'Blind Spots' in Open Innovation Need Addressing, Says Professor
- © Photo by Bruce Cook 2011
While research on open innovation has come a long way in eight years, the increasingly popular topic still has major blind spots.
This was the conclusion of Joel West, PhD, professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at KGI. West delivered the opening keynote last Friday for the research track of the 2011 Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation conference held in the San Francisco Bay Area.
West presented his analysis of more than 200 research papers published from 2003-2010 on how firms are utilizing external sources to support their innovation efforts, prepared in collaboration with Dr. Marcel Bogers of Southern Denmark University. The papers examined in their study all built on the conception of open innovation, as defined by Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley.
"The current research clearly over-emphasizes the initial phase of this open innovation process, where firms search for and obtain external sources of innovation. Research on the later phases — when firms integrate and commercialize these innovations — is comparatively scarce," West said.
Other major omissions include examination of innovation communities, financial impact of open innovation and the role of the firm business model. The unpublished working paper is available online at the Social Science Research Network.
The theme of MCPC 2011 was "Bridging Mass Customization & Open Innovation." The conference was hosted by UC Berkeley and was co-sponsored by MIT, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and RWTH Aachen.