Managing open innovation : connecting the firm to external knowledge

Open innovation is about firms’ external relations with other firms and organisations. It is a topic which has attracted an immense amount of attention, but which has also been heavily criticised due to the diversity of the ideas and fuzziness of its key concepts. To date, the bulk of the literature on open innovation draws on case study material to illustrate the operation of firms in an anecdotal way. By contrast, this book examines open innovation practices by using large-scale datasets and stresses their impact on firm performance. The authors examine four key issues: differences between firms in open innovation practices, public funding to enhance external relations, R&D outsourcing of firms, and the role of human resources in R&D and innovation. -- ‘Research on open innovation has developed exponentially in the last five years, but strong empirical evidence on several research questions is still lacking. The authors offer, via detailed large scale empirical research, interesting answers on how to manage open innovation and how to shape policy conditions that lead to more open innovation.’ (Wim Vanhaverbeke, University of Hasselt, Belgium).