The relevance of stakeholder analysis for Open Innovation

Open Innovation (OI) opens a company’s innovation process to its environment and enables the purposeful collaboration with external partners, such as suppliers, customers, consumers, universities or even competitors. This allows the utilisation of external expertise and creativity. In a qualitative study, we identified the selection of suitable OI-partners as one of the main challenges for companies conducting OI – especially when no or only little experience with OI. A common mistake is focussing only on OI-partners for solving the (technical) task and neglecting strategic-political relevant OI-partners. This could mean that only users of a product were involved while the actual buyers of the product were another group and not involved. However, another mistake was focussing on external OI-partners and not considering internal OI-partners sufficiently, such as employees or superiors. Thus, we developed an OI-specific approach for identifying relevant OI-partners for an OI-project. Besides identification methods from OI and Lead-User approach for assessing the “technical” solution-oriented skills and expertise of OI-partners, stakeholder analysis assesses their strategic relevance. At the example of five industry cases, we evaluate our approach and the relevance of a combined consideration of technical solution-oriented potential and strategic relevance of OI-partners. At this, stakeholder analysis does also focuses on the identification of internal OI-partners, who are necessary for developing a solution for the OI-project’s task. However, they might also be relevant for reducing internal barriers such as Not-Invented-Here syndrome or resistance against change.     «

Open Innovation (OI) opens a company’s innovation process to its environment and enables the purposeful collaboration with external partners, such as suppliers, customers, consumers, universities or even competitors. This allows the utilisation of external expertise and creativity. In a qualitative study, we identified the selection of suitable OI-partners as one of the main challenges for companies conducting OI – especially when no or only little experience with OI. A common mistake is focussi...     »