Written by Alexander Schroll

Tags: Human characteristics | influencing variables | Open Innovation Adoption | Skills

The evaluation of influencing variables on open innovation adoption is the major focus of my research work on open innovation. I define three different categories of variables:

• The market side, which could be something like industry, industry hostility, uncertainty in the industry and others.
• The organisational side, which includes everything depend on the company. For instance strategic breadth, competitive advantage, economies of scale, firm size, R&D intensity and others.
• And finally, the human side which includes several characteristics of the company executives (decision makers who have an influence on formulation of the R&D strategy)

Today, I will explain which human characteristics are needed for a company adopting open innovation.

The CEO and other top-level company executives have an important role when it comes to formulation and implementation of a (R&D-)strategy towards open innovation. Lichtenthaler and Ernst [2009] found that the openness of a company seems to be determined more by a firm's individual decision, rather than on industry characteristics. This confirms the important role of the company executives.

Background of the company executives: Drechsler and Natter [2008] already found that companies with increased decision influence of the R&D department are more likely to adopt open innovation strategies. Hence, a technical background (as usually required for R&D) in terms of education or expertise (former working experience) seems to foster open innovation adoption.

• Proactivity: Open Innovation requires a certain proactivity, because the company steps up and searches for external innovations instead of waiting for the internal R&D department. I suppose
  that CEOs and company executives need to be proactive in order to adopt an open innovation strategy.
• Networking: Despite being proactive, the company executive should also be able to leverage the companies' and his/her personal network. As open innovation requires the company to deal with many different stakeholders, the importance of networking skills is obvious. We are not living in the world of closed innovation anymore, where "the best people" worked for us. In an open innovation world, people need to grow their networks and get in contact with the innovation solvers.
• Risk averseness: The outcome of an open innovation project is always vague. Open innovation requires a certain investment without knowing any outcome. There is always the risk of harming the company through an open innovation strategy. Therefore the adoption of open innovation is connected with a risk, which requires a certain risk acceptance of the company executives.
• Innovativeness of the company executives: It seems obvious, but it's often forgotten. An innovative company also needs innovative leaders. The more innovative a company executive is, the more
  innovative he/she will be when it comes to the definition of the innovation management process and formulation of innovation strategies.
• Last, but not least: Controllability. Open innovation requires managers to step back from completely controlling the innovation process. With the adoption of open innovation strategies the
  company increasingly looses influence. If a manager is not willing to let things develop on their own, it is unlikely that he/she will adopt a risky open innovation strategy.

I am still waiting for first empirical results from my study. But a first insight is, that company executives already have certain skills like Proactivity and Networking skills. But in many cases, company executives don't like to take the kind of risk which arises from open innovation projects. Furthermore, company executives like to have everthing under their control. A potential loss of control is not acceptable for many company executives which are currently working closed innovation organisations.