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1、Beyond high tech: early adopters ofopen innovation in other industriesHenry Chesbrough1and Adrienne Kardon Crowther21Center for Open Innovation, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, CA, USA2Analysis Group, Menlo Park, CA, USACompanies have historically invested in large research and development dep
2、artments to driveinnovation and provide sustainable growth. This model, however, is eroding due to a number offactors. What is emerging is a more open model, where companies recognize that not all goodideas will come from inside the organization and not all good ideas created within theorganization
3、can be successfully marketed internally. To date, Open Innovation concepts havebeen regarded as relevant primarily to high-technology industries, with examples that includeLucent, 3Com, IBM, Intel and Millenium Pharmaceuticals. In this article, we identifyorganizations in industries outside high tec
4、hnology that are early adopters of the concept.Our findings demonstrate that many Open Innovation concepts are already in use in a widerange of industries. We document practices that appear to assist organizations adopting theseconcepts, and discover that Open Innovation is not ipso facto a recipe f
5、or outsourcing R&D.We conclude that Open Innovation has utility as a paradigm for industrial innovation beyondhigh tech to more traditional and mature industries.1. IntroductionThe book Open Innovation describes an inno-vation paradigm shift from a closed to anopen model.1At the heart of this model
6、is therecognition that today, competitive advantageoften comes from inbound open innovation, whichis the practice of leveraging the discoveries ofothers: companies need not and indeed should notrely exclusively on their own R&D. In addition,outbound open innovation suggests that ratherthan relying e
7、ntirely on internal paths to market,companies can look for external organizationswith business models that are better suited tocommercialize a given technology. Open Innova-tion has taken on greater saliency in light of thedebate about globalization and the potential forthe R&D function itself to be
8、come outsourced, asthe manufacturing function was 20 years earlier.2Open Innovation follows a long tradition ofstudying the processes of innovation. Schumpeter(1934) gave a powerful impetus to the study ofinnovation with his comparison of the entrepre-neur and the entrenched incumbent firm. Business
9、historians have documented the extensivemarketsfor innovation that pre-dated the rise of thecorporate R&D laboratory, and often pre-datedthe enforcement of intellectual property law(Lamoreaux and Sokoloff, 2001). Historicalaccounts suggest that early R&D activities grewout of the need in many indust
10、ries to maintainand improve production activities (Chandler,1990). Because activities were frequently uniquefor each firm, investments in R&D were firmspecific. Mowery (1983) documented the rise ofthe corporate R&D laboratory in American man-ufacturing, and attributed this rise to the costs oforgani
11、zing innovation inside the firm, relativeto the costs of organizing innovation throughthe market. From the technology base createdby internal R&D, firms naturally moved toexploit their accumulated knowledge to developR&D Management 36, 3, 2006. r 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation r 2006 Blackwel
12、l Publishing Ltd, 2299600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA, 02148, USAnew products, thereby enhancing their economiesof scope; in many industries large-scale dedicatedR&D functions emerged, providing a barrier toentry through economies of scale (Chandler,1990).Another
13、 rich source of antecedents has beensubstantial prior work on the importance ofexternal technology, at least when it was in-bound to the organization. Nelson and Winter(1982) modeled the firms decision to search fornew technology outside of its own organization.Cohen and Levinthal (1990) wrote about
14、 theimportance of investing in internal research inorder to be able to utilize external technology, anability they termed, absorptive capacity. Rosen-berg (1994) asked the question, why do firmsconduct basic research with their own money,and answered that this research enhanced thefirms ability to u
15、se external knowledge. Firmsthat fail to exploit such external R&D may be at asevere competitive disadvantage (Rosenberg andSteinmueller, 1988).Other recent research has called attention tothe rise of intermediate markets in particularindustries (Arora et al., 2001). These intermediatemarkets alter
16、the incentives for innovation,and also condition the mode of entry of newtechnologies and new firms into an industry(Gans et al., 2002). The presence of intermediatemarkets may interact with more networked struc-tures to change the way in which innovation isorganized.Any model that claims to be a new paradigmfor industrial innovation must account foranomalies that are not well explained in an earlierparadigm (Kuhn, 1962). Open Innovation identi-fies some anomalies in this vein. Co
