Structural Analysis for Assessing and Managing Risks in Open Innovation

By opening a company’s innovation process to external partners, Open Innovation (OI) allows to overcome risks in product development, such as missing customer integration or high product flop rates. However, OI itself bears some risks, which endanger the success of an OI-project. Though several studies regarding possible OI risks and barriers exist, a systematic analysis of dependencies between OI-risks is missing. By knowing dependencies between risks, an OI-team planning an OI-project can focus the limited resources on the most relevant risks. For instance, instead of treating five different risks, it might be sufficient to treat the one “root” risk. Thus, this paper focuses on closing this gap. After identifying and aggregating risks from literature, their dependencies are analysed by a Design Structure Matrix. A subsequent ABC-analysis of activity and criticality derives a ranking of the most relevant OI-risks. At this, we focus on a structural risk assessment and exclude (for this paper) the consideration of individual probabilities and damage potentials.     «

By opening a company’s innovation process to external partners, Open Innovation (OI) allows to overcome risks in product development, such as missing customer integration or high product flop rates. However, OI itself bears some risks, which endanger the success of an OI-project. Though several studies regarding possible OI risks and barriers exist, a systematic analysis of dependencies between OI-risks is missing. By knowing dependencies between risks, an OI-team planning an OI-project can focu...     »