mortara

Technovation 31 (2011) 586–597

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Technovation journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/technovation

How do large multinational companies implement open innovation?
Letizia Mortara n, Tim Minshall
Centre for Technology Management, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering, Alan Reece Building, 17 Charles Babbage Road,
Cambridge CB3 0FS, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Available online 28 June 2011

This paper addresses a major gap in reported research on open innovation (OI): how do companies implement open innovation? To answer this question a sample of 43 cross-sector firms were reviewed for their OI implementation approaches. The study analyzed how firms moved from practising closed to open innovation, classifying the adoption path according to the impetus for the adoption of the OI paradigm and the coordination of the OI implementation. The way firms adopted OI was found to vary according to (1) their innovation requirements, (2) the timing of the implementation and (3) their organizational culture.
& 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Open innovation (OI)
Open innovation implementation
Organizational change
Organizational culture
Case studies

1. Introduction
The adoption of the ‘Open innovation’ (OI) paradigm – in which organizations make use of internal and external resources to drive their innovation processes – is considered by many contemporary firms as a way to enhance innovation capabilities. Despite the growing interest in OI there are still many unanswered questions.
One of the most pressing for academics and practitioners alike relates to how OI can be implemented (Gassmann, 2006). The literature concerning the adoption of the OI paradigm by companies is growing fast and many journals have recently hosted special issues leading to the publication of useful reviews of OI literature in the innovation

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