How SMEs Engage in Open Innovation: a Survey
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How SMEs Engage in Open Innovation: a Survey Gabriele Santoro 1 & Alberto Ferraris 1,2 & Elisa Giacosa 1 & Guido Giovando 1
Received: 6 November 2015 / Accepted: 28 December 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Although open innovation has gained more and more attention in innovation management, even for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), still lack heterogeneous explanations on how smaller firms do engage in open innovations and which source of knowledge they exploit most. In this context, this paper investigates if SMEs from different industries participate in open innovation, highlighting the role of internal and external sources at introducing new products and services. Our study shows that SMEs of Piedmont still have a closed approach to innovation and mainly rely on internal sources to develop new products and services. Moreover, with regard to external sources of knowledge, they primarily rely on one source, the customers. Keywords Open innovation . Small and medium-sized enterprises . Source of knowledge . Innovation management
* Gabriele Santoro [email protected] Alberto Ferraris [email protected] Elisa Giacosa [email protected] Guido Giovando [email protected]
1
Department of Management, University of Torino, Corso Unione Sovietica, 218 bis, 10134 Torino, Italy
2
Research Fellow of the Laboratory for International and Regional Economics, Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia
J Knowl Econ
Introduction In the current scenario of economic crisis, globalization, increasing competition and rises of the development of new technologies, firms are more and more forced to reformulate their strategy. Likewise, within innovation management, they have to openup their boundaries and rely more on external source of knowledge. In a such framework, due to the high technology development costs and the shortening of the product lifecycle (especially in high-tech industries) innovate with a closed model no longer guarantees profitable outcomes and makes the innovation development more expensive and more risky. Therefore, firms try to diversify the business risks across multiple sources and, at the same time, to reduce R&D costs. This is in line with the paradigm of open innovation (Chesbrough 2003), according to which firms should take advantages both from internal and external sources of knowledge, and exploit both internal and external paths to market (Del Giudice et al. 2013; Del Giudice and Maggioni 2014; Ferraris 2014). With a strong perspective on innovation (Bresciani and Ferraris 2012; Ferraris 2013) and features of flexibility, high efficiency, high adaptability to market change, SMEs should show openness and benefit from open innovation practices, thought they suffer from lack of financial and organizational resources (liability of smallness) to assimilate and integrate external knowledge in the innovation process, and they are usually more reluctant to take risks. Despite SMEs have high inno
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