How to Make Innovation With External Partners? The Conceptual Design of an ICT Platform Supporting the Inbound Open Innovation

Over time, Open Innovation (OI) strategy was considered a “must” for many firms. While focusing specifically on the inbound OI process, the literature has put in evidence that ICT has much to contribute; in fact, it can foster activities, such as communication, cooperation, knowledge sharing and creation among different actors. The empirical evidence shows that platforms have exponentially grown during the last years. However, on closer view, existing platforms support only specific OI phases or sub-processes, but not the process in its own entirety. Conversely, the scientific debate, although recognizing that ICTs can enable the entire inbound process and although analyzing the existing platforms, has rather disregarded the way firms can support the whole OI inbound process by means of ICT. Also, to our best knowledge, literature does not offer any contribution regarding a systematic design (specifically a conceptual design) of such an ICT platform. Hence, the objective of this paper is to develop the conceptual design of an ICT platform supporting the inbound Open Innovation process within the Technological Developments business unit of Leonardo Defense Systems Division. After a preliminary phase concerning the context analysis, methodology includes three main steps: (i) conceptualization of functions; (ii) preliminary design; (iii) conceptual design of the System/SW architecture. In each of these phases, we tried to merge evidence from the scientific literature with empirical insight emerging from the field.