Embracing Open Innovation to Acquire External Ideas and Technologies and to Transfer Internal Ideas and Technologies Outside

The objective of this dissertation is to increase understanding of how organizations can embrace open innovation in order to acquire external ideas and technologies from outside the organization, and to transfer internal ideas and technologies to outside the organization. The objective encompasses six sub-objectives, each addressed in one or more substudies. Altogether, the dissertation consists of nine substudies and a compendium summarizing the substudies. The dissertation depicts how firms can embrace open innovation in order to acquire external ideas and technologies, and in order to transfer internal ideas and technologies to the outside. An extensive literature review was conducted on open innovation and crowdsourcing literature (substudies 1–4). In the subsequent empirical substudies, both qualitative research methods (substudies 5–7) and quantitative research methods (substudies 8–9) were applied. The four literature review substudies provided insights on the body of knowledge on open innovation and crowdsourcing. These substudies unveiled most of the influential articles, authors, and journals of open innovation and crowdsourcing disciplines. Moreover, they identified research gaps in the current literature. The empirical substudies offer several insightful findings. Substudy 5 shows how the non-core ideas and technologies of a large firm can become valuable, especially for small firms. Intermediary platforms can find solutions to many of the pressing problems of large organizations by engaging renowned scientists from all over world (substudy 6). Intermediary platforms can also bring breakthrough innovations with novel mechanisms (substudy 7). Large firms are not only able to garner ideas by engaging their customers through crowdsourcing but they can also build long-lasting relations with their customers (substudies 8 and 9). Embracing open innovation brings some challenges for firms too. Firms need to change their organizational structures in order to be able to fully benefit from open innovation. When crowdsourcing is successful, it produces a very large number of new ideas. This has the consequence that firms need to allocate a significant amount of resources in order to identify the most promising ideas. In an idea contest, customarily, only one or a few of the best ideas are rewarded (substudy 7). Sometimes, no reward is provided for the selected idea (substudies 8 and 9). Most of the ideas that are received are not implemented in practice