Abstract
Companies adopting an open approach to innovation aim at exploiting as many sources of knowledge as possible to create new products or services. Communities of customers, networks of experts or other organisations are all considered sources of valuable knowledge. However, to be managed effectively, each source requires different tools and practices. Managers responsible for the implementation of a technological system supporting open innovation should be able to single out the requirements associated with each source and devise customised strategies to facilitate the knowledge exchange. This chapter: (1) provides a framework which enables managers to analyse each specific source of knowledge and elicit the associated requirements, (2) suggests seven strategies to facilitate the knowledge exchange and (3) shows how these seven strategies can be adapted to different sources of knowledge.
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Further Reading
A previous version of the framework discussed in this paper was proposed in the cited paper by Carlsson, Corvello and Migliarese (2009). For readers interested in Open Innovation, besides the two by now classic books by Henry Chesbrough, we suggest the paper by Chesbrough and Kardon Crowther “Beyond high tech: early adopters of open innovation in other industries”, R&D Management, 36(3): 229–236, 2006. We also recommend two special issues of international journals dedicated to the topic: Technovation (2011, 31(1)) and the European Journal of Innovation Management (2011, 14(4)). For more information about RAC two papers are particularly interesting: the already cited paper by Lane and Lubatkin (1998) and Lichtenthaler “Relative capacity: Retaining knowledge outside a firm’s boundaries”, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 25, 200–212, 2008. The importance of the specificity of the different sources of knowledge is also considered in the paper by Abecassis-Moedas and Mahmoud-Jouini “Absorptive capacity and source-recipient complementarity in designing new products: an empirically derived framework, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 25(5): 473–490, 2008.
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Corvello, V., Gitto, D., Carlsson, S., Migliarese, P. (2013). Using Information Technology to Manage Diverse Knowledge Sources in Open Innovation Processes. In: Eriksson Lundström, J., Wiberg, M., Hrastinski, S., Edenius, M., Ågerfalk, P. (eds) Managing Open Innovation Technologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31650-0_12
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