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.

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.