An approach to enable and advance open innovation for small and medium-sized enterprises

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Small and medium-sized enterprises form a very important part of any economy. These organisations generally provide 60–70 percent of the employment in countries. The success and growth of SMEs have a direct impact on a country's GDP, but SMEs also face challenges and constraints due to their size. Available resources must be managed and spent wisely.To be more competitive, SMEs often turn to innovation to develop new products and services that can help them grow and be more relevant in the market. One can argue that innovation has become an imperative for business success. Open innovation practices are becoming more prevalent in organisations as a way to innovate. More organisations are adopting open innovation to gain wider access to knowledge and technology not otherwise available to them internally to the organisation or to appropriate value from their own knowledge and technology. Adopting these new innovation processes however requires a change to organisational and management practices.Research into open innovation in SMEs has generally lagged behind research in larger organisations. Available research does show that there are benefits to using open innovation by SMEs, but also that current open innovation practices tend to be ad hoc in nature and are usually not managed as a formalised approach. Open innovation is still an evolving field, especially in its application within SMEs. There is a requirement to develop a formalised approach to help SMEs navigate the adoption and use of open innovation within their organisations.This dissertation follows a design science research method to develop such an approach that SMEs can use for the implementation, execution and improvement of open innovation within their organisations. First, the need for such an approach was established through a review of the literature and a study of South African SMEs. Thereafter, a series of design cycles was undertaken to develop various artefacts to form an integrated open innovation approach.The approach consists of an open innovation life cycle framework, design propositions with detailed descriptions filling out the framework and a toolset of templates that help users better interact with the content of the approach.Following the design science research method, a practical solution was sought for a real field problem. It is grounded in the philosophical paradigm of pragmatism and balances the need to develop theory and application.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University