Developing a framework for measuring open innovation in defense industry

Evidence in defense industry including knowledge dispersion and budget cuts demonstrate increasingly necessity of moving toward open innovation as defense industry in united states of America, England, and many other countries are opening their innovation activities. Our country's defense industry inevitably has to step in this road to confront the rising challenges. But there is no trace of an open innovation model for the defense industry in academic literature. Based on innovation literature and experts’ experiences, the present study was designed to develop a framework to measure innovation openness in the defense industry. This framework can be used to map defense industry innovation projects onto openness spectrum in three dimensions, thus may help us to draw the way to more openness. first, a preliminary framework based on innovation literature was presented to defense industry experts, and their critics and suggestions were captured during interviews. Then using experts’ opinions and by reviewing the literature again, the final framework, accepted by experts and consistent with the literature, was developed. The final result is a three-dimension framework which measures open innovation “depth” and “breadth”, and “knowledge depth” of defense innovation at project or organization level.