The Challenges of Implementing Open Innovation in a Public Research Institute

Innovation is a significant driver for economic growth in many sectors, including the agri-food industry. Besides research and development activities of private organizations, research performed at public research institutes and universities are important sources for innovation. However, developing and commercializing new concepts is becoming increasingly challenging. During the last decade, an increasing amount of research has been conducted on the topic of Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2003). Within this approach, innovation is considered to be a systemic, participatory and collaborative effort of diverse actors. Organizations open up their boundaries to source in complementary external resources and source out internal resources to be externally developed.

Although the potential benefits (e.g. cost and risk sharing, reduced time to market, improved market acceptance) of the open innovation approach has been abundantly theorized and increasingly empirically studied, many organizations still follow more closed innovation approaches such as the technology push (Rothwell, 1994) or market pull approach (ibid). One explanation for this reluctance is the often challenging transition and management of this organizational innovation from relatively closed innovation activities towards more open innovation approaches. Although research on these management challenges and open innovation in practice is growing, studies on this topic are still scarce (Giannopoulou et al., 2011). More specifically, this type of research has mainly focused on private, often high-tech organizations, and less on the public sector and low-tech organizations (Rampersad et al., 2010). With this study, we want to provide further insight into challenges experienced by researchers trying to implement open innovation practices in a public research institute researching topics and developing concepts for the relatively low-tech agricultural, fisheries and food industry.

Research on this topic offers valuable insights for researchers in such institutes as well as for managers of private organizations, especially of organizations collaborating in innovation projects with such universities and research institutions (Rampersad et al., 2010).