Respecting the Deal: Economically Sustainable Management of Open Innovation Among Co-Opeting Companies

Platforms like eBay allow product seekers and providers to meet and exchange goods. On eBay, consumers can return a product if it does not correspond to expectations; eBay is the third-party firm in charge of assuring that the agreement among seekers and providers will be respected. Who provides the same service for what concerns open innovation, where specifications might not be fully defined? This paper describes the business model of an organizational structure to support the elicitation and respect of agreements among agents, who have conflicting interests but that gain from cooperating together. Extending previous studies, the business model takes into account the economic dimensions concerning the needs of knowledge share and mutual control to allow a third-party to sustainably reinforce trust among untrusted partners and to lower their overall relational risk.