Innovative Enterprise Theory & Practice
This article is part of the THNK VIEWS series. We bridge theory and practice on organizing imagination and innovation by extracting key implications and offering new insights to innovation practitioners. This article builds on the study SME Network Characteristics vs. Product Innovativeness: How to Achieve High Innovation Performance by Annemien Pullen, Petra de Weerd-Nederhof, Aard J. Groen and Olaf A. M. Fisscher, on combining open innovation and network orchestration.
Open innovation is based on a simple premise: “If you and I swap a dollar, we still each have one dollar. If you and I swap an idea, we both have two ideas.” Therefore sharing in a wider environment creates new outputs that no single enterprise would be able to achieve on itself.
Companies share in risks and rewards. To do so, companies have sought a number of ways to create shared value: joint ventures, technology alliances, and more recently, innovation networks – the collaboration of multiple companies to develop new products and services. Think of same-sector companies collaborating along a supply chain, or cross-sector organizations from the private, public and non-profit worlds collaborating
But how do you successfully create and manage an innovation network?