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To Develop a Product You Have to Look Inside

, by Claudio Todesco
Gaia Rubera, with Andrea Ordanini and Deepa Chandrasekaran, demonstrates that being open is not enough, previously developed skills are needed to exploit input coming from outside

The concept of open innovation was quite novel when Gaia Rubera took an interest in it. "Academic papers were mostly based on case studies. A quantitative and systematic investigation on the actual working of open innovation (OI) and its effects on firm performance was still missing", says Rubera, Associate Professor of Marketing. "Besides, there was this idea that being 'open' was enough to foster innovation and that OI was a way to launch more products in the market, not to improve their innovativeness".

Rubera, Deepa Chandrasekaran, and Andrea Ordanini have combined data from a survey of 239 Italian firms with secondary data on the level of innovation of products sold through supermarkets. They have identified two types of inbound open innovation practices: the use of incoming technology and ideas which occurs in the development stage (development-centric OI) and the acquisition of finished or nearly finished products (commercialization-centric OI). The results are featured on Open innovation, product portfolio innovativeness and firm performance: the dual role of new product development capabilities published in 2015 by the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

"We have shown that being 'open' is not enough: development-centric OI requires some advanced internal competencies. Without these skills, OI does not contribute to fill the gap between more and less innovative companies. It ends up, rather paradoxically, widening the gap. In the case of commercialization-centric OI, the least innovative firms are able to bridge the gap in the short term, but in the long run their internal skills are likely to wither".

Read more on this topic
Open Businesses Are Good for Business. And Innovation
Piacentini: Exporting the Model of Open Innovation into Public Administration
De Biase: After Ideology Dies, Theory Takes a Step Forward
Open Innovation? It Is a Question of Knowledge Governance
Open Patenting. It Ranges from Licensing to Viral Patents, but Academia is Skeptical
Innovation: the Conditions for Making an Open Relationship Work

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