2.2 Open Innovation Leading to Collaboration
Open Innovation as a source for creating new solutions is a key concept to look at,
as it calls for significant stakeholder interaction to achieve the results. While the
relevance of Open Innovation for Business is steadily increasing, Open Innovation
is a must for Social Innovation. Even more than in Business, solving problems today
in society requires a constant collaboration between all sectors to determine the
most burning problems and approaches to resolve them. There are no serious issues
today that can be solved by any of the sectors alone. Figure 2 shows a visualization
of closed and open Innovation processes:
The concept of Open Innovation has two different focus directions of knowledge
sharing that are offering significant relevance for cross-sectorial collaboration in
Social Innovation:
Outside-In Processes integrate external knowledge into the Innovation process and
thus enhance a company’s internal knowledge base through the integration of
external stakeholder knowledge. This can be through a loose collaboration or
formal agreements.
Inside-Out Processes are focused on the externalization of knowledge, which is far
less common than Outside-In. Here, companies can license or provide technology
or knowledge to capitalize on potential economic benefits outside the firm. It
can also be used to run processes of joint development.
Both directions of Open Innovation require significant collaboration between the
stakeholders and, in Social Innovation, also among the different sectors