Implementing open innovation: technological, organizational and managerial tools

Implementing open innovation: technological, organizational and managerial tools The concept of open innovation (OI) has generated great interest in the last decade (Chesbrough, 2003); many articles have appeared and interesting special issues (SIs) in prestigious journals have been published (Enkel et al., 2009; West et al., 2014), while others are forthcoming (Corvello et al., 2017; Bogers et al., 2016). This means that OI has been and still is a “hot-topic,” with firms asking academics to help them define specific issues such as the “who” issue, i.e. with whom the collaboration should take place (Laursen and Salter, 2006), the “when” issue, i.e. which phase(s) of the innovation process should be opened (Lazzarotti and Manzini, 2009) and the “how” issue, i.e. how openness should be implemented. As regards the “how,” too little attention continues to be dedicated to the set of tools firms can use to support the implementation of OI and, hence, to how firms can create a positive environment that encourages people to leverage existing technological capabilities outside the boundaries of the organization (Hung and Chou, 2013; Aloini et al., 2015; Lazzarotti et al., 2015) or to capture and benefit from external sources of knowledge in order to enhance current technological developments (Huizingh, 2011), thus – achieving a positive impact on performance (Caputo et al., 2016). Building on literature on innovation and knowledge management, we define such a set as the emergent or intentional system of Technological (information and communication technologies (ICT)), managerial and organizational tools through which the firm influences the collaborative behavior of people inside the firm with the external partners, as well as the collaborative behavior of the partners along the innovation funnel, from the idea generation up to the commercialization phase. Basically the main question is: what are the technological, managerial and organizational (TMO) tools that firms can use along all the phases of the OI process? It is from this perspective that this editorial will propose two interpretive lenses through which the contributions of this SI will be presented: the first concerns the TMO tools that support OI, and the second, the OI process along which the tools are adopted.