job is to run an open innovation center.

This year’s theme is “Open R&D and Open Innovation”. Drafts of the papers are due this year in abstract (May 8) or final (July 6) form, with final manuscripts at the end of 2008, presumably for publication in 2009.

The editors are also planning on partnering with three related conferences:

• EURAM 2008 in Lubljana and Bled, Slovenia (14-17 May);
• R&D Management Conference 2008 in Ottawa, Canada (17-20 June); and
• R&D Management Advanced Workshop 2008 in Linkoping, Sweden (15-16 September)

which I take as a hint that authors planning on submitting to the special issue should attend one of these conferences.

Personally, I hope to submit an open innovation paper to the DRUID 25th anniversary conference, but its February 29 deadline is coming up quick.

CFP: Open Innovation in IT diffusion

Today I got an e-mail advertising an academic conference next fall in Spain. Normally I round file these (or whatever the electronic equivalent is), but this one caught my eye.

The solicitation is for IFIP 8.6, and the call for papers proclaims:

Open IT-based innovation
Moving towards cooperative IT transfer
and knowledge diffusion

The program committee has some big names in IT diffusion research, with names like Richard Baskerville, Rob Fichman, Kalle Lyytinen and Burt Swanson. IFIP 8.6 is the main international conference on IT diffusion.

Is it about open innovation? The themes overlap many topics that have been central to open innovation research, including

• Open innovation models for public and private organizations.
• Open business models in non-IT sectors.
  
• Products, services and new ventures based on IT open innovation.
  
• Innovating with customers [of course, more of a "user innovation" theme]

While the whole audience won't be preaching open innovation, it seems like an opportunity for European researchers studying the IT industry to present their work and also raise the awareness of open innovation among a mainstream MIS audience.

Papers are due March 1, 2008. I'm sorry won't be able to attend, but the conference is in Madrid (Oct. 22-24) and traveling to Europe during the school year is really not practical.

What is Open Innovation?

On this website, we have been using this definition from Henry Chesbrough’s introduction (on page 1) of the 2006 book:

Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.

This is a comprehensive definition, but not very pithy. I often get asked “what’s open innovation,” and have been casting about for another definition.

In discussing open innovation with Marcel Bogers during my visit to EPFL last spring, I came up with this definition:

Open innovation means treating innovation like anything else — something that can be bought and sold on the open market, not just produced and used within the boundaries of the firm.

Then I couldn’t find where I wrote that down (as it turns out, as a May 21 draft in my blogging software), so I reconstructed it with this even more pithy version:

Open innovation is using the market rather internal hierarchies to source and commercialize innovations.

This has an obvious debt to Oliver Williamson and his concept of TCE.

The one problem with either definition is that it has a blind spot for donated innovations — the “innovation benefactor” of Chesbrough’s 2003 Sloan Management Review paper — such as the National Science Foundation or the Sloan Foundation. But rather than try to add another sentence to subsume this case — which tends apply more to universities than to firms — perhaps I should just bound the claims:

Firms that embrace open innovation employ markets rather than hierarchies to obtain and commercialize innovations.

Technorati Tags: open innovation

Data for open innovation research

To promote his third book, Open Business Models, Henry Chesbrough was interviewed for PDMA Visions, the newsletter of the Product Development and Management Association.

As the founder of the open innovation paradigm,
Chesbrough offers an important update on the practice of open innovation. The questions are mainly about how firms can apply open innovation, as would be expected given the interviewer and publication. It is a useful update both for firms and business students to understand the open innovation phenomenon.

However, Chesbrough also suggests for US scholars a new opportunity for future research on open innovation:

The National Science Foundation [NSF] reported data on extramural R&D (where the company paid for it, but the work was conducted outside of the company) and on collaborative R&D (where a company worked with another organization on an R&D project). In the year 2004, the NSF found that three to four percent of R&D spending was spent on extramural R&D, and another three to four percent was spent on collaborative R&D.

These are not huge percentages, but they add up to $9 or $10 billion in R&D for that year. And the fact that the government has started to collect these data is itself significant, in that it must see this trend developing, or else it would not have bothered to ask these questions on the survey.

The availability of data is obviously crucial for large-scale empirical research on open innovation. For example, the OI research articles of Ammon Salter and Keld Laursen depended on the annual U.K. Innovation Survey, part of the periodic Community Innovation Surveys run by EU countries.

The NSF data on extramural R&D (a particular form of external innovation sourcing) is a start, but more data is needed to judge the extent of open innovation use in the U.S.

Technorati Tags: open innovation, Henry Chesbrough

CFP: Broadening the Scope of Open Innovation

Following the success of the open innovation track at the EURAM 2007 conference, we are organizing a special issue of the International Journal of Technology Management (IJTM) on "Broadening the Scope of Open Innovation".

Deadline: 1 October 2007

Guest Editors:

Oliver Gassmann, University of St.Gallen (HSG), Switzerland
Wim Vanhaverbeke, Hasselt University & Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Vareska van de Vrande, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Henry Chesbrough coined the term 'Open Innovation' to indicate how large companies combine externally and internally developed technologies in a flexible way to develop new businesses. Since then, there has been an increased awareness and interest of both practitioners and researchers into the concept of Open Innovation.

Open Innovation was originally applied to external corporate venturing, new business development, spin-ins and spin-offs, but it has many other potential application fields. Scholars are nowadays broadening the scope and deepening our understanding of Open Innovation. There is a growing need integrate Open Innovation into the mainstream management literature and to link it to concepts such as absorptive capacity, dynamic capabilities, competence building, etc. The growing range of application fields requires an integrative framework to link these different areas to each other.
Finally, Open Innovation management has proven to be difficult as most companies are not experienced with the management of external relationships.
Despite the growing efforts to explore Open Innovation practices and their impact on firms' innovation performance, many managerial questions remain unanswered.

This special issue aims to stimulate the ongoing debate on Open Innovation and advance our understanding of open innovation as a field of research.
Submissions are invited from both practitioners and management researchers and they may be purely theoretical or based on empirical research.

Subject Coverage
Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

* The organisation of open innovation practices inside the firm
* What are the processes and mechanisms through which internal innovation is commercialised outside the firm?
* How do external sources of innovation enter the firm?
* The added-value of open innovation practices for all parties involved
* How is cooperation with universities, research institutes, competitors, and/or consumers organised?
* Open source as an open innovation strategy
* IP management in a world of open innovation
* How do IP rights affect open innovation practices?
* What is the role of the government in stimulating open innovation?
* How much open innovation vs. closed innovation does a company need?
* Industry and product specifics on open innovation impact
* Potentials of inter-organisational networks for open innovation
* Innovation controlling of open innovation activities (e.g. key performance indicators, controlling instruments)
* Company's capabilities to profit from open innovation
* How to link open innovation to capability building and corporate strategy processes?
* How to create and capture value in Open Innovation?
* What is the role of business models, organisation structure and corporate culture in developing efficient innovation practices?

Important Dates
Deadline for submission of manuscripts: 1 October 2007
Notification of acceptance/rejection to authors: 1 January 2008
Submission of final manuscript: 1 March 2008

More info
For more info, please visit de Inderscience website or contact Vareska van de Vrande (v.j.a.v.d.vrande@tue.nl).

Open Innovation: A Worldwide Perspective

By Vareska van de Vrande

During the past few weeks, I have been immersed in open innovation research around the globe.

From May 16-19, I have co-chaired the Open Innovation track (#12) at the EURAM conference in Paris. From a large number of well written submissions to the track, 14 papers, broadly representing 4 different topics, were selected for presentation. On the first day of the conference, the track started with an overview of the current status of open innovation research, stressing the importance of management related issues in the implementation of open innovation in both large and small firms. The second session, on "External Knowledge Sourcing", stressed the roles of different external parties in the open innovation process, such as competitors, end-users and universities. During the third session, two more presentations stressed the role of universities as a source of external knowledge. The last session included a number of presentations around the organization of open innovation within companies and the corresponding challenges faced by firms. The keynote speech by Julian Birkinshaw advocated once more the need of a theory on open innovation and the issues that should be concerned when developing such a theory. In all, the different presentations in this track have shown once more the many aspects of open innovation research and the many questions that are still open for discussion. If you want to learn more about the different papers, please visit OpenInnovation.eu, where all presentations are available for download.

Soon after Paris, I left for the 5th International Symposium on Management of Technology (ISMOT'07) in Hangzhou, China. The conference was focused around the theme "Managing total innovation and open innovation in the 21st century" and was held at one of the leading research institutes of China: Zehjiang University. A number of keynote speeches from academic researchers as well as from leading industry experts stressed the growing importance of open innovation in their respective fields, indicating that open innovation is a truly global concept. The paper presentations furthermore showed that many Chinese researchers have also picked up on this topic. For more information about the conference, please visit the ISMOT'07 website.

Managing open innovation through online communities

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, so (a week late) I’m posting my final notes on EURAM 2007.

EURAM 2007 ended Saturday [May 21] and with it two tracks that solicited papers on open innovation. To complete our EURAM 2007 coverage, I’ve asked fellow OI blogger Vareska van de Vrande to publish her thoughts on the other track (#12), which she attended and co-chaired.

I attended all but two sessions of the track “Managing Open Innovation through Online Communities” (#15). Although I’ve already blogged on some aspects, I wanted to provide an overall summary. Sebastian Späth of ETH Zürich has also blogged on the track.

Assessing the 14 presented papers (one was a no-show), the track had three main topical themes:

• Open source communities. At least six papers fit this category, which is not surprising since the organizers are all open source researchers (as were the two keynote speakers).
• Online communities other than open source, mainly around consumer products, but also Wikipedia, and web logs. Depending on how you classify it, another 4-6 papers.
• User innovation (of the von Hippel sense), which included both the open source and other communities. The example that stood out was music mods but this seemed to be the one common innovation perspective through the majority of the papers.

The keynotes turned out to be a nice complement to each other, one emphasizing open innovation and the other user innovation and online communities.

My own keynote discussed how open innovation links directly to the open source phenomenon when companies are involved. But (except for the paper presented by Cristina Rossi) the connections of these papers to open innovation and the work of Henry Chesbrough were more implied than explicit.

Of interests to readers of this blog, there certainly are research opportunities here to do more with open innovation. One of the criticisms of the open innovation paradigm (beginning with Chesbrough’s 2003 book) was that the examples were so heavily weighted towards IT that many questioned whether it generalized beyond IT. Last year’s special issue of R&D Management provided additional evidence for open innovation beyond IT. But the work in this conference on user innovation shows how more work can be done on consumer-centric user innovation — which, to the degree it provides innovation to a firm, also qualifies as open innovation.

The other keynote came from one of the leading experts on user innovation — Karim Lakhani, former von Hippel student and now a Harvard b-school prof. His closing keynote (among other things) challenged us to study the innovation role of communities with more precision and depth. Are communities another organizational form? What holds them together? What do we gain from all the various theoretical lenses that have been used to study communities?

As Lakhani alluded to in his slides (I couldn’t attend his talk), one problem with the papers and the field is that we sometimes use the term “innovation” too loosely. There is the old question of whether an open source re-implementation of existing software really qualifies as a technological innovation: Apache was breaking new ground from day one, but the impetus for Linux (and GNU) was to create a Unix knock-off with different IP rights. One of the track’s papers described a viral marketing effort as user innovation, although this could still be plausible if we consider that the innovation process includes interpreting and applying innovations, not just their design and production.

Overall, the online communities track demonstrated the strength of a special interest track system, in that there were synergies (network effects :-) of having so much similar research and researchers in one room for 2 1/2 days rather than tiny pockets randomly scattered throughout a conference. The feedback for open source and user innovation research was exemplary, even if the open innovation knowledge in the room wasn’t nearly as strong (perhaps because they were all in track #12).

Some of the papers are expected to be combined into a special issue of Industry and Innovation to be published in Spring 2008. More details later.

Technorati Tags: EURAM 2007, open innovation, open source, user innovation

What is “community” innovation?

The final event of the “Managing Open Innovation through Online Communities” track was a keynote by Karim Lakhani, integrating the entire track. I’m sorry I was unable to attend the keynote (when I made my train reservation, I didn’t know about the inflexibility of the HEC shuttle buses), but Karim was gracious enough to share his slides.

I wish I had been able to go, because it’s clear that Lakhani tried to stir things up and the discussion must have been lively. Still, the ideas are well worth acknowledging in a blog about open innovation.

He started by quoting an April 23 article in the New York Times on how thousands of Wikipedia contributors are able to make effective news summaries for major events such as the Southeast Asian tsunami, the London subway bombings, or the Virgina Tech massacre. He highlighted on quote by a Wikipedia contributor:

As the popular joke goes, “The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.”

One problem that Lakhani pointed out is that sociologists could never agree on what “community” is, with nearly 100 definitions used by 1955 and an ongoing split (identified in 1887 by Ferdinand Tönnies) between the two ideas expressed in German as Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesselschaft (society). The field also sought to reject any concept of community working together for utilitarian (rational choice) reasons.

To find the way out — at least for researchers like Lakhani interested in phenomena such as user innovation — he points to a 2001 paper by Jochen Gläser which uses a definition that allows for instrumental motives:

A community is an actor constellation that consists of individuals who perceive to have something in common with others, and whose actions and interactions are at least partially influenced by this perception.

He then explicated key differences (on factors such as the basis of membership and coordination mechanisms) between the traditional “communities” studied by sociologists, and the communities used in the innovation literature:

• social movements, such as environmentalism
• communities of practice — typically defined by a professional identity, such as copier repair technicians
• knowledge producing communities, such as scientific communities
• problem solving communities — which is where he classifies F/OSS

To this, he wonders how we can/should study communities in innovation. Are communities really like organizations? How are sponsored communities different from organic ones — or ones organized entirely within a firm?

After examining communities, he sought to unpack the other words of the track title and the controversies that might be studied within each: open, innovation, managing, etc. I’m sure this was equally important, but I had trouble engaging this from the slides. And the community dimension is one that was particularly salient for me at EURAM, as I presented the latest version of my work with Siobhán O’Mahony on sponsored open source communities.

When compiling an open innovation research agenda that concluded the 2006 book, I’m embarrassed to say that we didn’t even list “community” among the different levels of analysis that might be used — even though I’d co-authored an open source chapter in the same book and already presented a paper with Siobhán on sponsored communities. This was a major omission, because studying communities — particularly outside open source — seems a major opportunity for open innovation scholars.

Technorati Tags: EURAM 2007, open innovation, user innovation

Software open innovation without open source

In my book chapter with Scott Gallagher analyzing open source as an example of open innovation, we were challenged two years ago by co-editor Henry Chesbrough to more clearly delineate the overlap between the two constructs — including examples of IT innovations that fit in one category but not the other. It turns out that the resulting typology — Figure 5.1 in our 2006 book — has well stood the test of time. I used it again this week in my keynote speech at EURAM, in this case to introduce open source researchers to open innovation concepts.

However, one thing bothered Scott and me. We were very interested in game mods as something that was definitely open innovation, but (except in rare cases) did not really use the open source IP model. We were not sure whether it was representative of a broader phenomenon or just an interesting anomaly. There is so much about the video game industry that is anomoulous — despite the industry’s huge economic significance — that we thought this could be just one more.

It turns out there’s an N of at least 2, because music mods seem to work almost the same way as game mods. I learned about this from two papers at the EURAM 2007 online communities track. This research has been pioneered by Lars Bo Jeppesen, although the 2nd paper (by Linus Dahlander and Lars Frederiksen) did not involve “Lars Bo” (as everyone called him this week).

The company involved in this is called Propellerhead Software of Sweden. Even if the name is not familiar to readers, anyone who’s walked into a guitar store (such as Guitar Center) in the US has seen their Reason software, providing a software-only simulation of all the great guitars and amplifiers during the seminal rock & roll era of the 1960s and 1970s — sounds originally created using wirewrap components, discrete components, or even tubes.

Propellerhead has an active community of user-contributed content — special sounds and sound effects. Jeppesen said that a typical computer-controlled musical instrument would take 100-150 hours to develop by an experienced Propellerhead engineer. They have attracted free some 100 significant modifications by users. Of course, this is exactly the user innovation paradigm of Eric von Hippel of MIT.

Jeppesen and Frederiksen already published a 2006 paper on this in Organization Science (DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1050.0156). I had previously read parts of the article, but somehow never made the connection between their research and the demo I saw of Reason and the Line 6 Toneport at the Guitar Center booth during the 2006 and 2007 Macworld Expo.

Technorati Tags: conferences, EURAM 2007, open innovation, open source, user innovation

Cumulative, open and user innovation

This week I was at the European Academy of Management (EURAM 2007) conference, held at the HEC campus at Jouy-en-Josas, a half-hour outside of Paris. Of the two track related to open innovation, I spent almost all my time at the track on “Managing Open Innovation through Online Communities.”

On Thursday morning, I kicked off the track with a keynote linking open innovation and open source software. My slides will be (now are) available online.

As I found out, most of the audience was familiar with the original Chesbrough book Open Innovation, but were not using the concepts in their research. This is an issue I’ve encountered before. Some of it is because Chesbrough’s choice of terminology is oh descriptive and generic — adding “open” as a modifier to “innovation” can and has been used by other researchers in a sense not consistent with Henry Chesbrough’s definition. In other cases, there is an attempt to piggyback on the recent popularity of the buzzword in industry and academia.

So I want to highlight one small part of my talk — that which contrasts the innovation models of Chandler, Chesbrough, Scotchmer and von Hippel.

Alfred Dupont Chandler, Jr. is America’s greatest business historians, the one primarily responsible over the past 40 years for our understanding of how and why the modern American (and later, multinational) corporation developed. In books such as the The Visible Hand (1977) and Scale and Scope (1990), he showed how companies of the late 19th century and early 20th century diversified and integrated to command dominant positions in their respective markets.

Most of the companies he selected had significant administrative (organizational) innovations that helped define our modern conception of how to build a large corporation. While railroads or Sears Roebuck did not have a significant product innovation effort, it was impossible to write about the US (or German) chemical industry without considering the role of the internal industrial R&D lab in the success of the large firm.

Such vertical integration of R&D to product development and distribution is the exact opposite of what the original Open Innovation book was attacking. It’s not that open innovators (such as IBM) can’t have in-house R&D, but their innovation strategies should not be defined only in terms of progressing internal technologies to internal investigations to a firms own R&D funnel. Over and over again, I illustrate this using Figures 1.1 and 1.1 from Chapter 1 (by Chesbrough) of our 2006 book.

But open innovation overlaps heavily with two other streams of research on innovation. Researchers on each side often omit the links, either because they don’t know them, because they are emotionally or intellectually invested in one paradigm, or (legitimately) for parsimony or compactness. Still, both paradigms have strong links back to open innovation.

The better known of the two is the user innovation paradigm of MIT’s Eric von Hippel. Promulgated with his 1988 book (Sources of Innovation) and a series of journal articles, von Hippel focused on the idea that firms could tap into both the knowledge and desire of users to solve their own needs. In some cases, it’s a classic win-win, as users get a better solution and producers gain a broader (or deeper) solution to sell.

The user innovation paradigm is the theoretical basis for a large stream of open source software research (particularly from Karim Lakhani), as it is an excellent fit to the entire Apache experience. (As far as I know, the only research that interprets OSS through open innovation paradigm is my own work with Scott Gallagher). Von Hippel has combined his earlier work, the open source work, and other evidence along the way in his 2005 book Democratizing Innovation.

The other stream is the concept of cumulative innovation. Some of this ties back to the cumulative processes of public science (analyzed, by among others, Paul David). But perhaps the most single-minded pursuit of the topic has been by Suzanne Scotchmer, both in her 2004 book and in various papers.

So who does innovation? Below is a table I prepared summarizing the four perspectives:

	Focal Firm	Suppliers	Customers	Rivals
Chandler	X
Chesbrough	X	X	X	X
Scotchmer	X			X
von Hippel	X	†	X

† In my original slides, I limited von Hippel to user innovation, but my audience reminded me that his 1988 book also included supplier innovation — which has been de-emphasized in subsequent work by von Hippel and his followers.

Chesbrough’s 2003 book certainly acknowledges the influence of von Hippel’s earlier book. Our 2006 book acknolwedges both books — although the mention of the later book is cursory only because it came out about the same time as we sent our manuscript to Oxford (October 2005). Conversely, many of the current user innovation researchers have a potential open innovation angle if they chose to pursue it.

So far, I’m not aware of anything that links Chesbrough to Scotchmer — perhaps because one is management and one is economics, or perhaps because the former favors strong IP rights and the latter is more about weakening (at least slightly) IP protection.

Right now, I don’t know how I’m going to pursue this comparison, but it seemed useful to my fellow researchers attending the conference and the track.

Update: Ironically, as I was preparing to come to Europe, Al Chandler died at the age of 88. But the Chandlerian approach towards understanding large firms will long survive him.

Technorati Tags: EURAM 2007, open innovation, user innovation, vertical integration

Open Innovation at EURAM

The European Academy of Management is holding its 2007 conference from May 16-19 in Paris.

EURAM is organized around “tracks,” with 33 tracks this year. The conference is looking to be a veritable open innovation reunion, with not one, but two tracks (#12, #15) on the topic of open innovation.

I am excited that (as with DRUID 2006) that there is considerable interest among European academics in open innovation, even if the interest in the US has been more by managers than social science researchers. I am also excited to be attending EURAM for the first time, to be returning to Paris after nearly 20 years, and to be able to present my own open innovation research.

12. Open Innovation

This track is organized by the two major centers of open innovation research in Europe: Oliver Gassman and Ellen Enkel of the University of St. Gallen and Wim Vanhaverbeke and Vareska van de Vrande of the Technical University of Eindhoven.

The two senior faculty are experts in corporate R&D strategies who have helped promulgate among the earliest academic research into Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation paradigm. Gassman was the editor of the first academic special issue on open innovation, the June 2006 issue of R&D Management. Vanhaverbeke was co-editor of the first academic book on the paradigm, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm.

The track features 14 papers about various open innovation topics. It also has a keynote by Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School, who (among other things) edited the December 2006 special issue of Research Policy commemorating David Teece’s seminar 1986 paper on “Profiting from Technological Innovation.”

15. Managing Open Innovation through Online Communities

This track is organized by Linus Dahlander and Lars Frederksen of Imperial College London and Franceso Rullani of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa.

The program has a strong open source flavor. The track has 15 papers and two keynote speakers known for their open source research over the past five years. On Thursday morning, it begins with Joel West of San José State, while the track concludes with a keynote by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School.

While most of the papers are about open source, at least two are non-open source papers on user innovation. Most link their research to the community model of collaborative production and consumption, which (if done for profit) is certainly considered an example of open innovation.

Technorati Tags: conferences, EURAM 2007, open innovation

Best-selling Open Innovation Book?

So far there have been a total of three books on open innovation. The original 2003 book by Henry Chesbrough is also now in paperback.

What are readers buying? As of this morning, this is the order of the Amazon rankings:

• Open Business Models (2006) by Chesbrough, helped by a very favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.


• Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (2006) edited by Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West


• Open Innovation: The New Imperative (2003) by Chesbrough in paperback


• The 2003 book in hardback

Open Business Models is what’s new for those who have to apply open innovation, while Researching a New Paradigm provides multiple research perspectives for those want to know more about the concepts behind it. I expect it to remain the best-selling open innovation book throughout 2007.

The relatively strong sales of Researching a New Paradigm — despite its high list price and its academic bent — are somewhat surprising. However, Amazon has finally cut the street price. As the one who first appproached Oxford about publishing the book, I’m glad to hear it’s finally catching on.

The Amazon data don’t allow us to combine the sales of the paperback and hardback editions to get a combined ranking for the original Open Innovation book. But it’s clear that it’s continuing to sell in spite (because of?) the release of two new books in the past six months.

Of course, all three (four) books are from Chesbrough, who first identified the phenemonon and is director of Berkeley’s Center for Open Innovation. Still, there are already a wide range of research articles about open innovation to suggest that the phenomenon has captured the interest of a wide range of innovation researchers.