The Requirements to Shift from Close Innovation into Open Innovation

Open innovation represents an emergent paradigm, which organizations must become familiar with and apply it in practice sooner or later in order to survive and prevent their failure. Factors such as diffusion of knowledge, increasing costs and complexity of R&D, the shortening of the technology life cycles, the growth of venture capital and presence of knowledgeable suppliers and clients, have weakened the close innovation paradigm. So, self-sufficient, inward focus, monopoly of knowledge and capital investment on internal research, does not create competitive advantages for organizations any more. In open innovation era, organizations make use of both internal and external resource of knowledge to drive their innovation processes, also search different internal and external ways to develop their markets. With regard to inescapable deployment of open innovation, now the question is what items should be considered by organizations in the shift from close innovation to open innovation? In other words, what are the requirements for implementing open innovation approach in organizations? This paper will answer the question by review of pervious research to identify and describe dimensions which could lead organizations in order to implement open innovation. These dimensions which named “the requirements to shift from close innovation into open innovation” and presented in conceptual framework of paper, are: networking, open innovation processes, organizational structures and knowledge management systems. Organizations should notice these dimensions interact each other, so change along one dimension will impact on the others.