Abstract: In the digital economy, firms are finding that an increasingly important form of open innovation is managing networks of collaborations with suppliers, customers, individual consumers or even competitors (West, 2014). In some cases, firms may be able to define the rules of such collaboration by sponsoring their own platform or ecosystem. In other cases, they may end up joining an existing collaboration (such as a standards, consortium or open source community) where the rules and even the participants are largely defined. Firms seek to maximize their returns by optimizing both value creation and value capture — "growing the pie" versus "slicing the pie". At times, it may even be advantageous for firms to give away potential advantages by being open to direct competitors (West, 2003; Henkel, 2006; Alexy et al., 2018). This talk reviews what we do (and do not) know about such network forms of open innovation, with a particular focus on the strategic use of openness.

Bio: Joel West is Professor of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences near Los Angeles. One of the ‘founding fathers’ of research on Open Innovation — along with Henry Chesbrough and Wim Vanhaverbeke, with whom he has published Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford, 2006) and New Frontiers in Open Innovation (Oxford, 2014), as well as the Research Policy special issue “Open Innovation: New Insights and Evidence” (2014) — he is the author of more than 30 articles and book chapters about Open Innovation, User Innovation, Open Source software, Telecommunication industry.

Please register with Michèle Breton (Nous contacter).