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Open Innovation: 9 Benefits, 12 Case Studies and 12 Books

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Today we hear a lot Open Innovation , but there are a lot of people who are not sure what it means exactly. As this topic is important nowadays, we decided to write an article about it to clarify all your doubts.

What is Open innovation?

Open innovation is about combining internal resources with external ones to boost innovation culture in the company .1 For example, big companies like GE, Cisco or Microsoft , etc. tend to have 8-12 different value pools, for instance, think suppliers , startups, customers or universities, etc. to consider for their open innovation efforts.

In other words, open innovation is a business model that encourages you to connect with outside sources so you can profit from exciting new startups and product opportunities, get a broader pool of talent, collaborate with others to come up with innovation that you could never do just by yourself.

Now, large multinationals including Kraft, KLM, Pfizer, and Siemens actively and openly participate in collaborative, online innovation communities where seekers and solution providers work together. Much the way tech companies use hackathons to get outsiders to contribute to their goals, OI-committed businesses announce proudly that they’re taking full advantage of the global innovation community. That transparency demonstrates to the market that they have a clear strategy for the future and they’re aggressively pursuing it out in the open.

Open innovation may seem to be for big business. But it is an approach that can be used by all companies, especially start-ups and small businesses. It may be as simple as inviting a trusted supplier to help you develop ideas or launching a website , etc.

So, find the right collaborators! One of the most visible open innovation actions these days are suggested websites or special places on the web that invite customers and the general public to submit ideas on how to improve a company’s products and services. And then, on these websites companies publish a hackathon info to find the right partner with the most brilliant idea.

9 Benefits of Open Innovation

1. creating new products and services.

Especially when you’re a startup, there’s nothing more exciting than getting your first product out on the market. But it’s easy to get stuck, focusing all your efforts on selling your first product rather than thinking of what else you could provide for your customers. It can be scary to invest time and resources into creating a new product, especially taking into account that startups have a limited budget. Yet, by investing your resources and the resources of the third parties into creating something new, that you know will bring value to your community. This move may help you increase your profits and create buzz around you.

2. Innovating old products and services

Sometimes, you don’t need to create new products. Sometimes, your older service has a potential to be better, has potential to attract a lot of clients. This is when you need to get a creative team together to improve your idea. One of the benefits of open innovation is that the process never ends. You’re always thinking about how you can make your organisation better.

3. Building a strong community

Lego is a great example of how a company can engage their fans on a wide scale by using open innovation. No matter the size of your organisation , a great benefit of open innovation is taking the time to get in touch with your fans and your soulmates, news talents. Get to know what your community wants, and then give it to them. In the process, you will find that enthusiastic community members are willing to dedicate their time and ideas to help you create something better. These relationships are key and will help your company build a strong community dedicated to your project.

4. Keeping your employees engaged

One of the main sources of employee dissatisfaction is a lack of feeling of ownership on the projects they work on. Sometimes, your team may have some great ideas but might not feel comfortable bringing them forward. By bringing an open innovation initiative to your workplace, your team can get involved in big picture planning, make it their project. When people feel more invested in the bigger goals of the organisation, it makes them more excited to come to work in the morning and put their heart and their soul in it.

5. Staying ahead of the competition

By keeping your team and your community engaged and on the lookout for new ideas, you make sure that your organisation stays helpful and relevant to your community. Using open innovation can help you find your niche that makes your organisation uniquely valuable to the community.

6. Costs reduction

When you work with other companies, you split the costs. Moreover, you become more efficient because of each company; each member works on what he is good at.

7. Time-to-market acceleration

Instead of figuring out how to make the desired product, train your people, buy equipment, etc., you just start a collaboration with a company that already has all this, that allows you to bring a product to market faster.

8. New revenue streams

Did you know that some businesses get more revenue from secondary products rather than from the primary ones? Working with other companies will allow you to enter a new market with an idea and product you have.

9. Innovation risk reduction

Any innovation has risks, but if you work with experts, you minimise your risk of failure, especially if you agile and get feedback from your target on a regular basis.

Let’s look at open innovation case studies

GE is one of the leading companies implementing different open innovation models. Their Open Innovation Manifesto focuses on the collaboration between experts and entrepreneurs from everywhere to share ideas and passionately solve problems. Based on their innovation Ecomagination project that aims to address environmental challenges through innovative solutions, GE has spent $17 billion on R&D and received total revenues of $232 billion over the last decade. GE is famous for their open innovation challenges and initiatives on their open innovation page. Through these challenges, GE familiarises itself to future potential talents.

For example the Unimpossible Missions: The University Edition challenge is targeted for students that are creative, have a certain level of technical skills and a clear recruitment motivation. Through the challenge, GE aims to get three smart and creative students to have their internship at GE.

Another example is GE’s project First Build, a co-create collaboration platform, which connects designers, engineers, and thinkers to share ideas with other members who can discuss it together. It is one of the open innovation models that aims to provide a platform that can help both external and internal individuals to collaborate in terms of ideas sharing and manufacturing to reach innovative ideas for products and services.

Open innovation was also adopted by NASA to build a mathematical algorithm that can determine the optimal content of medical kits for NASA’s future manned missions. To reach an innovative software who can solve this problem, NASA collaborated with TopCoder, Harvard Business School, and London Business School. The application of open innovation created a cost-effective and time-effective solution that could not be reached using the internal team alone.

Currently, the company is adopting open innovation models on levels between the team and other entrepreneurs from one side and the company and its consumers from the other. The Coca-Cola Accelerator program aims to help start-ups in eight cities around the world; Sydney, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Singapore, Istanbul, San Francisco, and Bangalore. Those start-ups aim to think in innovative ways to build a the Happiness Coca-Cola brand.

Another open innovation model presented by Coca-Cola is the Freestyle dispenser machine that allows users from around the world to mix their flavors and suggest a new flavour for Coca-Cola products. The new product records the consumer flavour so they can get it from other Freestyle machines located around the world using the Coca-Cola mobile application. This model of open innovation puts the consumers in the heart of the production process as the company uses the suggested flavours as part the external ideas that can be evaluated and processed as a new product line.

The new LEGO strategy aimed to focus on the consumer by linking both business and creativity. This strategy was known as, LEGO’s Shared Vision. To innovative new LEGO sets that can achieve success in the market, LEGO started the LEGO Ideas, an initiative based on a co-create open innovation model. In this online website, LEGO consumers can design their own LEGO sets either using LEGO bricks or computer 3D applications. Other users start to discuss the idea and vote for it, once the idea reaches a targeted vote, LEGO can consider it as a new product with giving a small part of the revenues to the creator of the set. This model contributes putting the consumer at the heart of the innovation process and help the team to target sets that can achieve success based on the LEGO Ideas votes and comments. This co-create platform can also contribute reducing the risk of innovation as these feedback from the website can give business analysts idea about the viability of the new product.

Another great open innovation step LEGO did was building a partnership between the company and MIT Media Lab to deliver programmable bricks, which was introduced as LEGO Windstorm.

Samsung adopts an open innovation to build their external innovation strengths through Samsung Accelerator program. The initiative aims to build a collaboration between designers, innovators, and thinkers to focus on different solutions. The program provides office spaces, statical capital, and product support to entrepreneurs to help them to build software and services. Samsung does open innovation collaboration, especially with startups.

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The distinctive part of Samsung’s open innovation collaboration is that Samsung divides it into four categories: partnerships, ventures, accelerators, acquisitions. Typically Samsung partnerships aim for new features or integrations within Samsung’s existing products. Ventures can be described as investments in early-stage startups. These investments can bring revenue in case of exits, but also provide access to new technologies that Samsung can learn and benefit from. For example, Samsung has invested in Mobeam, a mobile payment company.

Accelerators provide startups with an innovative and empowering environment to create new things. Samsung offers these startups an initial investment, facilities to work in, as well as some resources from their vast pool. The idea is that the products coming from the internal startups could become a part of Samsung’s product portfolio over time or just serve as learning experiences for the company. Acquisitions aim to bring in startups working on innovations that are at the core of Samsung’s strategic areas of the future. These acquisitions often remain independent units and can even join the Accelerator program.

As an example of Samsung’s collaboration with startups, Samsung has acquired an IoT company called SmartThings to gain an IoT platform without having to spend the money, and more importantly, time on R&D. Samsung sees potential in the IoT industry and views it as a strategically important part of their future business and thus an area where they want to be the forerunner. For Smart Things, it continues to operate as an independent startup fueled with the resources of a big company. With the investment potential and home electronics of Samsung, SmartThings can be developed into an integral part of Samsung products, by creating new IoT possibilities for homes.

By collaborating with startups, Samsung aims to benefit from the variety of innovations that smaller companies have already come up with. These companies often have products that can complement or be integrated into Samsung’s products, creating value for both parties.

The Entrepreneurs in Residence program allows Cisco to invite early-stage entrepreneurs with big ideas for enterprise solutions to join their startup incubation program. This includes access funding from Cisco, potential opportunities to collaborate with their product & engineering teams, co-working space in Silicon Valley and much more.

Wayra by Telefonica has been around for three years, and today, it is present in 11 countries across Latin America and Europe. It seems to be very well organised, and it is very active with more than 300 startups engaged so far.

Hewlett Packard

It is one company in particular that has embraced the ideals of open innovation. It has developed labs where open innovation thrives. It has created an open innovation team that links collaborators that are researchers and entrepreneurs in business, government and academia, to come up with innovative solutions to hard problems with a goal of developing breakthrough technologies.

Peugeot Citro”n

The French car manufacturer has launched a collaborative project to design the cars of the future and aimed at multiplying the company’s partnerships with scientific laboratories all around the world. This project materialised into the creation of a network of OpenLabs. These structures are designed to allow the encounter between the group’s research centres and the external partners. They have a goal of thinking about the future of the automotive industry, particularly according to scientific advances.

P&G’s open innovation with external partners culminates in their Connect+Develop website. Through this platform, P&G communicates their needs to innovators that can access detailed information related to specific needs and submit their ideas to the site. P&G recruits solutions for various problems all the time. Connect+Develop has generated multiple partnerships and produced relevant products.

The idea for Nivea’s B&W deodorant was coined together with Nivea’s users through social media. The way Nivea collaborated with its users throughout the R&D process is very interesting. They pretty much said that okay, we know that our current product can be connected to stains in clothes. Could you share your stories and home remedies so that we can develop a better product? Nivea then partnered up with a company they found via pearl finder and developed, together with the users, the B&W deodorant. This admittance of issues in their product could have been seen as a sign of weakness. However, users were very active in collaborating with Nivea, and the end-product ended up being a great success.

Telegram is a messenger application that works on computers and smartphones very much like WhatsApp and Line. However, what makes Telegram different is how much users can contribute to its content openly. Users with any developing skills can create their stickers and bots on the Telegram platform. Telegram also promotes the best stickers updating an in-app list of the trending stickers.

Open Innovation Books

To learn more about Open Innovation, I recommend you to read these interesting books about open innovation.

1. A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing: Advice from Leading Experts in the Field by Paul Sloane

Open innovation is one of the hottest topics in strategy and management today. The concept of capturing ideas in a hub of collaboration, together with the outsourcing of tasks is a revolution that is rapidly changing our culture. A Guide to Open Innovation explains how to use the power of the internet to build and innovate to introduce a consumer democracy that has never existed before. With corporate case studies and best practice advice, this book is a vital read for anyone who wants to find innovative products and services from outside their organizations, make them work and overcome the practical difficulties that lie in the way.

2. Open Business Models: How To Thrive In The New Innovation Landscape by Henry W Chesbrough

In his book, the author demonstrated that because useful knowledge is no longer concentrated in a few large organisations, business leaders must adopt a new, open innovation model. Using this model, companies look outside their boundaries for ideas.

3. Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era by Henry Chesbrough

Chesbrough shows how companies in any industry can make the critical shift from product- to service-centric thinking, from closed to open innovation where co-creating with customers enables sustainable business models that drive continuous value creation for customers. He maps out a strategic approach and proven framework that any individual, business unit, company, or industry can put to work for renewed growth and profits. The book includes guidance and compelling examples for small and large companies, services businesses, and emerging economies, as well as a path forward for the innovation industry.

4. Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm by Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West

Authors describe an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their boundaries. The book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and graduate students of innovation and technology management.

5. The Open Innovation Revolution: Essentials, Roadblocks, and Leadership Skills by Stefan Lindegaard, Guy Kawasaki

This practical guide reveals that, without the right people to drive innovation processes, your odds of success shrink dramatically. And as open innovation becomes the norm, developing the right people skills networking, communicating with stakeholders, building your brand and the ability to sell ideas is essential for your innovation leaders and intrapreneurs.

6. The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise by Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

Authors Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin draw on their own experience building InnoCentive, the pioneering global platform for open innovation. Writing for business executives, R&D leaders, and innovation strategists, Bingham and Spradlin demonstrate how to dramatically increase the flow of high-value ideas and innovative solutions both within enterprises and beyond their boundaries.

7. Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation by Linus Dahlander, Lars Frederiksen, Francesco Rullani

This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organisation theory, innovation studies and marketing to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers to an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional pearls of wisdom for how business can be done.

8. Motivation in Open Innovation: An Exploratory Study on User Innovators by Robert Motzek

Robert Motzek’s study investigates most important factors controlling user innovators’ motivation and will derive suggestions on how manufacturers can address these points to tap the full potential of user innovation for their new product development.

9. Constructing Openness on Open Innovation Platforms: Creation of a Toolbox for designing Openness on Open Innovation Platforms in the Life Science Industry by Emelie Kuusk-Jonsson, Pernilla Book

The work benchmarks a model for designing Open Innovation Platforms and takes a theoretical standpoint in the socio-legal approach, viewing regulatory interventions and constructions of contractual and intellectual property law as the legal framework enabling the creation of openness, which in turn affects the choices made in the business arena.

10. SMEs and Open Innovation: Global Cases and Initiatives by Hakikur Rahman, Isabel Ramos

Open innovation has been widely implemented in small and medium enterprises with the aim of influencing business promotion, value gain, and economic empowerment. However, little is known about the processes used to implement open innovation in SMEs and the associated challenges and benefits. This book unites knowledge on how SMEs can apply open innovation strategies to development by incorporating academic, entrepreneurial, institutional, research, and empirical cases. This book discusses diverse policy , economic, and cultural issues, including numerous opportunities and challenges surrounding open innovation strategies; studies relevant risks and risk management; analyses SMEs evolution pattern on adopting open innovation strategies through available measurable criteria; and assists practitioners in designing action plans to empower SMEs.

11. Open Innovation Essentials for Small and Medium Enterprises: A Guide to Help Entrepreneurs in Adopting the Open Innovation Paradigm in Their Business by Luca Escoffier, Adriano La Vopa, Phyllis Speser , Daniel Stainsky

Small and Medium Enterprises have to approach open innovation differently than large companies. This practical guide to open innovation is expressly for entrepreneurs and managers in SMEs. The authors provide strategies, techniques, and tricks of the trade enabling SMEs to practice open innovation systems profitability and enhance the long-term value of their company.

12. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology by Henry W Chesbrough

This book represents a powerful synthesis of that work in the form of a new paradigm for managing corporate research and bringing new technologies to market. Chesbrough impressively articulates his ideas and how they connect to each other, weaving several disparate areas of work R&D, corporate venturing, spinoffs, licensing and intellectual property into a single coherent framework.

About Ekaterina Novoseltseva

I am a cmo at Apiumhub . Apiumhub is a software development company based in Barcelona that transformed into a tech hub, mainly offering services of mobile app development, web development & software architecture.

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My Starbucks Idea : an Open Innovation Case-Study

How Starbucks gathered more than 150,000 ideas and created new products and services by engaging its community.

Since opening its first store back in 1996, the Seattle-based coffee behemoth now includes almost 30,000 coffee shops around the world and is valued at a staggering $30 billion . A strong commitment to open innovation has helped to drive this incredible growth.

This zest for open innovation led to the "My Starbucks Idea" platform, a customer participation experiment. Now that the company has retired this platform after nearly ten years, we thought it would be a good opportunity to look back and ask a few questions.

So, what can a case study of the "My Starbucks Idea" platform tell us about open innovation? What were the benefits to Starbucks from managing this platform, and how can other businesses take advantage of these benefits?

Pour yourself a little cold brew, and we’ll show you how it all came together.

How did they do it?

As a company, Starbucks has always placed a lot of value on refining its products and procedures following customer feedback. In the company’s earliest years, this was reflected in simple systems like suggestion boxes and customer surveys.

In 2008, however, founder Howard Schultz launched the open innovation platform "My Starbucks Idea". This platform encouraged customers and fans to share their ideas and suggestions for how to make the company’s beloved products even better.

“We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers,” Schultz said at the time . “That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.”

As it turns out, the as-yet undecided 2020 Presidential candidate was on to something. Starbucks customers had a real thirst to share their ideas: over the first five years of operation, the platform received over 150,000 ideas, and the company put hundreds of them to use.

The format was simple. All customers had to do was create a profile, write (and categorize) their suggestion, and submit it for others to comment on. If the idea gathered enough steam, or if the Starbucks administrators liked the looks of it, it could then be adopted by the company.

Plenty of companies crowdsource product ideas via customers. So, what made "My Starbucks Idea" unique?

What made "My Starbucks Idea" unique?

"My Starbucks Idea" was a lot more than just a fancy suggestion box.

To help encourage a community of fans, Starbucks enabled users to vote and comment on ideas they liked. There was also a public leaderboard showing the most dedicated fans, as well as those with the most popular ideas.

Users could also see profiles for the Starbucks ‘Idea Partners’ - the company representatives tasked with managing and monitoring online discussion and working with customers on their suggestions. This helped put a human face on the company.

This blend of open innovation, customer co-creation, and fan community site proved immensely popular. Not only did it create a lot of great product innovations for Starbucks, but it also helped to drive increased customer loyalty.

Through actively managing the "My Starbucks Idea" platform, Starbucks engaged customers, making them feel they were being listened to. By rolling out fan-driven ideas like cake pops and pumpkin spice lattes, Starbucks created greater product diversity.

In June 2018, after almost a decade, the company retired the "My Starbucks Idea" platform. Starbucks still encourages its customers and fans to submit their suggestions for new products on Twitter , of course, as well as via its website .

Now, let’s dig into the detail a little more. What were the results of the "My Starbucks Idea" platform, and what can these results tell us about customer-driven innovation?

Cake pops and pumpkin spice: the results of "My Starbucks Idea"

By paying attention to customer preferences, Starbucks was able to hold its spot as the market leader, even in a rapidly changing industry like the food and beverage sector.

The "My Starbucks Idea" concept was based on a core belief: customers know what they want.

The company’s commitment to this concept led to fans submitting over 150,000 ideas, of which hundreds were adopted. And these weren’t just run-of-the-mill suggestions, either - they include fan favorites like hazelnut macchiatos.

More than just receiving product suggestions, however, the platform also led to suggestions around process improvements, including finessing Starbucks’ mobile payment systems and offering free Wi-Fi.

For a better overview of the range of innovations submitted through the "My Starbucks Idea" platform, check out the following infographic, published in 2013:

These examples demonstrate the value of open innovation. By handing power over to customers, and by giving them an incentive to participate by recognizing their ideas, Starbucks was able to channel a lot of crowd creativity.

So, it’s clear that the "My Starbucks Idea" platform led to a huge amount of valuable product innovation. But beyond just suggesting new drink flavors, what were the wider benefits of this experiment?

What were the benefits for Starbucks?

First, there’s the obvious benefit: empowering customers to make suggestions for product improvements meant that Starbucks had access to new, and potentially very valuable, ideas. Many of these were things that would only have occurred to dedicated customers.

The "My Starbucks Idea" platform created significant benefits for Starbucks.

Besides the simple value of these ideas, however, the platform also helped generate a lot of media attention and free advertising. By encouraging die-hard fans to engage online, Starbucks created a new way to market their products to their most valuable customer segment.

The platform also served as a market research tool, too. Many thousands of fans signed up to submit their ideas, and in doing so provided the company with demographic information. This allowed Starbucks to build detailed customer profiles.

The benefit didn’t go just one way, though: Starbucks customers also got plenty of value out of the platform. By engaging with the company, customers experienced a greater sense of inclusiveness, with the platform helping to build a real community.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, however. As significant as the benefits were for both Starbucks and its customers, the "My Starbucks Idea" platform still created a number of risks to be managed.

How did Starbucks manage the risks of open innovation?

As we’ve seen in the examples of General Motors crowdsourcing advertisement suggestions on Twitter, handing the keyboard over to the customer can open a company up for online criticism, and even harassment.

Sometimes, open innovation can be something of a double-edged sword.

For "My Starbucks Idea", this risk was definitely present. Starbucks employees were required to sift through the online ideas and comments on a regular basis to weed out any trolling or abuse , and to prevent the platform from becoming a tool for corporate mockery.

Managing the risks of online abuse and platform misuse took a lot of dedicated resources, requiring an active approach from the company. Despite a strict set of community guidelines, the platform still required a lot of moderating.

But enough about the negative stuff. What can "My Starbucks Idea" tell us as a case study in open innovation, and how can you put these ideas to use in your own business?

How to make open innovation work for you

As we’ve seen in our article on ten companies showing us how to get it right when it comes to customer co-creation, successful open innovation takes careful planning and foresight.

If you want to make open innovation work for you and your customers, you need to:

• Appeal to the intrinsic motivations of your fans and customers
• Set clear limits and guidelines for the exercise
• Encourage and reward different perspectives

Embrace open communication

Let’s take a closer look at these things one by one.

Appeal to intrinsic motivations

Whether it’s a beer fan giving Anheuser-Busch suggestions on their new line of craft lager , or the LEGO community suggesting new toy sets , nobody ever wants to give away a great idea for free. If a product suggestion is valuable, it’s only fair that a company should pay for it.

So, before you ask your customers and fans to put on their thinking hats, give them a reason to participate in the exercise. Whether it’s monetary compensation, public recognition, or a mixture of the two, there should be something on the line if their idea succeeds.

This is something Starbucks got right with its open innovation platform. Not only did fans get the public recognition associated with having their names attached to the ideas, they were also eligible for monetary compensation, too.

Set clear guidelines and limits

Sometimes, a little structure can be a great way to encourage creativity.

Rather than simply asking fans for ideas, "My Starbucks Idea" included guiding categories for suggestions. These included ‘products’, ‘atmosphere & location’, ‘service systems’, and others. These categories helped guide the submissions process and helped stimulate fan creativity.  

Starbucks also set clear community guidelines to help manage online exchanges, too. This not only gave customers a more secure environment in which to share their ideas, it also cut down the amount of work for Starbucks employees managing the site. Win-win!

Encourage different perspectives

The true value of open innovation rests in the ability to encourage customers to share different perspectives on a product or service. After all, you can have the world’s most amazing thinkers on your payroll, but having access to a broad pool of opinions will still get the best ideas.

Starbucks really got this right with "My Starbucks Idea". By actively encouraging and rewarding a range of perspectives and values, the company was able to unlock the innovative potential of a huge number of people, with great results.

If you’re thinking about how to embrace open innovation, make it a priority to encourage people with a range of different perspectives, opinions, and life experience to participate.

When it comes to encouraging innovation , open communication is a must - especially given the rise of company representation on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

Businesses need to engage their customers with transparency, consistency, and, above all else, respect. If open innovation participants feel they’re being listened to, and are getting a trusted source of information, they’re more likely to contribute.

Once again, Starbucks really nailed this with "My Starbucks Idea". By communicating regularly with fans, and providing a clear source of dependable information about the platform, Starbucks was able to build trust and reward fans for their ideas.

For Starbucks, open innovation is much more than just cake pops.

Don't just take it from us - here is Matthew Guiste, one-time Director of Social Media at Starbucks, talking about the value of open innovation for the company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjNM8drAqG0

By unleashing the creative potential of its diverse customer base via the "My Starbucks Idea" platform, Starbucks was able to source valuable new product ideas, engage with their most dedicated fans and gather market information to stay on top of trends.

All it took was a little investment in a web platform, some community guidelines, and a commitment to open communication. That’s a small price to pay for such a valuable tool.

Jonathan Livescault

Former Strategy Consultant turned Entrepreneur. Excited to help every day corporate innovation teams get results and build their company's future.

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A guide to open innovation (with case studies)

Daniel Saunders

Chief executive officer.

The following guide delves into what open innovation means and the different models available to your corporation. We’ll analyse why you would choose to pursue an open innovation solution over a closed innovation approach and examine innovation case studies from P&G, Metro Bank, United Utilities, and Nivea.

What is open innovation? 

Open innovation is primarily about partnerships and collaboration. It’s about identifying and connecting with innovative ideas, solutions, people, or companies to drive value, solve problems or explore new opportunities. 

The term open innovation (OI) was coined by Henry Chesbrough , a professor at UC Berkeley. He described it as trading ideas in and out of an organisation to accelerate innovation and open up the organisation to using more external ideas. 

The definition suggests two important aspects that characterise open innovation; 

• The “outside-in” aspect brings external ideas into a company’s innovation process.  
• The “inside out” aspect is where ideas from within the company are shared externally. 

Types of open innovation  

Open innovation means companies seek collaborators to innovate and co-create alongside. Types of open innovation include open innovation labs , accelerators, incubators, M&As, and hackathons. Often the most fruitful open innovations involve unconventional partnerships.

Advantages of open innovation 

When you want to develop a new idea via open innovation, you have two main options; buy or partner.  

• Buy an existing innovation. Buying a company that owns an innovation is much faster than trying to build something yourself, sometimes by decades. The other advantage of buying is you usually own the innovation and any IP outright and can customise it as necessary. C orporate Venture Capital can be an alternative to a full takeover, allowing companies to test the waters with smaller investments into potential acquisition targets, whilst also bringing in additional revenue from the investment. 
• Partner to implement an innovation. Partnering is the quickest and cheapest option, but the compromise is that you don’t fully own the idea. That’s why finding the right company to partner with and validating their ideas for your use cases is essential. This is where corporate innovation labs and accelerator programs add immense value—scouting for global ideas, assessing the fit between businesses and use cases, leading agile development and validation phases, etc. 

Case study: P&G shifts from a $2bn annual spend on internal R&D to open innovation

Proctor and Gamble (P&G) are one of the world’s largest FMCGs businesses. Their market position as a global leader can be connected to their long history of innovation, starting with the launch of their R&D department in 1890 to launching Connect + Develop , their open innovation program in 2002. 

But after generations of internal closed innovation, what prompted the shift to open innovation?

Former P&G CEO A.G. Lafley spearheaded the change in 2000 after realising that the business couldn’t meet its growth objectives by throwing more money at R&D (at the time, they were spending more than $2bn annually on R&D). 

But Lafley had noted that over the decades, many of P&Gs most successful innovations came from “unlikely connections, approaches and ideas.” Such as technology invented for one industry enabling innovation in entirely different industries. Or how company acquisitions allowed P&G to form strategic external connections that lead to “commercially successful products.”

Based on these insights, Lafley set an internal company goal that 50% of all future product innovations should be developed with one or more external partners. At the time (2000), only 10% of product innovations involved outside partners. 

P&G managed to exceed the target before the end of the decade. The result of increasing open innovation to 50% had a massive impact on the corporation, which Lafley himself summarises;

“…company sales more than doubled, profit tripled, free cash flow quadrupled, and P&G’s stock price nearly doubled in a decade when the S&P 500 index was actually down.” A.G. Lafley

What’s needed for open innovation to succeed? 

Corporations’ biggest mistake is seeing a cool idea and shoehorning it into their business. Inevitably this approach fails. 

While there’s no set open innovation model, one thing is always essential, and that’s structure. Innovation means change; incorporating a new idea or process into an existing system requires the system to change to meet it (or the idea to change to meet the system), e.g. changing your current processes, people or mindset. That’s why any new idea must be tested and validated to ensure it’s the right fit before incorporating it into business as usual. 

Three open innovation case studies 

1. united utilities found innovation success through a structured open innovation approach .

Since 2017, L Marks has run the Innovation Lab for the UK’s largest listed water company, United Utilities, which manages the water network for more than seven million people.

The innovation lab comprises a 12-week program that moves through several stages to advance the innovation. For example, all the teams participating in the innovation lab run live trials in real business environments to validate their ideas and over 90 United Utilities employees are called upon to mentor the teams based on their subject matter expertise. 

Applying their tried and tested program meant the L Marks scouting team got in front of 1500 businesses, received over 400 applications, and accepted over 30 teams into the program from France, Portugal, Canada, Australia, India, and the UK. 

This structured approach to open innovation meant that United Utilities made framework agreements with over half of the program participants.

Kieran Brocklebank, Head of Innovation at United Utilities, explains why their Innovation Lab brings about such novel innovations; “Interestingly, all the suppliers we are working with would label themselves as small or startup, and five of them had never worked with a UK water company before. They all have a completely different energy to a large corporate like United Utilities, which is exactly what you need to disrupt the status quo.”

2. Nivea co-created a best-selling deodorant with customers 

Nivea used “netnography”—mining online customer reviews and comments—to gain insights about how customers used their products. They realised that customers had two major gripes when using their deodorant,

• Yellow stains on white clothes 
• And white deodorant stains on black clothing. 

Before diving into product development, Nivea contacted customers online and asked for their feedback about which new product characteristics would be most important to them. This co-creation work led to customers providing additional ideas, which were also incorporated into the product development. 

T he Nivea R&D team then partnered with specialist chemicals company Evonik, and experts at the textile research centre Hohenstein institute, to develop a new patented technology that protected dark fabric and minimised staining on white clothes. Nivea’s “Invisible Black and White” deodorant became the company’s best-selling deodorant in its 130-year history.

3. Inside-out and outside-in knowledge sharing by Metro Bank 

Metro Bank runs the Magic Makers program, which includes Fusion , a 3-day competitive corporate innovation workshop . Fusion is open to external start-ups and internal Metro teams. Both have to compete to earn a place at Metro’s 10-week innovation lab to develop their ideas further. 

This program exemplifies open innovation. The Metro Bank team are heavily involved in the programme to share their knowledge with external startups. And by involving internal and external teams, knowledge, views, working practices, and ideas are passed inside-out and outside-in.

In the 2022 Fusion program, three winners were chosen, one of which was an internal Metro Bank team, ‘Return of the Hack’, whose idea will enable customers to access more information digitally.  The team will work alongside other external startups to develop their idea in an agile manner during the 10-week innovation lab. 

Faisal Hussain, Chief Technology Officer at Metro Bank, explained the impact; 

“Innovation Lab brings out the very best in our colleagues as they compete internally to come up with MAGIC – literally Making A Great Idea Count. They also evaluate how we can embrace and embed the start-up propositions into the practical day to day running of the Bank to realise real results that benefit our customers. The spirit of innovation is so strong in Metro Bank that an entirely internal team of colleagues has been selected over an external start-up.”

No company can survive in today’s world without some form of open innovation.

The collaborative approach characteristic of open innovation models gives companies access to innovative ideas and solutions across the globe. It provides a clear advantage over innovating internally and in isolation, especially considering the breadth and speed of today’s technological advancements. 

But rather than a silver bullet, open innovation requires structure to access it in any material way. Structure in terms of international scouting to leading agile development and market validation phases to ensure the program is a commercial success. 

The Ever-Evolving Balancing Act: Sustaining Innovation vs. Strategic Vision

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Why Now Is the Time for “Open Innovation”

• Linus Dahlander
• Martin Wallin

Covid-19 has shown how companies can work together to solve problems.

As companies struggled to adapt to the fallout of the Covid-19 crisis, many turned to open innovation — a collaborative approach that plays to the strengths of all companies involved and can produce creative, unexpected solutions. It’s a kind of collaboration, the authors argue, that’s worth pursuing whether or not you’re in a crisis. Making it work, however, requires that companies: momentarily put aside traditional concerns over IP to focus on other approaches to creating value; leverage their partners’ motivations effectively to maintain a productive working relationship; embrace new partners; and commit to the projects they pursue through open innovation to reap their benefits. This approach can be extremely fruitful, and not just in the middle of a crisis.

In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

Amidst the gloom and doom of the early months of the Covid-19 crisis, something surprisingly uplifting started to happen: Companies began to come together to work openly at an unprecedented level, putting the ability to create value before the opportunity to make a buck. The German multinational Siemens, for instance, opened up its Additive Manufacturing Network to anyone who needs help in medical device design. Heavy truck maker Scania and the Karolinska University Hospital have partnered, too: Scania is not only converting trailers into mobile testing stations, but also directed some 20 highly skilled purchasing and logistics experts to locate, acquire, and deliver personal protective equipment to health care workers. Similarly, Ford is working together with the United Auto Workers, GE Healthcare, and 3M to build ventilators in Michigan using F-150 seat fans, portable battery packs, and 3D printed parts.

• LD Linus Dahlander (@linusdahlander) is a professor at ESMT Berlin and the holder of the Lufthansa Group Chair in Innovation. His research focuses on networks, communities, and innovation.
• MW Martin Wallin ( @mwallin ) is a professor of innovation management at Chalmers University of Technology. He focuses on innovation, strategy and digitalization.

Partner Center

My Starbucks Idea : an Open Innovation Case-Study

My Starbucks Idea was produced in 2008 to encourage customers to suggest ways to improve Starbucks products. Starbucks' employees could then decide if they would make the suggested improvements. On the platform, customers had the ability to vote and comment on other suggestions. By engaging with its most engaged customers, Starbucks was able to drive genuine fan affinity, which translated into increased customer loyalty. Starbucks retired the platform in 2018, but not before it had generated over 150,000 new product ideas from customers, with many of these ideas adopted by the company. Open innovation is a fantastic tool for companies looking to boost customer loyalty and gather valuable insights.

More Innovation Resources:

How to not build corporate innovation labs.

Innovators are Unreasonable Networkers

Innovation thrives when people with different experiences and interests interact and exchange new ideas. The best innovators have active networks outside their industry or geography and resist the temptation to merely adapt to current conditions.

How to Embrace These 4 Leadership Paradoxes

Effective leaders must navigate paradoxes inherent to leadership practices and organizations, including maintaining a strong sense of self while demonstrating humility, and balancing continuity and change.

16 Examples of Open Innovation – What Can We Learn From Them?

Despite years of hype and countless studies, many still find open innovation an abstract concept.

Even though a few common key success factors for open innovation can be named, there’s plenty to be learned from companies who’ve actually been using open innovation.

This post gathers  examples and key learnings   from a wide range of companies using open innovation in different ways .

Some of them use open innovation to add value to their hardware, while others use it to gain more information for developing new products.

Think about the different types of co-operation, key stakeholders and potential collaborators. How do you motivate them to participate? The stakeholders from our examples of open innovation range from product users to smaller companies, that complement the product or help solve your problems, all the way to scientists and individuals wanting to participate in order to learn new skills and gain valuable experience.

1. Quirky - Crowdsourcing product ideas to be manufactured

You might have heard about Quirky , a community-led invention platform. The concept behind Quirky is that you can put your product idea up on Quirky and others within the Quirky community can comment and contribute to your idea.

If the idea is good and gains traction, it can be developed further by people on Quirky.  

The Quirky community

Quirky members have a wide range of special skills, so you can collaborate with those that complement your expertise. Thus, the ready product is developed by the community.

The best products on the platform are chosen by Quirky for manufacturing and sold at the  Quirky store . The process at this point is financed by Quirky, so having your own company and resources isn’t crucial for your product’s success.

But why would people share their expertise and develop ideas that are then manufactured and sold by Quirky?

• You can get your product idea out there with much less effort. If you  want to make your idea a reality, Quirky offers a simple way to do so.
• You can learn and get to use your talent to acquire more experience to put to your CV, and perhaps be one step closer to your dream job.
• I f the product ends up being a success you can  earn money from being part of developing it.  If the idea is originally yours, you may get royalties depending upon its success. This is what makes Quirky an active platform with an active community.

Practical takeaways  

The practical teaching from the Quirky example is that there is a way to get people ideating for you even for free.

By assessing problems that many have to deal with or by creating challenging tasks, people get motivated to collaborate with you. To cultivate this collaboration and create an active community, an appealing online presence will go a long way to make sure people find you.

2. Samsung - Diverse types of collaboration

Even though you might recognize Samsung from several plagiarism case convictions , Samsung has also been qualified as one of the most innovative big companies   today. Of course, Samsung has a major internal R&D unit, but the company is also a proud open innovation advocate and does open innovation collaboration especially with startups.

The distinctive part of Samsung’s open innovation collaboration is that Samsung divides it to 4 categories .

The four categories are even described as being the "four legs of the open innovation activities" at Samsung. The 4 categories of collaboration:

• Partnerships
• Accelerators
• Acquisitions

Partnerships are essentially collaboration between companies, such as startups in Silicon Valley. Typically partnerships aim for new features or integrations within Samsung’s existing products.  

Ventures can be described as investments into early stage startups. These investments can bring revenue in case of exits, but also provide access to new technologies that Samsung can learn and benefit from. For example, Samsung has invested in Mobeam , a mobile payment company.

Accelerators provide startups with an innovative and empowering environment to create new things. Samsung offers these startups an initial investment, facilities to work in, as well as some resources from their vast pool. The idea is that the products stemming from the internal startups could become a part of Samsung’s product portfolio over time or just serve as learning experiences for the company.

Acquisitions aim to bring in startups working on innovations that are at the core of Samsung's strategic areas of the future. These acquisitions often remain independent units and can even join the Accelerator program.

Collaboration with Startups As an example of Samsung’s collaboration with startups, Samsung has acquired an IoT company called SmartThings to gain an IoT platform without having to spend the money, and time on R&D.

Samsung sees potential in the IoT industry and views it as a strategically important part of their future business and thus an area where they want to be forerunner.

Practical takeaway  

By collaborating with startups, Samsung aims to benefit from the variety of innovations that smaller companies have already come up with. These companies often have products that can complement or be integrated to Samsung’s own products, creating value for both parties.

On the other hand, the kind of companies that aim for new innovations requiring high initial investments are typically better invested in or just acquired.

So, the main learning point from the Samsung case is that different kinds of companies at different stages of their lifespan offer different kinds of possibilities. You should identify these and figure out the methods that best match the different kinds of opportunities.

3. Local Motors - Co-Creation in a community

Local Motors activates its open community through its Co-Create platform . The designed vehicles are then manufactured through, for example, 3D printing.

The key part in Local Motors’ product development is its completely open innovation platform. You don’t even need to be registered to their platform-site to see the new designs that the community has envisioned.

Like in most other open innovation companies, the innovations are coined through open innovation challenges, like the LITECAR challenge .

In 2015 Local Motors had an Urban Mobility Challenge: Berlin 2030, the aim of which was to envision the future of transport in Berlin. Now, one year later one of the envisioned transport solutions has already seen daylight. It’s one of the most known Local Motors Co-Creation products, Olli , the self-driving smart bus.

Apart from being self-driving, Olli also works through your phone. You can choose your routes through Olli or even create new ones. Olli is not just some envisionment of the faraway future, it’s actually  hitting the streets of Washington D.C .

Like other designs, Olli has been developed through the Co-Creation site after the initial design. You can, in fact, see the conversations and ideas that the community has posted there. The site even has ongoing development: Currently, they are looking for solutions in universal interface improvement and a superior suspension development.

Practical takeaways

Local Motors has positioned itself as an open innovation company in an industry that’s traditionally everything but open.

The company actually challenges collaborators to make a difference and be a part of the change. This makes them stand out from their competitors. The fact that this openness is clearly a fundamental part of Local Motors, makes people see that open innovation is not just a marketing trick, but at the very core of the way they work.

This positioning and “strength of openness” is a great foundation for standing out and building collaboration. As a result, Local Motors benefits from an active and motivated community.

The community is a great advocate for the company. So, in order to create an engaged community, you need to make sure that you’re committed enough for people to really believe in your initiatives.

4. United Genomes Project - Openness Accelerating Science

Most of the medical R&D is still done in the traditional, costly and slow way. The United Genomes Project (UGP) was established to solve this problem. The project uses open innovation to create breakthrough medical innovations in Africa through their open source genetic database.

Gaining knowledge of different genomes is important, because depending on your DNA , different medicines actually work differently in your body. While traditional ways of medical R&D don’t support personalized medicines, the UGP does.  The UGP makes it possible for African medical professionals and aspiring practitioners to use this open data to create new innovations.

The idea for the UGP spur from the fact that the founder, Geoffrey Siwo himself, made a breakthrough medical finding with the help of internet databases while he was an undergraduate in Kenya.

The discovery wouldn’t have been possible without the online resources and information, as he didn’t have the means to gain that knowledge through expensive research methods. Some scientists have resources to gather costly genetic data but others don’t. However, the need for new medicine has no boundaries.

The UGP enables cost-efficient open innovation to take place anywhere, and this can kick off new breakthrough medical innovations .  It’s also noteworthy that as diversity (geographic and otherwise) is good for successful innovation , open innovation makes it possible for literally anyone with adequate skills to participate, as Siwo’s personal experience teaches us .

What does this teach us?

Most importantly, the fact that open innovation could speed up R&D and innovation drastically.

Also, this kind of initiative to work for a good cause has many benefits for the company. One is, of course, the good PR that these kind of initiatives most likely generate. However, being part of making a difference is a great motivator for your employees in itself.

5. Lego - Creating new products from community ideas

Lego is another example of how engaging your users creates more value. Lego activates its users through its Create and Share site as well as the Lego Ideas site . The Create and Share site lets Lego community members share their designs and Lego pictures, while the Ideas site actually aims for new product releases.  

As an example, the mini-Big Bang Theory Lego set is a community-based product that originated in the Lego Ideas. When the amount of supporters reaches 10k, Lego evaluates the design and the design can hit the stores under the Lego Ideas product label. The idea for mini-Big Bang Theory was submitted over 2 years ago and it took the project over 10 months to get from the Ideas site to production.

When the product ideas are approved for production, the original community members that ideated the product also get monetary compensation. The mini-Big Bang Theory is just one example. More recent products that are yet to be released in the Lego Ideas series are, for example the Adventure Time themed set and the Beatles - Yellow Submarine set .

The community provides Lego with thousands of new ideas annually, which means that Lego has a steady flow of free ideas that people are already waiting to buy. This open innovation approach in their product design phase is said to be one of the core factors for Lego’s successful brand . It has definitely been one of the things that saved their brand and made them stay at the top of the market.

If you make products directly to consumers, aim to activate your users into helping you create products that fit their desires.

When the users interact with one another and tell you what they would want to see on the store shelves, you probably have ready demand, and can save a lot of resources on market research and reduce the inherent risk in R&D.

Getting their voices heard can build a base of committed users. Just make sure you have the capability to implement at least some of the most popular ideas and communicate that well so that your customers can feel like they really made an impact.  

Could user activation and participation bring you value, or are you on a market that requires you to take a different approach?

It’s noteworthy that the same model of user activation might not work as well in other kinds of environments, such as in some B2B contexts with a smaller customer base.

6. Mozilla - Motivating the community

One thing that rarely gets connected with open innovation is open source development.

When you think about it, open source software development is very much open innovation: in open source software development, the source code of a product is open and pretty much anyone with decent skills can be a part of the software development.

Mozilla is a great example of this type of open source software development. Their product is the Firefox web browser, developed by Mozilla’s worldwide community of coders and other professionals. Mozilla has been at the forefront in advancing this kind of product development, and the development activities are carried out by Mozilla’s community where there are both volunteers and paid employees. 

People are motivated to volunteer at Mozilla because it is a great learning experience, they get to be a part of a community and are able to take part in Mozilla events.

If you want to participate in the Mozilla product development, it has been made easy. For the first step, you can start off with little things like reporting bugs to get involved. More information about the different ways for participating can be found through Mozilla’s website . Apart from volunteering, you can also apply for their internships and job openings. So from this perspective, Mozilla operates somewhere between a non-profit association and a company.

What we can learn from Mozilla is definitely the importance of fostering a community. As there are plenty of examples on the benefits of open innovation communities, it’s also worth it to learn from open source communities.

Could you benefit from opening up parts of your R&D to create this kind of a community?

Talented people join Mozilla’s communities to learn, get experience, meet people, contribute to the product and maybe even to be hired at some point. They seem to have their offerings for community members in order.

So, think about how you could motivate and foster your community . What could you offer to get people to be excited and participate?

7. Facebook - Using Hackathons to generate fresh ideas

There is an interesting internal open innovation example within Facebook. At Facebook, they organize hackathons for their employees. The idea of these hackathons is that the employees generate new ideas and innovations and make initial versions of them.  

These hackathons are not only for developers, but for anyone within the company. The point is that you work with something that you don’t work with on a daily basis. It’s argued that doing things outside your day-to-day work and enjoying making a difference within the company are what generates outside-the-box creative thinking. Of course, you can’t undermine the effect of diversity in these hackathons either.

Developers and architects might have certain ways of thinking, so it makes things interesting when you get ideas, for example, from people who work in the finance or marketing department.

When your employees meet each other across all the departments and other barriers that they normally have, they actually transmit tacit knowledge, the sense of team spirit across the company and build meaningful relationships within your organization.

All this happens while the employees are creating and innovating something new for your company. When this kind of collaboration is typical for your organization, you also create a product-innovation centered culture for your workplace.

The Pride Flag Feature

These hackathons are quite productive for Facebook. There are plenty of feature examples that can be traced back to these hackathons. For example, the like-button, live chat, and the Facebook timeline are ideas that have sprouted from Facebook hackathons.

The pride flag feature , that allowed you to modify your profile picture to support the LGBTQ community in 2015 was created at a Facebook hackathon. The idea was coined by two Facebook interns. Through the hackathon, it fastly spread throughout the company and ended up being released for public use. This example shows that your job title doesn’t necessarily matter when having a great idea.

Include the whole of your employee body.

If your employees are knowledge workers and you pay them for their creative thinking, it makes sense that you include all of them in the process of innovating new products and features. Anyone can have a groundbreaking idea and it pays off to listen to them.  

Opening up innovation internally has both short term and long term benefits.  In the short term, you can get new ideas to develop your business, and in the long run open internal innovation can be a great tool to motivate your employees and boost the development of both their thinking and skills.

You should be able to teach this mindset of creatively and proactively solving problems to all your employees.

And remember, not all internal open innovation occasions need to be full-on weekend long hackathons, you could also have many of the benefits from practices like shorter idea challenges.

8. GE - Connecting with young talents

The prizes for these challenges are very appealing for young professionals and students and  include:

• Scholarships
• Monetary awards
• Shances to work with GE on the project in question
• Paid internships 

The benefit of this is that GE gets connections to talented young people on top of the innovation work in open innovation challenges. GE’s innovation challenges and the possibilities they offer also affect the employer image of GE in a positive way.

For example the Unimpossible Missions: The University Edition challenge is clearly targeted for students that are creative, have a certain level of technical skills and a clear recruitment motivation. Through the challenge, GE aims to get three smart and creative students to have their internship at GE.

Open innovation can be used as a way to connect with talented young professionals and recruit new talent for the company. The innovation challenges for individuals and universities can be a good way to do this. They enable you to see the potential of young talents in a much wider angle than in a regular job interview, case interview or even take-home exercises.

9. Moodle - Benefit from a large sharing community  

Moodle is a learning platform that many universities and other educators use worldwide. The company itself originates from Australia, and is completely open source. This means that there is an open community behind Moodle and it's free for anyone to use, which is why schools, universities and other educators prefer it.

Moodle originally came about at the start of this millennium, when schools started to use more technology. Hence, there was a great blue ocean market space for this kind of a solution.

What makes Moodle tick, is the fact that its users create new value for the company at all times. There are over 70,000 registered sites that have over 10,000,000 courses on the platform with almost 90,000,000 users on the whole. That’s more than the entire population of Germany!

The distribution of Moodle is quite good, so it doesn’t need to market its product as much as emerging companies in the same field. It also has an open development roadmap, so everyone can see the future direction of the product, which gives further confidence to make the choice of starting to use the product.

Even though the timing of Moodle was on point and that played a great role in Moodle’s success, the key success factor from the open innovation perspective is that Moodle has a large sharing community that generates new users, as well as the openness of their development roadmap.

T hus, we can learn about creating value for users through expert users, such as universities. Moodle offers the platform that quality educators use worldwide to contact their students and to communicate with them. This makes it easy to spread.  

Moodle has been rated as the best learning management system is because it’s:

• Always up to date due to being open source
• Translated into almost 100 languages
• Plethora of features, which makes it very flexible

Moreover, the fact that Moodle works very openly and has an open development roadmap means that it’s trustworthy: everybody knows what’s going on and what new features the company is about to implement.

It’s worth to take a minute and think how you could gain trusting and committed users that spread the word, in turn generating new customers for you.

10. P&G - Being open about the innovation needs  

P&G’s open innovation with external partners culminates in their Connect+Develop website .

Through this platform, P&G communicates their needs to innovators that can access detailed information related to specific needs and submit their ideas to the site.  Connect+Develop has generated multiple partnerships and produced relevant products.

P&G recruits solutions for various problems all the time.

As an example, P&G’s COVERGIRL bypassed a lengthy R&D process by partnering up with OraLabs to publish a new lip balm, a market that was suddenly trending. As time is money, especially with trendy products, the collaboration with OraLabs really benefitted COVERGIRL.

On the other hand, as P&G communicates its needs openly, it creates competition for the solution providers as well, which is of course great news for P&G.

Let others know what your needs and problems are. This makes it possible for others to propose customized solutions for you, which enhances competition.

In the best scenario, you can pick the best innovator for your solution. Opening up about problems and needs can also bring great connections that you wouldn’t otherwise have found at all.

Being open about the problems that you have might be a scary idea, after all, not only possible collaborators but your competitors will be able to see what you are working on.

Despite this, there are great benefits about opening up about your needs to companies that could solve your problems. The collaborative relationships can also last for decades, ending up being helpful on more than one occasion.

P&G often refers to collaboration with long-lasting partnerships as being efficient because you already know each other's working practices inside and out.

On top of the fact that being completely open gives you the best chance to get outside-the-box solutions that you wouldn’t have thought yourself, it’s also possible to create your own trusted community that you can share your problems with.

11. Nivea - Involving users in product development

Nivea’s B&W deodorant is a strong example of activating users throughout new product development from ideation to implementation.

The intimately open collaboration with possible partnering companies happens via Beiensdorf’s pearlfinder , which might be interesting to take a look at. However, the real case that we can learn from here is Nivea’s B&W deodorant’s development.

The idea for Nivea’s B&W deodorant was coined together with Nivea’s users through social media. The way Nivea collaborated with its users throughout the R&D process is very interesting.

They basically shared what kind of product was needed, what seemed to be the reason behind these stains in the first place, and how they could be prevented. The resulting B&W deodorant then became the first deodorant on the market that prevents white and yellow stains from appearing.

Beiersdorf then partnered up with a company they found via pearlfinder and developed, together with the users, the B&W deodorant. This admittance of issues in their product could have been seen as a sign of weakness, however, users were very active in collaborating with Nivea and the end-product ended up being a great success.

Your users might have surprising problems that you could solve . User involvement and activation might be a good idea in engaging them to collaborate with you.

Even if open innovation collaboration may seem frightening to you, listening to your customers needs is common sense. So keep your eyes and ears open (also online!) for all ideas that come from your potential and existing users.

Of course, Nivea could have invented the invisible B&W deodorant by traditional means, but it would probably have cost more time and money. Nivea also gained visibility and committed customers by including them in the innovation process, which thus doubled as marketing.  

Open innovation is not just a cool way of doing things. It can have major cost benefits too.

Do you know what your users are thinking of your product?

Maybe there is a way of involving your users in the process, thus giving you helpful insight into their needs, wants and ways of bettering your product.

12. Philips - The High Technology Campus  

Philips has a wide range of open innovation activities. It has the platform , the challenges and it activates its own employees to think openly .

Philips also established its own open innovation campus at Eindhoven in 2003. The High Tech Campus is open for a variety of companies to work in. It offers them tools to help accelerate their business and research projects.

Currently, the campus works on its own, but Philips’ presence is still there and it continues to gain from the physical open innovation space.

The possibility to actually work physically together has created an innovation ecosystem in Eindhoven with over 140 companies with varying sizes working in the same small area.

Creating and being present in spaces where there is a possibility to collaborate together is great for open innovation.

Nothing builds collaborative and trusting relationships between companies and research groups like the possibility to visit one another casually on your coffee breaks to talk about what you’ve just been working on.

Even though technology gives you the possibility to open up your innovation to the masses, physical proximity is still a key factor in one-on-one close collaboration.

However, physical proximity is not always necessary. Companies can have active platform collaboration online and hold open innovation challenges worldwide.

Still, if you work closely with others and want to establish close personal connections, you could benefit from these physical spaces that enable concrete encounters.

Could proximity with collaborators be beneficial to your company?

13. Apple - Value creation through open platforms

Apple is a typical example of a company that is very closed and secretive of its R&D, so what is it doing on this list?

Despite the general closedness of Apple, they still use open innovation on their own terms when they think open innovation is suitable.

Take the apps on iOS-products as an example. Even if Apple’s product quality is top notch, it is first and foremost the quality and wide range of applications available for Apple products that makes them so valuable.

The logic behind the idea, that others can create applications on your platform is very smart.

Think about iPhone users (and all other smartphone users for that matter). They have all kinds of needs that phone makers or operating system makers don’t have a clue about. Some are interested in their health, others are into mobile gaming, some in news, books and music etc.

With all the possible apps, users can customize their user experience exactly like they want to, and all of this benefits both the platform and the users.

The key learning point here is that you can restrict the amount of openness in open innovation . What Apple does is that it regulates and controls its open innovation so that application developers can create their products to work in the Apple environment. This way they can be distributed through Apple’s channels with little to no visibility in the other aspects of Apple’s internal R&D.

However, achieving this kind of a position and control is not easy, nor is it always feasible. You have to think if having control actually gives you enough value.

Regulating the openness means that also the outcome possibilities of collaboration are restricted one way or the other. For example, the collaboration can fail to create breakthrough innovations.

Moreover, convincing others to engage in open innovation with you despite restraining the collaboration can be hard unless you clearly have a winning platform . So be careful on how you control the cooperation.

Due to Apple having a great brand and a winning platform, a high level of control is possible for them, but how about you?

14. General Assembly - Re-thinking education

General Assembly is a school, that provides online and on-campus courses, that help people gain work life relevant know-how.

Typically the course contents are related to the modern needs and technologies in today’s work life .

There are courses for example on:

• User interface design 
• Digital marketing
• Entrepreneurial skills

The offering is both for students that simply want to learn and make connections in the community, and for companies that want to provide their employees with courses.

Valuable Community

General Assembly incorporates open innovation through their community , developing their offering based on the needs of the changing work life. They are also actively seeking new partnerships. The community is used for connecting talented young professionals (current and former students) with companies looking for such.

General Assembly teaches people skills, that lead them to paying jobs and offers tools to help in building their own companies. So in a way, General Assembly is a personal accelerator for its students!  

As an example, there is General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive (WDI) course . Through this course, students learn how to develop web software professionally.

The students also complete several projects that provide them with the skills applicable for real work life situations. For example, Nathan Maas created his own service based on what he learned on the WDI course and now has a company called pennypost .

The open community of General Assembly made it possible for Maas to start his own company with people that liked his idea. Several fellow students and instructors actually joined Maas to create pennypost after the WDI course. The fact that these kind of innovative companies and individuals have their roots in the General Assembly means that they get visibility. Thus more and more companies want to hire from their alumni, in turn attracting more students.

General Assembly listens to and reacts to what its customers want to learn and teach.

The skills that they teach are very much related to the new needs of working life , skills that companies want to hire and teach their employees. Being nimble and developing its offering to match the needs of the society is what makes General Assembly more attractive to students.

The problem with traditional schools is that the curriculum tends to change slowly in them.

While the demands of businesses are changing rapidly, what you learned in school doesn’t often prepare you for real work-life situations with adequate skills.

General Assembly is a very good example of being open to the needs of its users and meeting constantly changing requirements.It's also open to new skills and instructors who have something to add to their offering.

15. Telegram - Enabling users to create content

Telegram is a messenger application that works on computers and smartphones very much like WhatsApp. What makes it different is how much users can contribute to its content openly. What makes Telegram interesting and popular is the fact that you can customize it to your liking.

Users with any developing skills can create their own stickers and bots (i.e. their own content) on the platform.  While Telegram can be used like a regular messenger, it’s also possible for users to customize their user experience by themselves.  

Even though instant messaging is a very competitive market, Telegram has gained a lot of users because of its ease, openness and the fact that you can create your own content. The Telegram company sometimes even grant prizes for new content.

Custom stickers makes it possible for you and your friends to make stickers of the funniest moments you’ve shared. Telegram also promotes the best stickers updating an in-app list of the trending ones.

The main giveaway of this case is that openness can:

• Allow users to create versatile new features for themselves
• Customize their user experience

When users can create almost any kind of feature they want, you can benefit from the best innovations .

Telegram can even bring the most popular features forward to all users.

So it might be a good idea to let your users create what they want to on your platform as it  might just be enough to differentiate your product from all the others!

Also, having the users configure a product to exactly match their needs creates a positive lock-in effect. Why would you want to change the product to a substitute, when others can’t be made to match your preferences?

16. Lilly - Gathering information  

Lilly is a pharmaceutical company, that has applied open innovation via its Open Innovation Drug Discovery program (OIDD) . In OIDD scientists (at universities as well as companies) can safely share biological data that aims for new drug discovery . Lilly then offers modern tools and help in screening and researching the data. So basically OIDD is a platform that enables companies to find new drug compounds faster.

OIDD is also a platform for generating R&D partnerships with Lilly. With the OIDD Lilly has generated a wide, Open Innovation 2.0 like open innovation network. In the network, all parties can benefit from the new value created within the network, in this case, from the new drug discoveries. Hence, new discoveries lead to new medicines faster.

This open way of working enables Lilly and other scientists to find new possible drugs and cures for severe diseases faster than before. Researchers apart from Lilly get the tools to test their compounds, while Lilly gets a great database of compounds. On the other hand, Lilly obtains connections that it can use when possible drug solutions are found.

The Lilly example demonstrates an open innovation network, and how that positively affects Lilly’s own R&D. The OIDD platform speeds up new drug discoveries, and when new drug compounds are found, Lilly can collaborate with the finding company.

In the end, Lilly might be able to manufacture the end product and be the one to sell it. This kind of open innovation network can be issued in many ways, like via this case’s open innovation platform. You might not even need to create the network yourself as there are many existing open innovation networks that you might be able to join.

If you are still apprehensive about open innovation because of problems with potential intellectual property rights, you might want to reconsider. You can start simple, with a pilot.

To help you out, we created in Viima an open innovation board template which allows you to manage your open innovation  initiatives in a user-friendly, intuitive and efficient manner. You can sign up for free and start collecting and developing the most promising ideas right away !

This post is a part of our Open Innovation blog-series. In this series, we dive deep into the different areas of open innovation and cover the aspects we think are the most important to understand about open innovation.

You can read the rest of the articles in our series covering open innovation by clicking on the button below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog to receive updates for more of our upcoming content!

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Open Innovation

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In Open Innovation, you will learn strategies for finding the best ideas, solutions, and people necessary to solve your organization’s most difficult problems.

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What do you do when your organization can’t solve a problem on its own? Are you paying for effort instead of solutions? Is your organization stuck?

Strategic problem solving is a key element in innovation and vital to an organization’s success and growth. Open innovation is a strategy for innovation management that suggests the best ideas and people necessary to solve your organization’s difficult problems may come from outside your company entirely. Through open innovation, organizations can connect with talented people and breakthrough ideas from across the globe. Whether you’re developing a new product, responding to the changing workforce, or simply looking for new ideas, you can use open innovation to find answers and solutions in areas you didn’t expect.  

Open innovation strategy is already all around you. The top companies around the world have figured out the key to innovation in business by using idea crowdsourcing and the wisdom of the crowd to help them create products and services that we use on a daily basis—from smartphone apps to Wikipedia. 

This is an innovation management course that presents a foundational understanding of open innovation, helping you not only solve some of your most difficult problems, but also gain access to a pool of talent that goes far beyond your organization's walls. By examining the different types of open innovation—contests, idea crowdsourcing for business, collaborative communities, and online labor markets—you’ll begin to develop a plan to adopt and implement an open innovation strategy in your organization. 

Through videos, real-world case studies, and peer interaction, you’ll build innovation skills, explore when and why to implement new solutions, how to operationalize and protect proprietary ideas, and, most importantly, how to identify the problems you’re trying to solve and address them with open innovation. 

Your next big idea might come from where you least expect it. Don’t think behind closed doors. Let open innovation in.

The course is part of the Harvard on Digital Learning Path and will be delivered via  HBS Online’s course platform . Learners will be immersed in real-world examples from experts at industry-leading organizations. By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Articulate the concept of open innovation and how it works
• Identify the types of problems that can be solved with open innovation and how to decouple problems from solutions
• Recognize ​the challenges and ethical considerations of open innovation, such as intellectual property rights
• Match your business problem to the right open innovation strategy, including: contests, idea crowdsourcing, collaborative communities, or online labor market
• Implement an open innovation strategy in your organization, including how to identify and access outside resources, helping you stay ahead of the competition

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Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in technology management, innovation, digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI). He has taught extensively in Harvard Business School’s MBA, executive, doctoral and online programs. He has co-developed new courses on Digital Innovation & Transformation, Digital Strategy and Innovation, and Laboratory to Market. Karim is also the founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard , as well as the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory.

Real World Case Studies

Affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.

Jin Paik is the Senior Director, Lab Operations at the Digital, Data, & Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard. Hear from this expert researcher how open innovation can illuminate novel solutions for your organization. 

Luis Villa is the Co-Founder and General Counsel of Tidelift, a startup that aims to make open source better for everyone by supporting developers. He will share how open innovation can attract talented employees to your organization.

Lynn E. Buquo

Lynn Buquo is the Former Senior Advisor at the NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. She will share how NASA is adopting open innovation into their organization.

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Learners who have earned a verified certificate for a HarvardX course hosted on the  edX platform  are eligible to receive a 30% discount on this course using a discount code. Discounts are not available after you've submitted payment, so if you think you are eligible for a discount on a registration, please check your email for a code or contact us .

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" This course was worth my time and I thoroughly enjoyed communicating and learning with innovative thinkers from around the world. This was a great experience, and I am grateful my administration invested in me in this way to continue learning and growing so I could better do my job and help more humans. "

Dr. Lindsey Keith-Vincent Associate Dean for  Research, Outreach, and Innovation in the College of Education Director of the Science and Technology Education Center (SciTEC) Louisiana Tech University

"Since I have already studied Open Innovation for my PhD, I am impressed by all the new knowledge and insights that I have gained. I like the different perspectives and the great case studies, which have been very supportive in many ways."

Prof. Dr. Rafaela Kunz Professor of International Management, Technology and Innovation Hochschule Fresenius

"This course provides enough details, tips, and real-world examples to utilize open innovation as a strategy within any organization. It helped explain the different tools, platforms, tactics, and flexibilities to use depending on the business outcomes required. This course saves a lot of time in understanding all the nuances of open innovation rather than learning it on the job. I should have taken this course earlier!"

Ed Wong Director of Possibilities HeroX

"I work in marketing, and am always looking for new ideas to develop and implement constant innovation. The content, cases, and examples helped me understand how this topic is applies in real life, and definitely added lots of value to my professional interest. I am likely to leverage this knowledge in my career."

Thelma Trinidad Marketing Consultant Fast Moving Consumer Goods

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• Study the NASA case on fostering a culture of open innovation.
• Identify the benefits of open innovation and how it can be applied.
• Evaluate and compare open innovation strategy to traditional problem solving methods.
• Study the HYVE case to understand problem formulation and iterative design.
• Understand why problem formulation is critical to a problem holder’s ability to find the best solution.
• Identify barriers associated with problem formulation, and learn how to overcome those barriers.
• Study the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute case to learn about their contests for medical imaging AI.
• Understand how and why contests work and the benefits and challenges presented by open innovation contests.
• Develop a plan for an open innovation contest for your organization.
• Study the Tidelift case's examples of innovation and open source software for all. 
• Explore the potential benefits of collaborating with or creating a community.
• Identify the management challenges of working with communities and how to address them.
• Study the Freelancer case to learn about unlocking the potential of online labor markets.
• Examine the supply and the demand sides of online labor markets.
• Identify and overcome barriers to adopting labor markets in your organization.
• Revisit the NASA case to understand how they scaled open innovation
• Understand how to overcome barriers to adoption and scaling.
• Prepare a plan to pilot and scale an open innovation solution for your organization.

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Open innovation using open source tools: a case study at Sony Mobile

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• Hussan Munir 1 ,
• Johan Linåker 1 ,
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Despite growing interest of Open Innovation (OI) in Software Engineering (SE), little is known about what triggers software organizations to adopt it and how this affects SE practices. OI can be realized in numerous of ways, including Open Source Software (OSS) involvement. Outcomes from OI are not restricted to product innovation but also include process innovation, e.g. improved SE practices and methods. This study explores the involvement of a software organization (Sony Mobile) in OSS communities from an OI perspective and what SE practices (requirements engineering and testing) have been adapted in relation to OI. It also highlights the innovative outcomes resulting from OI. An exploratory embedded case study investigates how Sony Mobile use and contribute to Jenkins and Gerrit; the two central OSS tools in their continuous integration tool chain. Quantitative analysis was performed on change log data from source code repositories in order to identify the top contributors and triangulated with the results from five semi-structured interviews to explore the nature of the commits. The findings of the case study include five major themes: i) The process of opening up towards the tool communities correlates in time with a general adoption of OSS in the organization. ii) Assets not seen as competitive advantage nor a source of revenue are made open to OSS communities, and gradually, the organization turns more open. iii) The requirements engineering process towards the community is informal and based on engagement. iv) The need for systematic and automated testing is still in its infancy, but the needs are identified. v) The innovation outcomes included free features and maintenance, and were believed to increase speed and quality in development. Adopting OI was a result of a paradigm shift of moving from Windows to Linux. This shift enabled Sony Mobile to utilize the Jenkins and Gerrit communities to make their internal development process better for its software developers and testers.

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1 Introduction

Software organizations have recently been exposed to new facets of openness that go beyond their experience and provide opportunities outside their organizational walls. Chesbrough (Chesbrough 2003 ) explains the term Open Innovation (OI) as “a paradigm that assumes that organizations can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology” . OI is based on outside-in and inside-out knowledge flows that help to advance technology and spark innovation. Some classical examples of inside-out are selling intellectual property while outside-in correspond to start-up acquisition and integration. There are also coupled processes (Enkel et al. 2009 ) where companies give and take during co-creation by making alliances and joint-ventures. OI is fuelled by increased mobility of workers and knowledge, more capable universities, greater knowledge access and sharing capabilities that World Wide Web offers (Chesbrough et al. 2014 ) and easier access to venture capital for start-ups.

Open Source Software (OSS) was widely used by software organizations before the OI model became popular (Lee et al. 2009 ) and nowadays provides a common example of OI (Munir et al. 2016 ). OSS leverages external resources and knowledge to increase innovation, product quality and to shorter time-to-market. OSS offers not only potential product innovation (e.g. by using an OSS platform of commodity parts to build differentiation parts), but potential process innovations in terms of an implementation of new or significantly improved production or delivery methods (Linåker et al. 2015 ).

IBM’s engagement in the Linux community in terms of patent and monetary contributions exemplifies how a firm can leverage OSS from an OI perspective. Risks and costs of development were in this case shared among other stakeholders such as Intel, Nokia, and Hitachi, which also have made significant investments in the Linux community (Lee and Cole 2003 ). Thanks to Linux involvement, IBM can strengthen its own business model in selling proprietary solutions for its clients running on top of Linux. Additionally, the openness of Linux also gave IBM more freedom to co-develop products with its customers (Chesbrough et al. 2014 ).

Software organizations that want to benefit from OI via OSS engagement need to adapt and innovate their internal software development strategies and processes. For example, influence on feature selection and road-mapping may be gained through a more active participation, as many OSS communities are based on meritocracy principles (Jensen and Scacchi 2007 ). Also, some benefits may first be fully utilized after contributing back certain parts to the OSS community (Ven and Mannaert 2008 ). For example, by correcting bugs, actively participating in discussions and contributing new features, a software organization might reduce maintenance cost compared to proprietary software development (Stuermer et al. 2009 ). Hence, in order for a firm to gain the expected benefits of products, OI process innovations may be a required step on the way forward (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003 ; Wnuk et al. 2012 ; Rolandsson et al. 2011 ). Existing literature does not particularly focus on how these internal SE process adaptions should be structured or executed (Munir et al. 2016 ). Further, little is known about how OSS involvement may be utilized as an enabler and support for further innovation spread inside an organization, e.g. process, tools, or organizational innovations.

In this study, we focus on identifying when, why and how a software organization adopts OI through the use of OSS, and what innovative outcomes can be gained (see Fig.  1 ). We investigate these aspects through a case study at Sony Mobile and how it actively participate and contribute to the communities of the two OSS tools Jenkins and Gerrit. These two tools are the basis of Sony Mobile’s internal continuous integration tool chain. The study further investigates how external knowledge and innovation captured through the active development of these OSS tools may be transferred into the product development teams of Sony Mobile. More explicitly, this study contributes by studying how OSS may be used, not only for leveraging product innovation (Linåker et al. 2015 ) in the tools themselves, but also how these tools can be used as enablers for process innovation in the form of improved SE practices and product quality.

Study Objectives in the intersection between proprietary organizations and open source software

This paper is structured as follows. Section  2 highlights the related work and Section  3 outlines the research methodology. In Sections  4 and  5 results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented, respectively. Finally, Section  6 discussed the results, followed by conclusions in Section  7 .

2 Related work

In this section, we summarize related work in OI strategies, OI challenges in SE and open source development practices inside software organizations. This section is partly based on the systematic mapping study by Munir et al. ( 2014 ).

The increased openness that OI implies poses significant challenges to software organizations in terms of securing their competitive advantage (Munir et al. 2016 ) and understanding what to contribute, when and how to maintain differentiation towards competitors that may also be involved in the OSS community (Henkel 2006 ; van der Linden et al. 2009 ; Jansen et al. 2012 ). Related to that is the challenge of what requirements should be selected, when these should be released and how an internal roadmap should be synchronized with the OSS project’s roadmap (Wnuk et al. 2012 ; Linåker et al. 2016 ). These challenges highlight the need for a clear contribution strategy that software organizations should create to focus their internal resources on value-creating activities, rather than contributing unnecessary patches or differentiating features (Wnuk et al. 2012 ).

Extensive involvement in OSS communities may also bring significant challanges. Among these challenges, Daniel et al. ( 2011 ) suggested that the conflict between organizational and OSS standards reduces developers’ organizational commitment and it is strongly dependent on the degree to which developers associate themselves with organizations or OSS communities. Investing in OSS may also be costly and create differentiation and property right protection challenges, as indicated by Stuermer et al. ( 2009 ) who studied the Nokia Internet Tablet, which was based on a hybrid of OSS and proprietary software development.

West and Wood ( 2008 ) examined the complex ecosystem surrounding Symbian Ltd. and identified three inherent difficulties for organizations leading an OI ecosystem: 1) prioritizing the conflicting needs of heterogeneous ecosystem participants, 2) knowing the ecosystem requirements for a product that has yet to be created, and 3) balancing the interests of those participants against those of the ecosystem leader.

Looking at OI strategies, Dahlander and Magnusson ( 2008 ) show how organizations may access OSS communities in order to extend the firm’s resource base, align the organization’s strategy with that of the OSS community, and/or assimilate the community in order to integrate and share results with them. The same authors explained that depending on how open a firm chooses to be in regards to their business model, different strategies may be enforced, e.g. symbiotically giving back result to the community, or as a free-rider keeping modifications and new functionality to oneself (Dahlander and Magnusson 2005 ). Some strategies include:

selectively revealing - differentiating parts are kept internal while commodity parts are made open (Henkel 2006 ; West 2003 ). This requires continuous assessment of what parts are to be considered commodity as opposed to differentiating value.

licensing schemas (cf. Dual-licensing (Chesbrough and Appleyard 2007 )), technology may be fully disclosed, but under a restrictive license (West 2003 ). Alternatively, everything may be disclosed under open and transparent conditions (Chesbrough and Appleyard 2007 ).

Henkel ( 2006 ) reports how small organizations reveal more, as they are likely to benefit from the external development support. Component manufacturers also reported to contribute a lot as they have a good protection of the hardware they sell; software is seen as a complementary asset. In a follow-up study, Henkel et al. ( 2014 ) further reported how openness had become a competitive edge, as customers had started to request even more revealing.

Dahlander and Wallin ( 2006 ) show how having an employee in the community can be an enabler for the organizations to not only gain a good reputation but also to influence the direction of the development towards the organizations’ own interests. However, to gain the roles needed to commit or review code written by community developers, individuals need to contribute and become an active part of the communities as these are often based on the principles of meritocracy (Jensen and Scacchi 2007 ).

Inner Source (Stol et al. 2014 ) has gained interest among researchers and practitioners as a way to adapt OSS practices at software organizations. Such hybrids of commercial and OSS practices (Mockus and Herbsleb 2002 ) could include using the OSS style project structure, where a core team of recognized experts has the power to commit code to an official release, and a much larger group contributes voluntarily in many ways.

Research has shown a lot of interest for OI and its different applications (West and Bogers 2014 ), including leveraging OSS for OI (Munir et al. 2016 ). However, the focus is mostly limited to management and strategic aspects, e.g., (Dahlander and Magnusson 2008 ; West and Wood 2013 ; Stuermer et al. 2009 ), with some exception of inner sourcing (Morgan et al. 2011 ; Stol et al. 2014 ). Little is still known about what triggers software organizations to adopt OSS from an OI perspective and how this affects SE practices (Munir et al. 2016 ).

This paper adds to existing knowledge by focusing on the use of OSS from an OI perspective in an organization that seek to complement its internal product development and process innovation (Linåker et al. 2015 ) with the use of external knowledge from OSS communities. Furthermore, this study aims to improve our understanding of what and how a software organization can open up and how SE practices are adapted to deal with the openness to OSS communities.

3 Case study design

Below we describe the research design of this study. We explain the research questions, the structure of the case study design, and the methodologies used for data collection as well as for the quantitative and qualitative analysis.

3.1 Research questions

The focus of this study is on how software organizations use OSS projects from an OI perspective, what triggers them to open up and how this impacts the organizations’ innovative performance and their SE practices (see Fig.  2 ). We investigate these aspects through a case study at Sony Mobile, and how they actively participate and contribute to the communities of the two OSS tools Jenkins (Ohloh.net 2014 ) and Gerrit (Google Project Hosting 2014 ). Both tools constitute pivotal parts in Sony Mobile’s internal continuous integration tool chain.

The Jenkins and Gerrit OSS communities surrounded by Sony Mobile and other members. Arrows represent knowledge transfer in and out of the community members such as other software organizations, non profit organizations (NPO) and individuals, which in turn are illustrated by funnels, commonly used in OI literature (Chesbrough 2003 )

The study further investigates how external knowledge and innovation captured through the development of these OSS tools, may be transferred into the product development teams of Sony Mobile. More explicitly, this study contributes by studying how OSS may be used, not only for leveraging product innovation (Linåker et al. 2015 ) in the tools themselves, but also how these tools can be used as enablers for process innovation in the form of improved SE practices and tools within the organization.

Jenkins is an open source build server that runs on a standard servlet container e.g. Apache Tomcat. It can handle Maven and Ant instructions, as well as execute custom batch and bash scripts. It was forked from the Hudson build server in 2010 due to a dispute between Oracle and the rest of the community.

Gerrit code review is an OSS code review tool created by Google in connection with the Android project in 2007. It is tightly integrated with the software configuration management tool GIT, working as a gatekeeper, i.e. a commit needs to be reviewed and verified before it is allowed to be merged into the main branch.

Based on this background, and the research gap identified in earlier work (Munir et al. 2016 ), we formulate our research questions to study the OI in Sony Mobile in an exploratory manner (see Table  1 ). RQ1 addresses the extent to which Sony Mobile is involved in the Jenkins and Gerrit communities and its key contribution areas (i.e. bug fixes, new features, documentation etc.). RQ2 and RQ3 explore the rationale behind Sony Mobile’s transition from closed innovation to OI. RQ4 highlights the key innovation outcomes realized as a result of openness. Finally, RQ5 aims at understanding whether or not the existing requirements engineering and testing processes have the capacity to deal with the OI challenges in SE. RQ1 is answered with the help of quantitative analysis of repository data, while the remaining four research questions ( RQ2, RQ3, RQ4, RQ5 ) are investigated using qualitative analysis of interview data.

3.2 Case selection and units of analysis

Sony Mobile is a multinational corporation with roughly 5,000 employees, developing embedded devices. The studied branch focuses on developing Android-based phones and tablets and has 1600 employees, of which 900 are directly involved in software development. Sony Mobile develops software in an agile fashion and applies software product line management with a database of more than 20,000 features suggested or implemented across all product lines (Pohl et al. 2005 ).

However, in order to work with OSS communities, namely Jenkins and Gerrit Sony Mobile created a designated tools department to acquire and integrate the external knowledge to improve the internal continuous integration process. The continuous integration tool chain used by Sony Mobile is developed, maintained and supported by an internal tools department. The teams working on phones and tablets are thereby relieved of this technical overhead. During the recent years, Sony Mobile has transitioned from passive usage of the Android codebase into active involvement and community contribution with many code commits to Jenkins and Gerrit. This maturity resulted in a transition from closed innovation to OI (Chesbrough 2003 ), assuming that business values are created or captured as an effect.

From an OI perspective, there are interactions between the Tools department and the Jenkins and Gerrit communities (see Fig.  2 ). The in- and outgoing transactions, visualized by the arrows in Fig.  2 , are data and information flows, e.g. ideas, support and commits, can be termed as a coupled innovation process (Enkel et al. 2009 ). The exchange is continuous and bi-directional, and brings product innovation into the Tools department in the form of new features and bug fixes to Jenkins and Gerrit.

The Tools department can, in turn, be seen as a gate between external knowledge and the other parts of Sony Mobile (see Fig.  2 ). The Tools department accesses, adapts and integrates the externally obtained knowledge from the Jenkins and Gerrit communities into the product development teams of Sony Mobile. This creates additional transactions inside Sony Mobile which can be labeled as process innovation (OECD 2005 ) in the sense that new tools and ways of working improve development efficiency and quality. This relates to the internal complementary assets need that is mentioned as an area for future research by Chesbrough et al. ( 2006 ).

We conducted a case study design with Jenkins and Gerrit as units of analysis (Runeson et al. 2012 ) as these are the products in which the exchange of data and information enable further innovation inside Sony Mobile.

3.3 Case study procedure

We performed the following steps.

Preliminary investigation of Jenkins and Gerrit repositories.

Mine the identified project repositories.

Extract the change log data from the source code repositories.

Analyze the change log data (i.e. stakeholders, commits etc).

Summarize the findings from the change log data to answer RQ1 .

Prepare and conduct semi-structured interviews to answer RQ2–RQ5 .

Synthesize data.

Answer the research questions RQ1–RQ5 .

3.4 Methods for quantitative analysis

To understand Sony Mobile’s involvement in the OSS tools ( RQ1 ), we conducted quantitative analysis of commit data in the source code repositories of Jenkins and Gerrit.

3.4.1 Preliminary investigation of jenkins and gerrit commits

A commit is a snapshot of a developer’s files after reaching a code base state. The number of lines of code in a commit may vary depending upon the nature of the commit (e.g. new implementation, update etc.) (Hattori and Lanza 2008 ). The comment of a commit refers to a textual message related to the activity that generates the updated new piece of code. It ranges from a simple note to a detailed description, depending on the project’s conventions. In this study, we used the keywords provided by Hattori and Lanza ( 2008 ) in his study as a reference point to classify the commit messages (see Table  2 ).

We mined the source code repositories of Jenkins and Gerrit to extract the commit id, date, committer name, committer email and commit description message for each commit, with the help of the tool CVSAnlY (MetricsGrimoire 2014 ). The extracted data was stored locally in a relational database with a standard data scheme, independent of the analyzed code repository. The structure of the database allows a quantitative analysis to be done by writing SQL queries. The number of commits per committer were added together with the name and email of the committer as keys.

We extracted the affiliations of the committers from their email addresses by filtering them on the domain, e.g., [email protected] was classified with a Sony Mobile affiliation. It is recognized that committers may not use their corporate email addresses when contributing their work, since parts of their work could be contributed privately or under the umbrella of other organizations than their employer. To triangulate and complement this approach, a number of additional sources were used, as suggested by earlier research (Bird and Nagappan 2012 ; Gonzalez-Barahona et al. 2013 ). First, social media sites as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook were queried with keywords from the committer, such as the name, variations of the username and e-mail domain. Second, unstructured sources such as blogs, community communication (e.g., comment-history, mailing-lists, IRC logs), web articles and firm websites were consulted.

Sony Mobile turned out to be one of the main organizational affiliations among the committers to Gerrit while no evidence of commits to the Jenkins core community was identified. The reason for this was that Jenkins is a plug-in-based community, i.e. there is a core component surrounded by approximately 1,000 plug-ins of which each has a separate source code repository and community. Our initial screening had only covered the core Jenkins component. After analyzing forum postings, blog posts and reviewing previously identified committers, a set of Jenkins plug-ins, as well as two Gerrit plug-ins, were identified, which then were also included in our analysis. The following Open Source projects were included for further analysis:

Gerrit Footnote 1

PyGerrit (Gerrit plug-in) Footnote 2

Gerrit-events (Gerrit plug-in) Footnote 3

Gerrit-trigger (Jenkins plug-in) Footnote 4

Build-failure-analyzer (Jenkins plug-in) Footnote 5

External-resource-viewer (Jenkins plug-in) Footnote 6

Team-views (Jenkins plug-in) Footnote 7

3.4.2 Classification of commit messages

Further analysis included creating the list of top committers combined with their yearly activity (number of commits) in order to see how Sony Mobile’s involvement evolved over time. Next, we characterized and classified the commits made by Sony Mobile to the corresponding communities by following the criteria defined by Hattori and Lanza ( 2008 ). This was done manually by analyzing the description messages of the commits and searching for keywords (see Table  2 ), and then classifying the commits in one of the following categories:

Forward engineering activities refer to the incorporation of new features and implementation of new requirements including the writing new test cases to verify the requirements. Re-engineering activities deal with re-factoring, redesign and other actions to enhance the quality of the code without adding new features. Corrective engineering activities refer to fixing defects in the software. Management activities are related to code formatting, configuration management, cleaning up code and updating the documentation of the project.

Multiple researchers were involved in the commit message classification process. After defining the classification categories, Kappa analysis was performed to calculate the inter-rater agreement level. First, a random sample of 34% of the total commit messages were taken to classify the commit messages and Kappa was calculated to be 0.29. Consequently, disagreement was discussed and resolved since the inter-rater agreement level was below substantial agreement range. Afterwards, Kappa was calculated again and found to be 0.94.

3.5 Methods for qualitative analysis

The quantitative analysis had laid a foundation to understand the relation between Sony Mobile, and the Jenkins and Gerrit communities. Therefore, in the next step we added a qualitative view by interviewing relevant people inside Sony Mobile in order to address RQ2–RQ5 . Interview questions are listed in the Appendix  A .

3.5.1 Interviewee selection

The selection of interviewees was based on the committers identified in the initial screening of the projects. Three candidates were identified and contacted by e-mail (Interviewees 1, 2 and 3, see Table  3 ). Interviewees 4 and 5 were proposed during the initial three interviews. The first three are top committers to the Jenkins and Gerrit communities, giving the view of Sony Mobile’s active participation and involvement with the communities. It should be noted that interviewee I3, when he was contacted, had just left Sony Mobile for a smaller organization dedicated to Jenkins development. His responsibilities as the tools manager for Jenkins at Sony Mobile were taken over by interviewee I4. Interviewee I4 is a Software Architect in the Tools department involved further down in Sony Mobile’s continuous integration tool chain and gives an alternative perspective on the OSS involvement of the Tools department as well as a higher, more architectural view on the tools. Interviewee I5 is an upper-level manager responsible for Sony Mobile’s overall OSS strategy, which could contribute with a top-down perspective to the qualitative analysis.

The interviews were semi-structured, meaning that interview questions were developed in advance and used as a frame for the interviews, but still allowing the interviewers to explore other relevant findings during the interview wherever needed. The two first authors were present during all five interviews, with the addition of the third author during the first and fifth ones. Each interviewer took turns asking questions, whilst the others observed and took notes. Each interview was recorded and transcribed. A summary was also compiled and sent back to the interviewees for a review. Any misunderstandings or corrections could then be sorted out. The duration of the interviews varied from 45 to 50 minutes.

3.6 Validity threats

This section highlights the validity threats related to the case study. Four types of validity threats (Runeson et al. 2012 ) are addressed with their mitigation strategies.

3.6.1 Internal validity

This concerns causal relationships and the introduction of potential confounding factors.

Confounding factors

To mitigate the risk of introducing confounding factors, the study was performed on the tools level instead of an organizational level to ensure that the innovation outcomes are merely the result of adopting OI. Performing the study on an organization level introduces the risk of confounding the innovation outcomes as a result of a product promotion or financial investment etc. instead of the use of external knowledge from OSS communities. Therefore, a more fine-grained analysis on the OSS tools level was chosen to minimize the threat of introducing confounding factors.

Subjectivity

It was found in the study that Sony Mobile does not use any general innovation metrics to measure the impact of OI. Therefore, researchers had to rely on qualitative data. This leads to the risk of introducing subjectivity while inferring innovation outcomes as a result of OI adoption. In order to minimize this risk, the first two authors independently performed the analysis and the remaining authors reviewed it to make the synthesis more objective. Moreover, findings were sent back to interviewees for validation. Furthermore, subjectivity was minimized by applying the commit messages classification criteria proposed by Hattori and Lanza ( 2008 ). During the analysis, the disagreements were identified using Kappa analysis and resolved to achieve a substantial agreement.

Triangulation

In order to mitigate the risk of identifying the wrong innovation outcomes, we used multiple data sources by mining the Jenkins and Gerrit source code repositories prior to conducting interviews. Furthermore, we also performed observer triangulation during the whole course of the study to mitigate the risk of introducing researcher bias.

3.6.2 External validity

This refers to the extent it is possible to generalize the study findings to other contexts. The scope of this study is limited to a software organization utilizing the notion of OI to accelerate its innovation process. The selected case organization is a large-scale organization with an intense focus on software development for embedded devices. Moreover, Sony Mobile is a direct competitor of all the main stream organizations making Android phones. The involvements by other stakeholders in the units of analysis (Jenkins and Gerrit) indicate their adoption of Google’s tool chain to improve their continuous integration process. Therefore, the findings of this study may be generalized to major stakeholders identified for their commits to Jenkins and Gerrit, and other OSS tools used in the tool chain development. Our findings may also be relevant to software organizations with similar context, domain and size as Sony Mobile.

3.6.3 Construct validity

This refers to what extent the operational measures that are studied really represent what researcher has in mind, and what is investigated according to the research questions (Runeson et al. 2012 ). We took the following actions to minimize construct validity threats.

Selection of interviewees

We conducted a preliminary quantitative analysis of the Jenkins and Gerrit repositories to identify the top committers and to select the relevant interviewees. The selection was performed based on the individuals’ commits to Jenkins or Gerrit. Moreover, recommendations were taken from interviewees for suitable further candidates to attain the required information on OI. Process knowledge, role, and visible presence in the community were the key selection factors.

Reactive bias

Researchers presence might limit or influence the interviewees and causing them to hide facts or respond after assumed expectations. This threat was limited by the presence of a researcher that has a long research collaboration record with Sony Mobile and explained confidentiality rules. Furthermore, interviewees were ensured anonymity both within the organization and externally in the OSS community.

Design of the interviews

All authors validated the interview questionnaire followed by a pilot interview with an OSS Jenkins community member in order to avoid misinterpretation of the interview questions.

3.6.4 Reliability

The reliability deals with to what extent the data and the analysis are dependent on the specific researcher, and the ability to replicate the study.

Member checking

To mitigate this risk, multiple researchers individually transcribed and analyzed the interviews to make the findings more reliable. In addition, multiple data sources (qualitative and quantitative) were considered to ensure the correctness of the findings and cross-validate them. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and sent back to interviewees for validation. The commit database analysis was performed and validated by multiple researchers.

Audit trail

Researchers kept track of all the mined data from OSS code repositories as well as interview transcripts in a systematic way to go back for validation if required. Finally, this study was not ordered by Sony Mobile to bring supporting evidence for OI adoption. Instead the idea was to keep the study design and findings as transparent as possible without making any adjustments in the data except for the anonymizing the interviewees. The results were shared with Sony Mobile prior to submitting the study for publication.

4 Quantitative analysis

This section presents a quantitative analysis of commits made to eight OSS projects, namely: Gerrit, pyGerrit, Gerrit-events, Gerrit-trigger, Build-failure-analyzer, External-resource-viewer and Team-views as depicted in Section  3.4.1 . It should be noted that the seven latter projects are plugins to Gerrit and Jenkins, i.e., not part of the core projects. In the analysis we investigated the types of commits made (see Section  3.4.2 ), and in what proportion these were made by Sony Mobile over time, as well as compared to other major organizations.

The two largest categories of commits for Gerrit are forward engineering (953 commits) and re-engineering (869 commits), followed by management commits (367 commits) and corrective engineering commits (169 commits), see Table  5 . This dominance of forward and re-engineering commits remained stable between 2010 and 2014, see Table  4 . Sony Mobile presented the first Android-based mobile phone in March 2010 and as can be seen from the analysis also became active in contributions to Gerrit with a total of 125 contributions in 2010. From 2012 the number of forward and re-engineering commits became more equal each year suggesting that Sony Mobile was not only contributing new features but also actively helping in increasing the quality of the current features and re-factoring (Table  5 ).

The number of forward engineering and re-engineering commits remained high and we notice a substantial decrease of corrective engineering and management commits. The decrease of management commits may suggest that Sony Mobile reached a high level of compatibility of its code review processes and therefore requires fewer commits in this area. This data shows an interesting pattern in joining an OSS community. Since Sony Mobile is a large organization with several complex processes, their joining of the Gerrit community had to be associated with a substantial number of forward engineering and re-engineering commits. This entry to the community lowered the transition time and enabled faster synchronization of the code review processes between the Android community players and Sony Mobile. At the same time, Sony Mobile contributed several substantial features from the first year of participation which is positive for the community. Figure  3 shows the progression of commits made by Sony Mobile to all OSS tools between year 2009 and 2014.

Sony Mobile’s commits for all OSS tools per year

4.1.1 PyGerrit

PyGerrit is a Python library that provides a way for clients to interact with Gerrit. As can be seen in Table  6 , Sony Mobile initiated this plug-in and is the biggest committer to it, representing 97.5% of the commits. Management commits are the most frequent category, followed by forward engineering commits. This suggests that some code formatting changes, cleaning up code and documentation commits were delivered by Sony Mobile after opening up this plug-in to the community. Sony Mobile’s yearly contribution analysis shows a steady growth since its introduction in 2011 (see Fig.  3 ).

This indicates that companies that want the communities to accept their plug-ins should be prepared to dedicate effort on management type of commits to increase the code’s quality and documentation and therefore enable other players to contribute.

4.1.2 Gerrit-event

Gerrit-event is a Java library used primarily to listen to stream-events from Gerrit Code Review and to send reviews via the SSH CLI or the REST API. It was originally a module in the Jenkins Gerrit-trigger plug-in and is now broken out to be used in other tools without the dependency to Jenkins. Table  6 shows that apart from Sony Mobile(66.1%), HP(4.1%), SAP(0.2%), Ericsson(3.3%) and Intel(2%) commits reveal that they are also using Gerrit-event in their continuous integration process. Sony Mobile started contributing to Gerrit-event in 2009 and since then seem to be the largest committer along with its competitors (see Table  6 ). Similarly, to the PyGerrit plug-in, management and forward engineering commits dominate and Sony Mobile is the main driver of features to this community.

Sony Mobile turns out to be the biggest contributor in Gerrit-event where the focus is mostly on adding new features (forward engineering) based on the internal organizational needs.

4.2 Jenkins

Commits from Sony Mobile to Jenkins could not be identified in the core product but to a various set of plug-ins (see Table  6 ). The ones identified are:

Gerrit-trigger

Build-failure-analyzer

External resource-reviewer

4.2.1 Gerrit-trigger

This plug-in triggers builds on events from the Gerrit code review system by retrieving events from the Gerrit command stream-events, so the trigger is pushed from Gerrit instead of pulled as scm-triggers usually are. Multiple builds can be triggered by one change-event, and one consolidated report is sent back to Gerrit. This plug-in (see Table  6 ) seems to attract the most number of commits with the percentage of 65.2% from Sony Mobile. 135 commits were classified as management and 76 as corrective engineering. In this case, the majority of the commits were not forward or re-engineering, which may suggest that Sony Mobile was more interested in increasing the code quality and fixing the bugs rather than extending it. It seems logical as for the Jenkins community new functionality can be realized in the form of a new plug-in rather than extending the current plug-ins.

Adding plug-ins allows greater flexibility but increases the total number of parallel projects to manage and maintain by the community.

4.2.2 Build-failure-analyzer

This plug-in scans build logs and other files in the workspace for recognized patterns of known causes to build failures and displays them on the build page for quicker recognition of why the build failed. As can be seen in see Table  6 , Sony Mobile came out as the largest committer (85.5%) to the Build-failure-analyzer. One possible explanation for the lack of contribution from the other software organizations is that this plug-in might be very specific to the needs of Sony Mobile, but they made it open to see if the community shows interest in contributing to further development efforts.

Forward engineering and management commits are the two most common categories. Moreover, the number of commits have declined after 2012 and Table  5 shows a relatively low numbers of corrective engineering (17) and re-engineering (19) commits, which seem to indicate the maturity of this plug-in in terms of quality and functionality.

We hypothesize that after creating and contributing the core functionality for a given plug-in, the number of forward commits declines and further advances are realized in a form of a new plug-in.

4.2.3 External-resource-viewer

This plug-in adds support for external resources in Jenkins. An external resource is something attached to a Jenkins slave and can be locked by a build, to get exclusive access to it, then released after the build is done. Examples of external resources are phones, printers and USB devices. Like Build-failure-analyzer, Sony Mobile’s is the top commiter with the largest contribution percentage of 89.6% compared to Google (1.48%) and Ericsson (4.8%). Moreover, the majority of the commits are classified as forward engineering, suggesting that Sony Mobile has come up with the majority of the functionality to this plug-in. As the number of corrective engineering and re-engineering commits remained low (8 commits in each category), we can assume that the contributed code was high quality.

This data suggest a hypothesis that companies that frequently interact with OSS communities learn to contribute high quality code and possibly keep the same quality standards for other development initiatives.

4.2.4 Team-views

This plug-in provides teams, sharing one Jenkins master, to have their own area with team-specific views. Sony Mobile turned out to be the only committer for this tool (see Table  6 ), which implies that Team-views is tailored for the needs of Sony Mobile. Only forward engineering and management commits were identified in the data, suggesting that high quality code was contributed and no major re-factoring was required for this plug-in. This result also supports our previous hypothesis that modular plug-in based OSS communities provide an efficient way for proprietary companies to participate and contribute with new functionality as new plug-ins.

Decoupling of plug-ins helps in targeting contributions and quality improvement suggestions and simplifies the collaboration networks for discussions on bugs and future improvements.

5 Qualitative analysis

We conducted thematic analysis (Cruzes et al. 2015 ; Cruzes and Dybå 2011 ) to find recurring patterns in the collected qualitative data. The following steps were performed in the process.

Transcribe the interviewed data from the five interviewees (see Table  3 ).

Identify and define five distinct themes in the data (see Table  7 ).

Classify the interview statements based on the defined themes.

Summarize the findings and answers to the RQs.

5.1 Opening up

The process of opening up for external collaboration and maturing as an open source organization, can be compared to moving from a closed innovation model to an OI model (Chesbrough et al. 2006 ). The data suggest that the trigger for this process was a paradigm shift around 2010 when Sony Mobile moved from the Symbian platform (developed in a joint venture), to Google’s open source Android platform in their products (West and Wood 2013 ). Switching to Android correlates to a general shift in the development environment, moving from Windows to Linux. This concerned the tools used in the product development as well. A transition was made from existing proprietary solutions, e.g. the build-server Electric commander, to the tools used by Google in their Android development, e.g. GIT and Gerrit. As stated by I2, “… suddenly we were almost running pretty much everything, at least anything that touches our phone development, we were running on Linux and open source” . This was not a conscious decision from management but rather something that grew bottom-up from the engineers. The engineers further felt the need for easing off the old and complex chain of integration and building process.

At the same time, a conscious decision was made regarding to what extent Sony Mobile should invest in the open source tool chain. As stated by I5, “… not only should [the tool chain] be based on OSS, but we should behave like an active committer in the ways we can control, understand and even steer it up to the way we want to have it” . The biggest hurdle concerned the notion of giving away internally developed intellectual property rights, which could represent competitive advantage. The legal department needed some time to understanding the benefits and license aspects, which caused the initial contribution process to be extra troublesome. In this case, Sony Mobile benefited from having an internal champion and OSS evangelist (I5). He helped to drive the initiative from the management side, explained the issues and clarified concerns from different functions and levels inside Sony Mobile. Another success factor was the creation of an OSS review board, which included different stakeholders such as legal department representatives, User Experience (UX) design, product development and product owners. This allowed for management, legal, and technology representatives to meet and discuss OSS related issues. The OSS contribution process now includes submitting a form for review, which promotes it further after successful initial screening. Next, the OSS review board gives it a go or no-go decision. As this would prove bureaucratic if it would be needed for each and every contribution to an OSS community, frame-agreements are created for open source projects with a high-intensity involvement, e.g. Jenkins and Gerrit. This creates a simplified and more sustainable process allowing for a day to day interaction between developers in the Tools department and the communities surrounding Jenkins and Gerrit. Sony Mobile’s involvement in OSS communities is in-line with the findings of governance in OSS communities by Jensen and Scacchi ( 2010 ).

Adopting OI was a result of a paradigm shift moving from Windows to Linux environment to stay as close as possible to Google’s tool chain. Furthermore, Sony Mobile saw a great potential in contributing to OSS communities (Jenkins and Gerrit) and steering them towards its own organizational interests, as opposed to buying costly proprietary tools.

5.2 Determinants of openness

Several factors interplay in the decision process of whether or not a feature or a new project should be made open. Jenkins and Gerrit are neither seen as a part of Sony Mobile’s competitive advantage nor as a source of revenue. This is the main reason why developers in the Tools department can meet with competitors, go to conferences, give away free work etc. This, in turn, builds a general attitude that when something is about to be created, the question asked beforehand is if it can be made open source. There is also a follow-up question, whether Sony Mobile would benefit anything from it, for example maintenance, support and development from an active community. If a feature or a project is too specific and it is deemed that it will not gain any traction, the cost of generalizing the project for open use is not motivated. Another factor is whether there is an existing community for a feature or a project. By contributing a plug-in to the Jenkins community or a feature to Gerrit there is a chance that an active workforce is ready to adopt the contribution, whilst for new projects this has to be created from scratch which may be cumbersome.

Another strategic factor concerns having a first-mover advantage. Contributing a new feature or a project first means that Sony Mobile as the maintainer gets a higher influence and a greater possibility to steer it in their own strategic interest. If a competitor or the community publishes the project, Sony Mobile may have less influence and will have to adapt to the governance and requirements from the others. A good example here is the Gerrit-trigger. The functionality was requested internally at Sony Mobile and therefore undergone development by the Tools department during the same period it became known that there was a similar development ongoing in the community. As stated by I3, “… we saw a big risk of the community going one way and us going a very different route” . This led to the release of the internal Gerrit-trigger as an open source plug-in to Jenkins, which ended up being the version with gained acceptance in the Jenkins and Gerrit communities. The initial thought was however to keep it closed according to I3, “… We saw the Gerrit-trigger plug-in as a differentiating feature meaning that it was something that we shouldn’t contribute because it gave us a competitive edge towards our competitors [in regards to our continuous integration process]” . It should be noted that this was in the beginning of the process of opening up in Sony Mobile and a positive attitude was rising. A quote from I3 explains the positive attitude of the organization which might hint about future directions, “… in 5 years’ time probably everything that Sony Mobile does would become open” .

One of the key determinants of making a project open is that it is not seen as a main source of revenue. In other words, there is no competitive advantage gained by Sony Mobile by retaining the project in-house. By maintaining an internal fork, the project incurs more maintenance cost compared to making it open source. Therefore, all the all projects with no competitive advantage are seen as good candidates to become open source.

5.3 Requirements engineering

This theme provides insights about requirements engineering practices in an example OI context. The requirements process in the Tools department towards the Jenkins and Gerrit communities does not seem very rigid, which is a common characteristic for OSS (Scacchi 2002 ). The product development teams in Sony Mobile are the main customers of the Tools department. The teams are, however, quite silent with the exception of one or two power users. There is an open backlog for internal use inside Sony Mobile where anyone from the product development may post feature requests. However, a majority of the feature requests are submitted via e-mail. The developers in the Tools department started arranging monthly workshops where they invited the power users and the personnel from different functional roles in the product development organization. An open discussion is encouraged allowing for people to express their wishes and issues. An example of an idea sprung out from this forum is the Build-failure-analyzer Footnote 8 plug-in. Most of the requirements are, however, elicited internally within the Tools department in a dialogue between managers, architects and developers. They are seen to have the subject matter expertise in regards to the tool functionality. According to I2, there are “… architect groups which investigate and collaborate with managers about how we could take the tool environment further” . This is formulated as focus areas, and “… typical examples of these requirements are sync times, push times, build times and apart from that everything needs to be faster and faster” . These requirements are high level and later delegated to the development team for refinement.

The Tools team works in an agile Scrum-like manner with influences from Kanban for simpler planning. The planning board contains a speed lane which is dedicated for severe issues that need immediate attention. The importance of being agile is highlighted by I2, “… We need to be agile because issues can come from anywhere and we need to be able to react” .

The internal prioritization is managed by the development team itself, on delegation from the upper manager, and lead by two developers which have the assigned role of tool managers for Jenkins and Gerrit respectively. The focus areas frame the areas which need extra attention. Every new feature is prioritized against existing issues and feature requests in the backlog. External feature requests to OSS projects managed by the Tools department (e.g. the Gerrit-trigger plug-in) are viewed in a similar manner as when deciding whether to make an internal feature or project open or not. If it is deemed to benefit Sony Mobile enough, it will be put in the backlog and it will be prioritized in regards to everything else. As stated by I3, “… We almost never implemented any feature requests from outside unless we think that it is a good idea [for Sony Mobile]” . If it is not interesting enough but still a good idea, they are open for commits from the community.

An example regards the Gerrit-trigger plug-in and the implementation of different trigger styles. Pressing issues in the Tools department’s backlog kept them from working on the new features. At the same time, another software intense organization with interest in the plug-in contacted the Tools department about features they wanted to implement. These features and the trigger style functionality required a larger architectural reconstruction. It was agreed that the external organization would perform the architectural changes with a continuous discussion with the Tools department. This allowed for a smaller workload and the possibility to implement this feature earlier. This feature-by-feature collaboration is a commonly occurring practice as highlighted by I1, “It’s mostly feature per feature. It could be an organization that wants this feature and then they work on it and we work on it”. But we don’t have any long standing collaborations” . I3 elaborates on this further and states that “… it is quite common for these types of collaboration to happen just between plug-in maintainer and someone else. They emailed us and we emailed back” as was the case in the previous example.

In the projects where the Tools department is not a maintainer, community governance needs more care. In the Gerrit community, new features are usually discussed via mailing lists. However, large features are managed at hackathons by the Tools department where they can communicate directly with the community to avoid getting stuck in tiny details (Morgan et al. 2011 ). As brought up by I2, “… with the community you need to get people to look at it the same way as you do and get an agreement, otherwise it will be just discussions forever” . This is extra problematic in the Gerrit community as the inner core team with the merge rights consists of only six people, of which one is from Sony Mobile. One of the key features received from the community was the tagging support for patch sets. I2 stated, “… When developers upload a change which can have several revisions, it enabled us to tag meta-data like what is the issue in our issues handling system and changes in priorities as a result of that change. This tagging feature allows the developers to handle their work flow in a better way” . This whole feature was proposed and integrated during a hackathon, and contained more than 40 shared patch sets. Prior to implementing this feature together with the community (I3 quoted) “… we tried to do it with the help of external consultants but we could not get it in, but meeting core developer in the community did the job for us” .

As hackathons may not always be available, an alternative way to communicate feature suggestions more efficiently is by mock-ups and prototypes. I3 described how important it is to sell your features and get people excited about it. Screenshots is one way to visualize it and show how it can help end-users. In the Jenkins community, this has been taken further by hosting official webcasts where everyone is invited to present and show new development ideas. Apart from using mailing lists and existing communication channels, Sony Mobile creates their own channels, e.g. with public blogs aimed at developers and the open source communities.

This close collaboration with the community is important as Sony Mobile does not want to end up with an internal fork of any tool. An I2 quoted, “If we start diverging from the original software we can’t really put an issue in their issue tracker because we can’t know for sure if it’s our fault or their system and we would loose the whole way of getting help from community to fix stuff and collaborate on issues” . Another risk would be that “…all of a sudden everybody is dependent on stuff that is taken away from the major version of Gerrit. We cannot afford to re-work everything” . Due to these reasons, the Tools department is keen on not keeping stuff for themselves, but contributing everything (Ven and Mannaert 2008 ; Wnuk et al. 2012 ). An issue in Jenkins is that there exist numerous combinations and settings of plug-ins. Therefore, it is very important to have backward compatibility when updating a plug-in and planning new features.

The requirements engineering process does not seem to be very rigid, and a majority of the features requests are submitted through e-mails, and monthly workshops with the power users (e.g. internal developers and testers). However, large features are discussed directly with the community at hackathons by the Sony Mobile’s Tools department to avoid communication bottlenecks. Furthermore, the prioritization of features is based on the internal needs of Sony Mobile.

5.4 Testing

Similar to the requirements process, the testing process does not seem very rigid either. I3 quoted, “… When we fix something we try to write tests for that so we know it doesn’t happen again in another way. But that’s mostly our testing process I think. I mean, we write JUnit and Hudson test cases for bugs that we fix” .

Bugs and issues are, similarly to feature requests, reported internally either via e-mail or an open backlog. Externally, bugs or issues are reported via the issue trackers available in the community platforms. The content of the issue trackers is based on the most current pressing needs in the Tools department. Critical issues are prioritized via the Kanban speed lane which refers to a prioritized list of requirements/bugs based on the urgent needs of Sony Mobile. If a bug or an issue has low priority, it is reported to the community. This self-focused view correlates with the mentality of how the organization would benefit from making a certain contribution, which is described to apply externally as well, “… Organizations take the issues that affect them the most” . However, it is important to show to the community that the organization wants to contribute to the project as a whole and not just to its parts, as mentioned by Dahlander and Wallin ( 2006 ). In order to do so, the Tools department continuously stays updated about the current bugs and their status. It is a collaborative work with giving and taking. “Sometimes, if we have a big issue, someone else may have it too and we can focus on fixing other bugs so we try to forward as many issues as possible” .

In Gerrit, the Tools department is struggling with an old manual testing framework. Openness has lead them to think about switching from the manual to an automated testing process. I2 stated, “… It is one of my personal goals this year to figure out how we can structure our Gerrit testing in collaboration with the community. Acceptance tests are introduced greatly in Gerrit too but we need to look into and see how we can integrate our tests with the community so that the whole testing becomes automated” . In Jenkins, one of the biggest challenges in regards to test is to have a complete coverage as there are many different configurations and setups available due to the open plug-in architecture. However, Gerrit still has some to catch up as stated by I2, “it is complex to write stable acceptance tests in Gerrit as we are not mature enough compared to Jenkins” . A further issue is that the test suites are getting bigger and therefore urges the need for automated testing.

Jenkins is considered more mature since the community has an automated test suite which is run every week when a new version of the core is released. This test automation uses Selenium, Footnote 9 which is an external OSS test framework used to facilitate the automated acceptance tests. It did not get any traction until recently because it was written in Ruby, while the Jenkins community is mainly Java-oriented. This came up after a discussion at a hackathon where the core members in the community gathered, including representatives from the Tools department. It was decided to rework the framework to a Java-based version, which has helped the testing to take off although there still remains a lot to be done.

I3 highlighted that Sony Mobile played an important role in the Selenium Java transition process, “The idea of an acceptance test harness came from the community but [Sony Mobile] was the biggest committer to actually getting traction on it” . From Sony Mobile’s perspective, it can contribute its internal acceptance tests to the community and have the community execute what Sony Mobile tests when setting up the next stable version. Consequently, it requires less work of Sony Mobile when it is time to test a new stable version. From the community perspective I3 stated, “an Acceptance Test Harness also helps the community and other Organizations to understand what problems that big or small organizations have in terms of features or in terms other requirements on the system. So it’s a tool where everyone helps each other” .

Like the requirements engineering process, the testing process is also very informal, and Sony Mobile prioritizes the issues that affect them the most. One of the biggest challenges faced by the community and organizations is to have complete test coverage due to the open plug-in architecture. The introduction of an acceptance test harness was an important step to make the whole testing process automated for organizations, and the Jenkins and Gerrit communities.

5.5 Innovation outcomes

The word innovation has a connotation of newness (Assink 2006 ) and can be classified as either things (products and services), or changes in the way we create and deliver products, services and processes. Assink ( 2006 ) classified innovation into disruptive and incremental. Disruptive innovations change the game by attacking an existing business and offering great opportunities for new profits and growth. Incremental innovations remain within the boundaries of the existing technology, market and technology of an organization. The innovation outcomes found in this study are related to incremental innovations.

Sony Mobile does not have any metrics for measuring process and product innovation outcomes. However, valuable insights were found during the interviews regarding what Sony Mobile has gained from the Jenkins and Gerrit community involvement. During the analysis, the following innovation outcomes have been identified:

Free features.

Free maintenance.

Freed-up time.

Knowledge retention.

Flexibility in implementing new features and fixing bugs.

Increased turnaround speed.

Increased quality assurance.

Improved new product releases and upgrades.

Inner source initiative.

The most distinct innovation outcome is the notion of obtaining free features from the community, which have different facets (Dahlander and Magnusson 2008 ; Stuermer et al. 2009 ). For projects maintained by Sony Mobile, such as the Gerrit-trigger plug-in, a noticeable amount of external commits can be accounted for. Similarly, in communities where Sony Mobile is not a maintainer, they can still account for free work, but it requires a higher effort in lobbying and actively steering the community in order to maximize the benefits for the organization. Along also comes, the free maintenance and quality assurance work, which renders better quality in the tools. Furthermore, the use of tools (Jenkins and Gerrit) helped software developers and testers to better manage their work-flow. Consequently, it freed-up time for the developers and testers that could be used to spent on other innovation activities. The observed innovation example in this case was the developers working with OSS communities, acquiring and integrating the external knowledge into internal product development.

Correlated to the free work is the acknowledgement that the development team of six people in the Tools department will have a hard time keeping up with the external workforce, if they were to work in a closed environment. “… I mean Gerrit has like let us say we have 50 active developers, it’s hard for the tech organization to compete with that kind of workforce and these developers at Gerrit are really smart guys. It is hard to compete for commercial Organizations” . Further on, “… We are mature enough to know that we lose the competitive edge if we do not open up because we cannot keep up with hundreds of developers in the community that develops the same thing” .

An organizational innovation outcome of opening up is the knowledge retention which comes from having a movable workforce. People in the community may move around geographically, socially and professionally but can still be part of the community and continue to contribute. I3, who took part in the initiation of many projects, recently left Sony Mobile but is still involved in development and reviewing code for his former colleagues which is in line with the findings of previous studies (Morgan et al. 2011 ; Stuermer et al. 2009 ). Otherwise, the knowledge tied to I3 would have risked being lost for Sony Mobile.

Sony Mobile had many proprietary tools before opening up. Adapting these tools, such as the build server Electric commander, was cumbersome and it took long time before even a small fix would be implemented and delivered by the supplier. This created a stiffness whereas open source brought flexibility . I2 quoted, “… Say you just want a small fix, and you can fix that yourself very easily but putting a requirement on another organization, I mean it can take years. Nothing says that they have to do it” . This increase in the turnaround speed was besides the absence of license fees, a main argument in the discussions when looking at Jenkins as an alternative to Electric commander. This was despite the required extra involvement and cost of more internal man-hours. As a result, the continuous integration tool chain could be tailored specifically to the needs of the product development team. I1 stated that “… Jenkins and Gerrit have been set up for testers and developers in a way that they can have their own projects that build code and make changes. Developers can handle all those parts by themselves and get to know in less than 3 minutes whether or not their change had introduced any bugs or errors to the system” . Ultimately, it provides quality assurance and performance gains by making the work flow easier for software developers and testers. Prior to the introduction of these tools there was one engineer who was managing the builds for all developers. In the current practice everybody is free to extend on what is given to them from tools department. It offers more scalability and flexibility (Morgan and Finnegan 2010 ).

I1 stated that besides the flexibility, the Tools department is currently able to make a “… more stable tools environment [at Sony Mobile] and that sort of makes our customers of the tools department, the testers and the engineers, to have an environment that actually works and does not collapse while trying to use it” . I2 mentioned that “… I think it is due to the part of open source and we are trying to embrace all these changes to our advantage. I think we can make high quality products in less time and in the end it lets us make better products. I think we never made an as good product as we are doing today” . Further exploration of this statement revealed the background context where Sony Mobile has improved in terms of handling all the new releases and upgrades in their phones compared to their competitors and part of its credit is given to the flexibility offered by the open source tools Jenkins and Gerrit.

The obtained external knowledge about the different parts of the continuous integration tool chain enabled better product development. However, the Tools department has to take the responsibility for the whole tool chain and not just its different parts, e.g. Jenkins and Gerrit, described by I5 as the next step in the maturity process. The tool chain has the potential to function as an enabler in other contexts as well, seeing Sony Mobile as a diversified organization with multiple product branches. By opening up in the way that the Tools department has done, effects from the coupled OI processes with Jenkins and Gerrit may spread even further into other product branches, possibly rendering in further innovations on different abstraction levels (Linåker et al. 2015 ). A way of facilitating this spread is the creation of an inner source initiative which will allow for knowledge sharing across the different borders inside Sony Mobile, comparable to an internal OSS community, or as a bazaar inside a cathedral (Wesselius 2008 ). The tool chain is even seen as the foundation for a platform which is supposed to facilitate this sharing (Linåker et al. 2014 ). The Tools department is considered more mature in terms of contributing and controlling the OSS communities. Hence, the Tools department can be used as an example of how other parts of the organization could open up and work with OSS communities. I5 uses this when evangelizing and working on further opening up the organization at large, and describes how “… they’ve been spearheading the culture of being active or in engaging something with communities” .

Some of the innovation outcomes attached to Sony Mobile’s openness entail more freed-up time for developers, better quality assurance, improved product releases and upgrades, inner source initiatives and faster time to market.

6 Results and discussion

Results from the quantitative and qualitative analysis are discussed below, of which the latter is addressed per theme, and connected to the research questions defined in Table  1 . Table  8 presents the mapping of research questions to answers with section numbers. Furthermore, a brief summary of answers to research questions is highlighted in Section  7 .

6.1 Involvement of Sony Mobile in OSS communities

Addressing RQ1 in Table  1 , the quantitative analysis showed that Sony Mobile has an active role in numerous OSS projects. In most of the analysed projects, Sony Mobile is the initiator and maintainer. An exception is Gerrit where they entered an already established project. However, with 8.2% (see Table  6 ) of the commits during the investigated time-span, they have established themselves in the community and been able to contribute the necessary adaptions for Gerrit to function as a part of the continuous integration tool-chain used inside Sony Mobile. This shows that Sony Mobile has an open mindset to creating their own OSS projects, as well as getting involved and contributing back in existing ones. In the projects which Sony Mobile has released themselves, they further show that they are open for contributions by others. In the Gerrit-trigger plug-in for example, they only represent 65% of the total commits. This also gives a clear picture of the help gained by the external workforce as highlighted by OI. By opening up the Gerrit-trigger plugin and making it a part of the Jenkins community, they earn benefits such as shared feature development, maintenance and quality assurance. A reason why some of the other projects have fewer external commits (e.g., PyGerrit, Build-failure-analyzer and Team-views) may be that they are not as established and attractive for others outside Sony Mobile. A further explanation could be that Sony Mobile has not invested the time and attention needed in order to build successful communities around these projects.

6.2 Opening up

In relation to RQ2 , the move to Android took Sony Mobile from a closed context to an external arena for OI, recalls the description provided by Grotnes (Grøtnes 2009 ). With this, the R&D was moved from a structured joint venture and an internal vertical hierarchy to an OI community. This novel way of using pooled R&D (West and Gallagher 2006 ) can be further found on the operational level of the Tools department, which freely cooperates with both known and unknown partners in the Jenkins and Gerrit communities. From the OI perspective, these activities can be seen as a number of outside-in and inside-out transactions.

The Tools department’s involvement in Jenkins and Gerrit and the associated contribution process are repetitive and bidirectional. Thus, this interaction can be classified as a coupled innovation process (Gassmann and Enkel 2004 ). This also complies with Grotnes’ description of how an open membership renders in a coupled process, as Jenkins and Gerrit communities both are free for anyone to join, in contrast to the Android platform and its Open Handset Alliance, which is invite-only (Grøtnes 2009 ).

The quantitative results provide further support for the hypothesis that both established, larger corporations and small scale software organizations are involved in the development of Jenkins and Gerrit (see Table  6 ). Some of the small organizations are Garmin, Ostrovsky, Luksza, Codeaurora, Quelltextlich etc. This confirms findings from the existing OI literature, e.g. (Stam 2009 ; Henkel 2008 ) that other community players also can use these communities as external R&D resources and complimentary assets to internal R&D processes. One possible motivation for start-ups or small scale organizations to utilize external R&D is their lack of in-house R&D capabilities. Large scale software organizations exploit communities to influence not only the development direction, but also to gain a good reputation in the community as underlined by prior studies (Dahlander and Wallin 2006 ; Henkel 2008 ).

Gaining a good reputation requires more than just being an active committer. Stam (Stam 2009 ) separates between technical (e.g. commits) and social activities (e.g. organizing conferences and actively promoting the community), where the latter is needed as complementary in order to maximize the benefits gained from the former. Sony Mobile and the Tools department have evolved in this vein as they are continuously present at conferences, hackathons and in online discussions. Focused on technical activities, the Tools department have progressively moved from making small to more substantial commits. Along with the growth of commits, they have also matured in their commit strategy. As described in Section  5.2 , the intent was originally to keep the Gerrit-trigger plug-in enclosed. This form of selective revealing (Henkel 2006 ) has however been minimized due to a more open mindset. As a consequence of the openness more plug-ins were initiated and the development time was reduced.

Although the adoption of Jenkins and Gerrit came along with an adaption to the Android development, it was also driven bottom-up by the engineers since they felt the need for easing off the complex integration tool chain and building process as mentioned by Wnuk et al. ( 2012 ). As described in Section  5.1 , this process was not free of hurdles, one being the cultural and managerial aspect of giving away internally developed intellectual property (Huesig and Kohn 2011 ). The fear to reveal intellectual property was resolved thanks to the introduction of an OSS review board that involved both legal and technical aspects. Having an internal champion to give leverage to the needed organizational and process changes, convince skeptical managers (Henkel 2008 ), and evangelism of open source was a great success factor, also identified in the inner source literature (Lindman et al. 2008 ).

6.3 Determinants of openness

When discussing if something should be made open or closed ( RQ3 ) in Table  1 , an initial distinction within the Tools department regarding the possible four cases is made:

New projects created internally (e.g. Gerrit-trigger).

New features to non-maintained projects (e.g. Gerrit).

External feature requirement requests to maintained projects (e.g. Gerrit-trigger).

External bug reports to already maintained projects (e.g. Gerrit-trigger).

The first two may be seen as an inside-out transaction, whilst the two latter are of an outside-in character. All have their distinct considerations, but one they have in common, as described in Section  5.2 , is whether Sony Mobile will benefit from it or not. Even though the transaction cost is relative low, it still needs to be prioritized against the current needs. In the case of the two former, if a feature is too specific for Sony Mobile’s case it will not gain any traction, and it will be a lost opportunity cost (Lerner and Tirole 2002 ).

The fact that Sony Mobile considers their supportive tools, e.g. Jenkins and Gerrit, as a non-competitive advantage is interesting as they constitute an essential part of their continuous integration process, and hence the development process. As stated in regards to the initial intent to keep Gerrit-trigger internally, they saw a greater benefit in releasing it to the OSS community and having others adopt it than keeping it closed. The fear that the community was moving in another direction, rendering in a costly need of patch-sets and possible risk of an internal fork, was one reason for giving the plug-in to the community (Ven and Mannaert 2008 ). Wnuk et al. ( 2012 ) reason in a similar manner in their study where they differentiate between contributing early or late to the community in regards to specific features. By going with the former strategy, one may risk losing the competitive edge, however the latter creates potentially high maintenance costs.

Sony Mobile is aware that increased mobility (Chesbrough et al. 2006 ) poses a threat to the Tools department as it is not possible for them to work in the OSS communities’ pace due to the limited amount of resources (Chesbrough et al. 2006 ). Consequently, it may end up damaging the originally perceived competitive advantage by lagging behind. On the other hand, openness gives Sony Mobile an opportunity to have an access to pragmatic software development workforce and also, Sony Mobile does not have to compete against the community. Additionally, by adopting a first mover strategy (Lieberman and Montgomery 1998 ) Sony Mobile can use their contributions to steer and influence the direction of the community.

6.4 Requirements engineering

Tracing back to RQ5 in Table  1 , the Tools department may be viewed as both a developer and an end-user, making up a source of requirements as can often be seen in Open Source Software Development (OSSD) (Scacchi 2002 ). This applies both internally (as a supplier and an administrator of the tools), and externally (as a member of the communities). From an RE perspective, they are their own stakeholder, competing with other stakeholders (members) in the Jenkins and Gerrit communities. These are important characteristics as stakeholders who are not developers are often neither identified nor considered (Alspaugh and Scacchi 2013 ). A consequence otherwise could be that certain areas are forgotten or neglected which stands in contrast to Wnuk et al. ( 2012 ) who state that adoption of OI makes identifying stakeholders’ needs more manageable. Further, this brings an interesting contrast to traditional RE where non-technical stakeholders often need considerable help in expressing themselves. The RE in OI applied through OSS can be seen as quicker, light-weight and more technically oriented than traditional RE (Scacchi 2002 ).

In OSSD, one often needs to have a high authority level or have a group of stakeholders backing up the intent. Sony Mobile has been very successful in this respect due to the Tools department involvement inside these communities (Dahlander and Wallin 2006 ). Due to their high commitment and good track record, Sony Mobile employees have reached a high level in the governance organization. The Tools department combines these positions in the communities together with openness in terms of helping competitors and interacting in social activities (Stam 2009 ) (e.g. developer conferences (Knauss et al. 2014 )). One reason for this is to attract quiet stakeholders, both in terms of influencing the community (Dahlander and Magnusson 2008 ), but also to get access to others’ knowledge which could be relevant for Sony Mobile. An example of this is the introduced focus on scalability in both the Jenkins and Gerrit communities, where the Tools department needed to find stakeholders with similar issues to raise awareness and create traction to the topic. Communication in this requirements value chain (Fricker 2010 ) between the different stakeholders, as well as with grouping can be deemed very ad-hoc, similar to OSS RE in general (Scacchi 2002 ). This correlates to the power structure and how influence may move between different stakeholders.

Social interaction between the stakeholders is stressed by Lucas et al. ( 2008 ) as an important aspect to resolve conflicts and to coordinate dependencies in distributed software development projects. The Tools department’s preference for live meetings over the otherwise available electronic options such as mailing lists, issue trackers and discussion boards, is due to time differences and lag in discussions that complicate implementation of larger features. Open source hackathons (Scacchi 2010 ) is the preferable choice as it brings the core stakeholders together which allows for informal negotiations (Fricker 2010 ) and a live just-in-time requirements process (Ernst and Murphy 2012 ), meaning that requirements are captured in a less formal matter and first fully elaborated during implementation. As highlighted in Section  5.3 , feature-by-feature collaborations is also a common practice. This is also due to the ease of communication as it may be performed between two single parties. Hence, it may be concluded that communication in this type of distributed development is a critical challenge, and in this case overcome by live meetings and keeping the number of collaborators per feature low.

This use of live-meetings and social events for requirements communication and discussion, highlights the importance of being socially present in a community other than just online if a stakeholder wants to stay aware of important decisions and implementations. Another reason for the individual stakeholder is to maintain or grow its influence and position in the governance ladder. Hence, organizations might need to revise their community involvement strategy and value what their intents are in contrast to if an online presence is enough.

Another interesting reflection on the feature-by-feature collaborations is that these may be performed with different stakeholders, i.e. relations between stakeholders fluctuate depending on their respective interests. This objective and short-term way of looking at collaborations imply a need of standardized practices in a community for it to be effective.

6.5 Testing

Addressing the RQ5 in Table  1 , we noticed during interviews that both Jenkins and Gerrit focus on manual test cases. At the same time, the communities started the transformation journey towards automated testing, with the Jenkins community leading. The openness of the Tools department led them to participate in the testing part of Jenkins community and to use its influence to rally the traction towards it amongst the other stakeholders in the community. This is especially important for the Jenkins community due to the rich number of settings offered by the plug-ins.

The Gerrit community is currently following the Jenkins’ community patch, as stressed by interviewee I2. With this move towards automated testing, quality assurance will hopefully become better and enable more stable releases. These are important aspects and business drivers for the Tools department as Jenkins and Gerrit constitute the critical parts in Sony Mobile’s continuous integration tool chain. From this perspective, a trend may be seen in how the different communities are becoming more professionalized in the sense that the tools make up business critical assets for many of the stakeholders in the communities, which motivates a continuous effort in risk-reduction (Munga et al. 2009 ; Henkel 2006 ).

The move towards automated testing also allowed for the Tools department to contribute their internal test cases. This may be viewed as profitable from two angles. First, it reduces the internal workload and second, it secures that settings and cases specific for Sony Mobile are addressed and cared for. The test cases may to some extent be viewed as a set of informal requirements, which secure quality aspects in regards to scalability for example which is important for Sony Mobile (Bjarnason et al. 2015 ). Similar practices, but much more formal, are commonly used in more traditional (closed) software development environments. From a community perspective, other stakeholders benefit from this as they get the view and settings from a large environment which enable them to grow as well.

As can be noted in Table  5 , the focus is on forward and re-engineering. An interesting concern is when and how much one should contribute to bug fixes and what should be left for the community, because some bug fixes are very specific to Sony Mobile and the community will not gain anything from them. As discussed earlier, Sony Mobile has the strategy of focusing on issues which are self-beneficiary. Therefore, to be able to keep the influence and strategic position in the communities, the work still has to be done in this area as well.

6.6 Innovation outcomes

In relation to RQ4 in Table  1 , the focal point of the OI theory is value creation and capture (Chesbrough 2003 ). In the studied case, the value is created and captured through their involvement in the Jenkins and Gerrit communities. However, measuring that value using key performance indicators is a daunting challenge. Edison et al. ( 2013 ) confirmed a limited number of measurement models, and that the existing ones neither model all innovation aspects, nor say what metric can be used to measure a certain aspect. Furthermore, existing literature is scarce in regards to how data should be gathered and used for the metrics proposed in the literature. As expected, we found that Sony Mobile does not have established mechanisms in place to measure their performance before and after the Jenkins and Gerrit introduction. However, from the qualitative data collected from the interviews we specifically looked for two types of innovations: product innovations in the tools Jenkins and Gerrit, and process innovation in Sony Mobile’s product development. Other types, specifically market and organizational innovation were considered but not identified.

By taking an active part in the knowledge sharing and exchange process with communities (Dahlander and Magnusson 2008 ; Stuermer et al. 2009 ), the Tools department enjoys the benefits of contributions extending the functionality of their continuous integration tools. Another benefit is the free maintenance and bug corrections and the test cases extension for further quality assurance. By extension, these software improvements may be labeled as product innovations depending on what definition to be used (Edison et al. 2013 ). This may also be viewed from the process innovation perspective (OECD 2005 ) as Sony Mobile gets access to extra work force and a broad variety of competencies, which are internally unavailable (Dahlander and Magnusson 2008 ). The interviewees admit to that even a large scale software organization cannot keep up the technical work force beyond the organization’s borders and there is a huge risk of losing the competitive edge by not being open. This is an acknowledgement to Joy’s law (Lakhani and Panetta 2007 ) “No matter who you are, not all smart people work for you” . Hence, it is vital to reach work force beyond organisational boundaries when innovating (Chesbrough 2003 ), and knowledge is still retained even if people move around inside the community.

Furthermore, these software improvements and product innovations affect the performance and quality of the continuous integration process used by Sony Mobile’s product development. Continuous integration as an agile practice (Beck et al. 2001 ) enables early identification of integration issues as well as increases the developers’ productivity and release frequency (Ståhl and Bosch 2014 ). With this reasoning, as reported elsewhere (Linåker et al. 2015 ), we deem that the product innovations captured in Jenkins and Gerrit transfer on as process innovation to Sony Mobile’s product development. The main reason behind this connection is the possibility to tailor and be flexible that OSS development permits. By adapting the tool chain to the specific needs of the product development the mentioned benefits (e.g. increased build quality and performance) are achieved and waste is reduced in the form of freed up hours, which product developers and testers may spend on alternative tasks, as confirmed by Möller and Wahlqvist ( 2012 ). Reduced time to market and increased quality of products are among the visible business outcomes. However, these outcomes cannot be confirmed due to a lack of objective metrics and came up as a result of interviews.

Another process innovation, which could also be classified as an organizational innovation outcome (OECD 2005 ) is the inner source initiative. This initiative not only helps Sony Mobile to spread the tool chain, but also to build a platform (i.e. software forge (Linåker et al. 2014 )) for sharing built on the tool within the other business units of Sony Mobile. This may be seen as an intra-organizational level OI as described by Morgan et al. ( 2011 ). By integrating the knowledge from other domains, as well as opening up for development and commits, this allows a broader adoption and a higher innovation outcome for Sony Mobile and neighboring business units, as well as for communities. Organizational change in regards to processes and structures and related governance issues, would however be one of many challenges (Morgan et al. 2011 ). Since Sony Mobile is a multinational corporation with a wide spread of internal culture, organizational changes are context and challenging.

6.7 Openness of tools software vs. proprietary software

A specific aspect of RQ2 in Table  1 is that Sony Mobile only opens up its non-competitive tools that are not the part of the revenue stream. I3 stated that “… Sony Mobile has learnt that even collaborating with its worst competitors does not take away their competitive advantage, rather they bring help for Sony Mobile and becomes better and better” . This raises a discussion point of why Sony Mobile limits its openness to noncompetitive tools, despite knowing that opening up creates a win-win situation for all stakeholders involved. Furthermore, it remains an open question why the research activity related to OI in SE is low, as confirmed by the results of a mapping study performed on the area (Munir et al. 2016 ).

In the light of the mapping study, it would be fair to state that the SE literature lacks studies on OI (Munir et al. 2016 ). Organizations have a tendency to open proprietary products when they lose their value, and spinning off is a one way of re-capturing the value by creating a community around it (van der Linden et al. 2009 ). This implication paves the way for future studies using proprietary solutions as units of analysis. Moreover, it will lead to contextualization of OI practices, which may or may not work under different circumstances. Therefore, the findings could also be used to address the lack of contextualization weakness of OI mentioned by Mowery ( 2009 ). It is also important to note that this study focuses on OI via OSS participation, which is significantly different from the situation where OI is based on open source code for the product itself (like Android or Linux). In future work we plan to explore that situation to see if there are other patterns in these OI processes.

7 Conclusions

This study focuses on OI in SE at two levels: 1) innovation incorporated into Jenkins and Gerrit as software products, and 2) how these software improvements affect process and product innovation of Sony Mobile. By keeping the development of the tools open, the in- and out-flows of knowledge between the Tools department and the OSS communities bring improvement to Sony Mobile and innovate the way how products are developed. This type of openness should be separated from the cases where OSS is used as a basis for the organization’s product or service offering, e.g. as a platform, component or full product (Ven and Mannaert 2008 ). To the best of our knowledge, no study has yet focused on the former version, which highlights the contribution of this study and the need for future research of the area.

Our findings suggest that both incumbents and many small scale organizations are involved in the development of Jenkins and Gerrit ( RQ1 ). Sony Mobile may be considered as one of the top committers in the development of the two tools. The main trigger behind adopting OI turned out to be a paradigm shift, moving to an open source product platform (RQ2) . Sony Mobile’s opening up process is limited to the tools that are non-competitive and non-pecuniary. Furthermore, Sony Mobile makes projects or features open source, which are neither seen as a main source of revenue nor as a competitive advantage (RQ3) .

In relation to the main innovation outcomes from OI participation ( RQ4 ), we discovered that Sony Mobile lacks quantitative indicators to measure its innovative capacity before and after the introduction of OSS at the Tools department. However, the qualitative findings suggest that it has made the development environment more stable and flexible. One key reason, other than commits from communities, regards the possibility of tailoring the tools to internal needs. Still, it is left for future research efforts to further investigate in how OI adoption affects product quality and time to market.

When looking at the impact of OI adoption on requirements and testing processes ( RQ5 ), Sony Mobile uses dedicated internal resources to gain influence, which together with an openness toward direct competitors and communities is used to draw attention to issues relevant for Sony Mobile, e.g. scalability of tools to large production environments. Social presence outside of online channels is highly valued in order to manage communication challenges related to distributed development. Another way of tackling such challenges regards co-creation on a feature-by-feature basis between two single parties. Choice of partner fluctuates and depends on the feature in question and individual needs of the respective parties. Further, prioritization is made in regards to how an issue or feature may be seen as beneficial, in contrast to the pressing needs of the moment. Regarding testing, much focus is directed towards automating test activities in order to raise quality standards and professionalize communities to organizational standards.

The scope of the study findings is limited to software organizations with similar context, domain and size as Sony Mobile. It is also worth mentioning that the involvement of stakeholders in the Jenkins and Gerrit OSS communities suggests that the continuous integration processes of these OSS projects are comparable to the corresponding process at Sony Mobile. Thus, we believe that findings of this study may also be applicable to incumbents as well as small software organizations identified in this study.

Future work includes investigation of other contexts and cases where companies use OSS aiming to leverage OI, and to cross-analyze the presented findings in this paper with findings from future case studies.

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Communicated by: Hakan Erdogmus

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Appendix A: Supplementary interview questionnaire

Demographics

Where do you work?

What is your job title?

Which department do you work for in the organization?

How many years of experience do you have?

Could you, in short, describe your daily work and responsibilities?

General involvement

Are you, or have been, in any way actively involved in any open source community in your daily work? (Gerrit, Jenkins, any other?)

Could you describe your involvement?

What is/was the reasons for your involvement in these open source communities? (Volunteered or tasked by management?)

How much time are you allowed to spend on community interaction?

How is your involvement with these community in your spare time, outside of your daily work?

What development process/methodology do you use and how does it interact with the community? (process of working)

Requirements

What are the sources (internal and external) behind the requirements/features? (by tool developers, tool users, pm’s, others)

How do you manage and implement the requirements/features?

How are the requirements approved and prioritized? (By developers alone, pm’s, community)

How is your involvement perceived from the community? Positive or negative? How come? (competitors)

Are there any internal (organizational) obstacles in contributing to the community? (Time, IP, management.)

Are there any external obstacles related to the involvement in the community related to the addition of new requirements/features?

How did you overcome these?

How does your internal process of reporting bugs differ from the community’s? (tools for reporting bugs in community)

How do you manage traceability between tests and requirements?

Who is responsible for fixing those bugs? (Process behind, consequence on quality and resolution time)

How does your internal process for correcting bugs or issues, differ from the community’s?

Are there any obstacles related to the involvement in the community related to the testing process? How did you overcome these? (Communication, synchronized level of quality/tests between contributors)

Business/strategy

What motivates your organization to contribute to open source project(s)? (Beyond lower cost, improved quality?)

What is the strategy behind these commits?

Did you consider alternate strategies such as buying proprietary tools (COTS) or hiring people/outsourcing for the development these tools? Why?

How are these strategies supported by your internal procedures (IP department)?

Is it a local strategy or global strategy? Who are the sponsors?

How has the commits effected the relation with other (corporate) stakeholders in the communities? (Free-riding, governance structure, constraints, Sony Authority, collaboration, balance between community and Sony’s needs, community buildup)

How has the commits effected the relation with other competitors? (Free-riding, governance structure, collaboration)

Perception on innovation and outcome

How has the usage/development of these tools effected the Sony Mobile’s product development? (Developers, testers)

How has the usage of these tools effected the products?

Is innovativeness of a requirement/issue/bug considered, and if so, what effect does it have on the requirements and contribution process?

How has the involvement in the communities implicated on innovation in your: 1) Processes? 2) Products 3) Organization 4) Business strategies

How do you measure the impact from the development/usage of these tools on Sony Mobile’s product development? Metrics etc.

Is the knowledge gained from the OSS tool development transferred and exploited outside of the tools development? (Absorptive capacity – Firm level, individual level)

Ending remarks

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Munir, H., Linåker, J., Wnuk, K. et al. Open innovation using open source tools: a case study at Sony Mobile. Empir Software Eng 23 , 186–223 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9511-7

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9511-7

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Open Innovation Case Study: Pfizer's Centers for Therapeutic Innovation

Pfizer recently announced the formation of a network of academic collaborators to accelerate the translation of basic science into biologics-based drugs. Pfizer anticipates establishing local Centers at each partner site enabling Pfizer and Academic Medical Center teams to work closely together. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has signed on as the first of multiple partners. The partnerships will follow a venture capital-funded biotechnology start-up model, whereby Pfizer funds preclinical and clinical development programs and offers equitable intellectual property and ownership rights. Pfizer has the goal of expanding the Centers to Europe and Asia in 2012. Assuming eight projects per CTI, this could bring dozens of differentiated entities against targets into Pfizer’s pipeline.

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Open innovation: benefits, case studies and books.

• October 10, 2019
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Table of Contents

Today we hear a lot “ Open Innovation ” but actually there are a lot of people who are not sure what it means exactly. As this topic is important nowadays, we decided to write an article about it to clarify all your doubts.

What is Open innovation?

Open innovation is about combining internal resources with external ones to boost the innovation culture in the company. For example, big companies like GE, Cisco or Microsoft, etc. tend to have 8-12 different value pools, for instance, think suppliers, startups, customers or universities, etc. to consider for their open innovation efforts.

In other words, open innovation is a business model that encourages you to connect with outside sources so you can profit from exciting new startups and product opportunities, get a broader pool of talent, and collaborate with others to come up with an innovation that you could never do just by yourself.

Actually, now, large multinationals including Kraft, KLM, Pfizer, and Siemens actively and openly participate in collaborative, online innovation communities where seekers and solution providers work together. Much like the way tech companies use hackathons to get outsiders to contribute to their goals, OI-committed businesses announce proudly that they’re taking full advantage of the global innovation community. That transparency demonstrates to the market that they have a clear strategy for the future and they’re aggressively pursuing it out in the open.

Open innovation may seem to be for big business. But it is an approach that can be used by all companies, especially start-ups and small businesses. It may be as simple as inviting a trusted supplier to help you develop ideas or launching a website, etc.

So, find the right collaborators! One of the most visible open innovation actions these days is suggested websites or special places on the web that invite customers and the general public to submit ideas on how to improve a company’s products and services. And then, on these websites, companies publish hackathon info to find the right partner with the most brilliant idea.

Benefits of Open Innovation

1. Creating new products and services Especially when you’re a startup, there’s nothing more exciting than getting your first product out on the market. But it’s easy to get stuck, focusing all your efforts on selling your first product rather than thinking of what else you could provide for your customers. It can be scary to invest time and resources into creating a new product, especially taking into account that startups have limited budgets. Yet, by investing your resources and the resources of the third parties into creating something new, that you know will bring value to your community. This move may help you increase your profits and create buzz around you.

2. Innovating old products and services Sometimes, you don’t need to create new products. Sometimes, your older service has the potential to be better, has the potential to attract a lot of clients. This is when you need to get a creative team together to improve your idea. One of the benefits of open innovation is that the process never ends. You’re always thinking about how you can make your organization better.

3. Building a strong community Lego is a great example of how a company can engage its fans on a wide scale by using open innovation. No matter the size of your organization, a great benefit of open innovation is taking the time to get in touch with your fans and your soulmates, new talents. Get to know what your community wants, and then give it to them. In the process, you will find that enthusiastic community members are willing to dedicate their time and ideas to helping you create something better. These relationships are key and will help your company build a strong community dedicated to your project.

4. Keeping your employees engaged One of the main sources of employee dissatisfaction is a lack of feeling of ownership of the projects they work on. Sometimes, your team may have some great ideas but might not feel comfortable bringing them forward. By bringing an open innovation initiative to your workplace, your team can get involved in big-picture planning, and make it their project. When people feel more invested in the bigger goals of the organization, it makes them more excited to come to work in the morning and put their heart and their soul in it.

5. Staying ahead of the competition By keeping your team and your community engaged and on the lookout for new ideas, you make sure that your organization stays helpful and relevant to your community. Using open innovation can help you find the niche that makes your organization uniquely valuable to the community.

6. Costs reduction When you work with other companies, you split the costs. Moreover, you become more efficient because in each company, each member works on what he is good at.

7. Time-to-market acceleration Instead of figuring out how to make a desired product, train your people, buy equipment, etc, you just start collaborating with a company that already has all this, which allows you to bring the product to market faster.

8. New revenue streams Did you know that some businesses get more revenue from secondary products rather than from the primary ones? Working with other companies will allow you to enter a new market with an idea and product you have.

9. Innovation risk reduction Any innovation has risks, but if you work with experts you minimize your risk of failure, especially if you are agile and get feedback from your target on a regular basis.

Let’s look at open innovation case studies

GE is one of the leading companies implementing different open innovation models. Their Open Innovation Manifesto focuses on the collaboration between experts and entrepreneurs from everywhere to share ideas and passionately solve problems. Based on their innovation Ecomagination project that aims to address environmental challenges through innovative solutions, GE has spent $17 billion on R&D and received total revenues of $232 billion over the last decade. GE is famous for its open innovation challenges and initiatives on its open innovation page. Through these challenges, GE familiarizes itself with future potential talents. For example, the Unimpossible Missions: The University Edition challenge is clearly targeted at students that are creative, have a certain level of technical skills, and a clear recruitment motivation. Through the challenge, GE aims to get three smart and creative students to have their internship at GE. Another example is GE’s project – First Build, a co-create collaboration platform, which connects designers, engineers, and thinkers to share ideas with other members who can discuss them together. It is one of the open innovation models that aims to provide a platform that can help both external and internal individuals to collaborate together in terms of ideas sharing and manufacturing to reach innovative ideas for products and services.

Open innovation was also adopted by NASA in order to build a mathematical algorithm that can determine the optimal content of medical kits for NASA’s future manned missions. In order to reach an innovative software that can solve this problem, NASA collaborated with TopCoder, Harvard Business School, and London Business School. The application of open innovation created a cost-effective and time-effective solution that could not be reached using the internal team alone.

Currently, the company is adopting open innovation models on levels between the team and other entrepreneurs from one side and the company and its consumers from the other. The Coca-Cola Accelerator program aims to help start-ups in eight cities around the world; Sydney, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Singapore, Istanbul, San Francisco, and Bangalore. Those start-ups aim to think of innovative ways to build the Happiness Coca-Cola brand. Another open innovation model presented by Coca-Cola is the Freestyle dispenser machine that allows users from around the world to mix their own flavors and suggest a new flavor for Coca-Cola products. The new product records the consumer flavor so they can get it from other Freestyle machines located around the world using the Coca-Cola mobile application. This model of open innovation puts the consumers at the heart of the production process as the company uses the suggested flavors as part of the external ideas that can be evaluated and processed as a new product line.

The new LEGO strategy aimed to focus on the consumer by linking both business and creativity. This strategy was known as, LEGO’s Shared Vision. In order to innovate new LEGO sets that can achieve success in the market, LEGO started LEGO Ideas, an initiative based on a co-create open innovation model. On this online website, LEGO consumers can design their own LEGO sets either using LEGO bricks or computer 3D applications. Other users start to discuss the idea and vote for it, once the idea reaches a targeted vote, LEGO can consider it as a new product by giving a small part of the revenues to the creator of the set. This model contributes to putting the consumer at the heart of the innovation process and helps the team to target sets that can achieve success based on the LEGO Ideas votes and comments. This co-create platform can also contribute to reducing the risk of innovation as this feedback from the website can give business analysts ideas about the viability of the new product. Another great open innovation step LEGO did was building a partnership between the company and MIT Media Lab to deliver programmable bricks, which was introduced as LEGO Windstorm.

Samsung adopts an open innovation in order to build its external innovation strengths through the Samsung Accelerator program. The initiative aims to build a collaboration between designers, innovators, and thinkers to focus on different solutions. The program provides office spaces, statical capital, and product support to entrepreneurs to help them to build software and services. Samsung does open innovation collaboration, especially with startups. The distinctive part of Samsung’s open innovation collaboration is that Samsung divides it into 4 categories: partnerships, ventures, accelerators, and acquisitions. Typically Samsung partnerships aim for new features or integrations within Samsung’s existing products. Ventures can be described as investments in early-stage startups. These investments can bring revenue in case of exits but also provide access to new technologies that Samsung can learn and benefit from. For example, Samsung has invested in Mobeam, a mobile payment company. Accelerators provide startups with an innovative and empowering environment to create new things. Samsung offers these startups an initial investment, facilities to work in, as well as some resources from their vast pool. The idea is that the products coming from internal startups could become a part of Samsung’s product portfolio over time or just serve as learning experiences for the company. Acquisitions aim to bring in startups working on innovations that are at the core of Samsung’s strategic areas of the future. These acquisitions often remain independent units and can even join the Accelerator program. As an example of Samsung’s collaboration with startups, Samsung has acquired an IoT company called SmartThings to gain an IoT platform without having to spend money, and more importantly, time on R&D. Samsung sees potential in the IoT industry and views it as a strategic important part of their future business and thus an area where they want to be a forerunner. Smart Things still continues to operate as an independent startup fueled by the resources of a big company. With the investment potential and home electronics of Samsung, SmartThings can really be developed into an integral part of Samsung products, by creating new IoT possibilities for homes. By collaborating with startups, Samsung aims to benefit from the variety of innovations that smaller companies have already come up with. These companies often have products that can complement or be integrated into Samsung’s own products, creating value for both parties.

The Entrepreneurs in Residence program allows Cisco to invite early-stage entrepreneurs with big ideas for enterprise solutions to join their startup incubation program. This includes access funding from Cisco, potential opportunities to collaborate with their product & engineering teams, co-working space in Silicon Valley, and much more.

Wayra by Telefonica has been around for three years, and today, it is present in 11 countries across Latin America and Europe. It seems to be very well organized and it is very active with more than 300 startups engaged so far.

Hewlett Packard

It is one company in particular that has really embraced the ideals of open innovation. It has developed labs where open innovation thrives. It has created an open innovation team that links collaborators that are researchers and entrepreneurs in business, government, and academia, to come up with innovative solutions to hard problems with the goal of developing breakthrough technologies.

Peugeot Citroën

The French car manufacturer has launched a collaborative project to design the cars of the future and aimed at multiplying the company’s partnerships with scientific laboratories all around the world. This project materialized into the creation of a network of OpenLabs. These structures are designed to allow the encounter between the group’s research centers and the external partners. They have a goal of thinking about the future of the automotive industry, particularly according to scientific advances.

P&G’s open innovation with external partners culminates in its Connect+Develop website. Through this platform, P&G communicates its needs to innovators that can access detailed information related to specific needs and submit their ideas to the site. P&G recruits solutions for various problems all the time. Connect+Develop has generated multiple partnerships and produced relevant products.

The idea for Nivea’s B&W deodorant was coined together with Nivea’s users through social media. The way Nivea collaborated with its users throughout the R&D process is very interesting. They pretty much said that “Okay, we know that our current product can be connected to stains in clothes. Could you share your stories and home remedies so that we can develop a better product?” Nivea then partnered up with a company they found via pearlfinder and developed, together with the users, the B&W deodorant. This admittance of issues in their product could have been seen as a sign of weakness, however, users were very active in collaborating with Nivea and the end product ended up being a great success.

Telegram is a messenger application that works on computers and smartphones very much like WhatsApp and Line. However, what makes Telegram different is how much users can contribute to its content openly. Users with any developing skills can create their own stickers and bots on the Telegram platform. Telegram also promotes the best stickers by updating an in-app list of trending stickers.

Open Innovation Books

To learn more about Open Innovation, I recommend you to read these interesting books about open innovation.

1. A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing: Advice from Leading Experts in the Field by Paul Sloane

Open innovation is one of the hottest topics in strategy and management today. The concept of capturing ideas in a hub of collaboration, together with the outsourcing of tasks is a revolution that is rapidly changing our culture. A Guide to Open Innovation explains how to use the power of the Internet to build and innovate in order to introduce a consumer democracy that has never existed before. With corporate case studies and best practice advice, this book is a vital read for anyone who wants to find innovative products and services from outside their organizations, make them work, and overcome the practical difficulties that lie in the way.

2. Open Business Models: How To Thrive In The New Innovation Landscape by Henry W Chesbrough

In his book, the author demonstrated that because useful knowledge is no longer concentrated in a few large organizations, business leaders must adopt a new, open innovation model. Using this model, companies look outside their boundaries for ideas.

3.  Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era by Henry Chesbrough

Chesbrough shows how companies in any industry can make the critical shift from product- to service-centric thinking, from closed to open innovation where co-creating with customers enables sustainable business models that drive continuous value creation for customers. He maps out a strategic approach and proven framework that any individual, business unit, company, or industry can put to work for renewed growth and profits. The book includes guidance and compelling examples for small and large companies, services businesses, and emerging economies, as well as a path forward for the innovation industry.

4. Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm by Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West

The authors describe an emergent model of innovation in which firms draw on research and development that may lie outside their own boundaries. The book will be key reading for academics, researchers, and graduate students of innovation and technology management.

5.  The Open Innovation Revolution: Essentials, Roadblocks, and Leadership Skills by Stefan Lindegaard, Guy Kawasaki

This practical guide reveals that, without the right people to drive innovation processes, your odds of success shrink dramatically. And as open innovation becomes the norm, developing the right people skills networking, communicating with stakeholders, building your personal brand and the ability to sell ideas is essential for your innovation leaders and intrapreneurs.

6. The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge-Driven Enterprise by Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

Authors Alpheus Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin draw on their own experience building InnoCentive, the pioneering global platform for open innovation. Writing for business executives, R&D leaders, and innovation strategists, Bingham and Spradlin demonstrate how to dramatically increase the flow of high-value ideas and innovative solutions both within enterprises and beyond their boundaries.

7. Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation by Linus Dahlander, Lars Frederiksen, Francesco Rullani

This book brings together distinguished scholars from different disciplines: economics, organization theory, innovation studies, and marketing in order to provide an improved understanding of how technological as well as symbolic value is created and appropriated at the intersection between online communities and firms. Empirical examples are presented from different industries, including software, services, and manufacturing. The book offers food for thought for academics and managers regarding an important phenomenon that challenges many conventional wisdoms regarding how business can be done.

8. Motivation in Open Innovation: An Exploratory Study on User Innovators by Robert Motzek

Robert Motzek’s study investigates the most important factors controlling user innovators’ motivation and will derive suggestions on how manufacturers can address these points in order to tap the full potential of user innovation for their new product development.

9. Constructing Openness on Open Innovation Platforms: Creation of a Toolbox for Designing Openness on Open Innovation Platforms in the Life Science Industry by Emelie Kuusk-Jonsson, Pernilla Book

The work benchmarks a model for designing Open Innovation Platforms and takes a theoretical standpoint in the socio-legal approach, viewing regulatory interventions and constructions of contractual and intellectual property law as the legal framework enabling the creation of openness, which in turn affects the choices made in the business arena.

10. SMEs and Open Innovation: Global Cases and Initiatives by Hakikur Rahman, Isabel Ramos

Open innovation has been widely implemented in small and medium enterprises with the aim of influencing business promotion, value gain, and economic empowerment. However, little is known about the processes used to implement open innovation in SMEs and the associated challenges and benefits. This book unites knowledge on how SMEs can apply open innovation strategies to development by incorporating academic, entrepreneurial, institutional, research, and empirical cases. This book discusses diverse policy, economic, and cultural issues, including numerous opportunities and challenges surrounding open innovation strategies; studies relevant risks and risk management; analyzes SMEs evolution patterns on adopting open innovation strategies through available measurable criteria; and assists practitioners in designing action plans to empower SMEs.

11. Open Innovation Essentials for Small and Medium Enterprises: A Guide to Help Entrepreneurs in Adopting the Open Innovation Paradigm in Their Business by Luca Escoffier , Adriano La Vopa, Phyllis Speser, Daniel Stainsky

Small and Medium Enterprises have to approach open innovation differently than large companies. This practical guide on open innovation is expressly for entrepreneurs and managers in SMEs. The authors provide strategies, techniques, and tricks of the trade enabling SMEs to practice open innovation systems profitability and enhance the long-term value of their company.

12. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology by Henry W Chesbrough

This book represents a powerful synthesis of that work in the form of a new paradigm for managing corporate research and bringing new technologies to market. Chesbrough impressively articulates his ideas and how they connect to each other, weaving several disparate areas of work R&D, corporate venturing, spinoffs, licensing and intellectual property into a single coherent framework.

If you are working on an open innovation project and you need help with software development, let us know ! We would be happy to know more!

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Ekaterina Novoseltseva is an experienced CMO and Board Director. Professor in prestigious Business Schools in Barcelona. Teaching about digital business design. Right now Ekaterina is a CMO at Apiumhub - software development hub based in Barcelona and organiser of Global Software Architecture Summit. Ekaterina is proud of having done software projects for companies like Tous, Inditex, Mango, Etnia, Adidas and many others. Ekaterina was taking active part in the Apiumhub office opening in Paseo de Gracia and in helping companies like Bitpanda open their tech hubs in Barcelona.

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One Comment

July 26, 2019

Hello there! It’s hard to come by anything interesting on this subject (that is not overly simplistic), because everything related to 3D seems very difficult. You however seem like you know what you’re talking about 🙂 Thank you for finding time to write relevant content for us!

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