Managing a big company in the information age is a challenging and demanding process. It requires constant renewal of cooperative techniques to meet the needs of the market and consumers for the ultimate goal of successful performance and profit-making. The age of technology presents its specific difficulties and, at the same time, opportunities for the development of businesses. Having met the obstacle of the lack of ideas or knowledge within the framework of one company, the enterprises started attracting outside parties for cooperation. Thus, a new type of corporative entrepreneurship named open innovation appeared. Open innovation has occurred in the field of business and technology as a new progressive approach to solving the problems of the implementation of challenging ideas and is now popularly utilized by many companies.
The phenomena of open innovation had existed long before it was introduced as a notion. The attempts to carry out an idea employing someone else’s knowledge or skill was made back in the 15th century when Johannes Gutenberg incorporated his ideas with outside experience to invent a printing press. However, the term “open innovation” was introduced by a professor at the University of California, Henry Chesbrough at the beginning of the 2000s. According to his definition, open innovation is an opportunity to advance a company’s innovation achieved with the help of collaboration between external and internal ideas and knowledge.
Under the conditions of the modern economic integration growth, the internationalization of business, the globalization and the emergence of new information and communication opportunities, the companies cannot afford to rely solely on their resources. The form of closed innovation is not sufficiently effective anymore due to the overall lack of universal tools, ideas, and knowledge available within a separate company. These factors significantly affected the emergence of open innovation, which has a lot of advantages to present. It helps to decrease the expenses for research, improves the effectiveness and quality of innovative performance, and enables the exchange of ideas among different sectors of the economy. Thus, open innovation contributes to the overall development of the technological field of business and guarantees the uniqueness of the new products on the market.
One of the most successful companies employing open innovation is IDEO and its project OpenIDEO. It is a model of cooperation that works as an open suggestion box where people can add up their ideas to the ones presented by others. Such a mutual interchange of knowledge and suggestions is integrated into the ultimate product that has more value than the one designed by one person of company separately from other options. OpenIDEO demonstrates the model of open innovation employed in practice.
There are some other bright examples of the implementation of open innovation in practice. Many large companies utilize this concept for the development of new products and new approaches to their design. They include Samsung, Lego, Facebook, and others. However, it is possible to show the concept of open innovation in action on some simple cases of cooperation. For example, a collection of feedback from the smartphone users about the specific features of the device they use and the suggestions for the improvements might be addressed as a form of open innovation. Such an approach allows retrieving the necessary information about the drawbacks and ways for perfection form the firsthand source, the people who use the product. Although, as a business cooperation model, open innovation concerns collaboration of specialists to gain a profound result.
Concluding the discussion, open innovation, as a model of company management, is now popularly used in many sectors of the economy. Due to the high cost of maintaining separate research laboratories, companies are increasingly concentrating on joint developments, creating open innovation centers. Organizations choosing the internal environment only make a big mistake because external ideas enable companies to increase their resources and provide unique competitive products.