Elevating the Work with Inbound Open Innovation; A multiple case study on multinational companies

Abstract

Many large companies fail to jump on subsequent technological waves affecting industries in tandem with ever-increasing competitive landscapes. To avoid being outcompeted, companies have to stimulate their innovative and explorative capabilities. One way for companies to do so is by harnessing the external environment of competent partners that is embedded around the focal company. This way of closely collaborating with external partners is called Open Innovation, a term coined by Henry Chesbrough in the early 2000’s. This thesis aims to examine how large multinational companies ought to work with Open Innovation in order to do so as efficacious as possible. More specifically, it aims to elaborate on what organisational modes of governance and structure, and which partners and practices, that are beneficial to Open Innovation in the context of large multinational companies. Due to absence of academia within the field of how Open Innovation practically should be managed, a qualitative multiple case study research is being conducted. Large multinational companies are being interviewed in order investigate if there are any preferable ways of working with Open Innovation. The main results of this study are twofold. Firstly, increased top-down governance with greater coordination of Open Innovation by top managers seem to be vital for elevating a company’s results of Open Innovation. Secondly, while most companies manage to collaborate with their already established partners such as customers and suppliers, they tend to face hardships with harnessing start-ups and innovation intermediaries. Albeit these two partners are being considered as highly important to large companies, especially in the recent time, many large companies fail to implement efficient practices for harnessing them. Nonetheless, large companies must deal with this inevitable challenge in order to stimulate their innovative and explorative capabilities for fostering innovations.