Houston, we have a problem: Ambiguity in perceiving ‘open innovation’ by academia, business, and policy-makers

Abstract

The concept of ‘open innovation’ introduced back in 2003 has received a remarkable, somewhat viral popularity. It got spread way beyond academic circles and has been widely adopted by business practitioners as well as policy-makers. However, as any young concept it still goes through the processes of theorizing, probing, and stretching its boundaries. As a result, the perceptions of what open innovation is varies not only between academic, business, and policy-making communities, but also within those. How does the open innovation concept manage its multi-lingual job of speaking to so diverse stakeholder and organizational groups? To find that out we rely on the literatures that tackle open innovation, on companies and policy-making organizations describing their open innovation strategies at their websites as well on primary survey data among companies on open innovation practices and perception. We identify and show where the perceptions differ, which open innovation practices perceived as such by the literature are commonly counted the same by companies and policy-makers, what novel practices the groups suggest and what do we need to build a comprehensive understanding of this developing phenomenon.