What are the key success factors of Open Innovation approaches in large companies ?

Abstract

Over the last ten years, there have been multiple examples of established corporations that have fallen on difficult times. Companies that have been disrupted, wiped out or relegated to the sidelines after having once dominated their industries. How can companies avoid this future? The answer is simple: innovation.

To survive and grow, corporations have now commonly understood that they must deal with external threats by opening their innovation process. Building an ecosystem of partners is a key to access additional competence, find new ideas and technologies, and improve the time to market.

This master’s thesis aims to identify a set of key success factors of Open Innovation through three case-studies conducted within large organizations. Once these factors are determined, the results are contrasted to those obtained from an extensive literature review. The outcome is a concise set of factors facilitating the implementation of Open Innovation in big corporations.

This work highlighted the fact that Open Innovation implies a set of changes related to the culture, strategy and structure of the company. First, it emphasized the need for the support of top management. Second, it confirmed the cultural shift through which every company must pass. Moreover, it proposes three factors which were less emphasized by existing researches: the autonomy of a separate entity, a short feedback loop with a need to pivot when an idea is not valuable, and the creation of a startup mindset using the concepts defined in the Lean Startup model.

Having completed the work, the main recommendations to address the challenges large companies are facing are to remain open-minded to new ideas while collaborating with others at the highest level possible, accept external inputs as willingly as internal ones, and validate ideas by rapid experimentation in the marketplace.