Open for Innovation: What Do We Know, Unsolved Puzzles and New Departures

Open innovation and external search for innovation has become a critical value creation and capture strategy among business firms over recent decades. Keld Laursen's and Ammon Salter's 2006 award-winning SMJ article “Open for Innovation: The role of openness in explaining innovative performance among UK manufacturing firms” addressed the issue of how open innovation in terms of search breadth and depth can help explain firms’ innovative performance at different levels of novelty, when factoring in the firms’ overall R&D strategy.

In this seminar, Laursen and Salter take their 2006-paper as a starting point and reflect on why open innovation remains of critical importance for firms pursuing an innovation strategy. They will explore why the paper became influential, discussing the research streams that preceded it and that have followed it. We highlight new research questions that emerge from this body of work, exploring the need to consider more carefully both social context and the individual-level in the analysis of open innovation. Finally, they will outline some important implications of recent research on open innovation for business practice, highlighting the "dark" side of openness with respect to who controls key resources and captures value.

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Open for Innovation: What Do We Know, Unsolved Puzzles and New Departures | Strategic Management Society