Design and manufacturing innovations are important competitive attributes in the premium marine sector. The adoption of an open innovation process has the potential to deliver behavioural and technological transformation. This pilot study illustrates an open innovation approach to explore the benefits of digital innovation when designing new products within the premium marine industry. The research demonstrates how an open innovation approach will flourish when focused on co-creation in collaboration with a network of cross-functional partners.

Contemporary digital in ear hearing aids are of significant importance for social participation of users with hearing impairments. Through the advancement of technology, extreme miniaturisation of these devices has been achieved. However, by no means all people who could benefit from a hearing aid actually use one. Cormack and Fortnum state that the majority (80%) of adults aged 55–74 years who would benefit from a hearing aid, do not use them. This is in line with Arnold and Makenzie who estimate a gap of a factor of 5 between people who would benefit from the use of a hearing aid than actually do acquire and use one. Even according to the statistics from the Federal Guild of Hearing Aid Acousticians in Germany, only 3.7 million use a hearing aid out of 5.4 million who have an induced hearing loss. This article explores the design space of fashionable analogue contemporary hearing aids.

Creativity is an essential factor in the development of innovative products. 4 Step Creation (4SC) is a method for systematic ideation and can be used to enhance the new product development process. It aims to promote creativity in interdisciplinary teams and provides a framework for collaboration so that original ideas can emerge, laying the foundation for innovation. At the same time, the method can be used for continuous improvement of existing systems. In this contribution 4SC is used in a design method experiment following the Design Method Validation System (DMVS) to validate design methods in product development. The experiment was carried out at PAD2022 International Summer School on the example of a vacuum cleaner robot. Findings show, that the developed method promotes transparency, traceability of ideas and thus communication in the team. It also facilitates the integration of different stakeholders in the ideation phase. The experiment also shows that the DMVS is well suited for planning, conducting, and evaluating design experiments.

We investigate how four internet of things (IoT) companies perceive the large quantity of community-generated content as a significant source of innovation. We study the extent to which these companies are willing to align their internal organisation to cope with the external community dynamics and define beneficial modes of collaboration for all involved stakeholders. Four IoT companies adopting open-source hardware principles were selected as case studies. The data collection was based on 18 interviews highlighting both the perspectives of the companies and their corresponding communities and the opinions of key experts in the domain. In our findings, we illustrate the different manifestations of open business models and the companies’ concrete approaches to working with external stakeholders. It is shown that companies with a business history more clearly claim sovereignty over their strategic decisions in a community-infused model, while, on the other hand, the community-based companies pursue a community-led strategy.

Open innovation (OI) has been appointed as a key factor to promote innovative performance, but some research gaps remain especially when it comes to SMEs in developing countries. This article deals with (1) the effect of formalization of innovation strategy on OI activities in SMEs, (2) the impact of OI activities on SMEs’ innovative performance, and (3) the moderating role played by control on the relationship between inbound and outbound activities and the innovative performance. OI encompasses a range of innovative methods and procedures in firms to stimulate internal innovation and widen the external use of innovation (inbound and outbound). In this work, an empirical study is carried out on 543 Ecuadorian SMEs. The results show that the formalization of the innovation strategy promotes OI activities, both inbound and outbound. While outbound activities carried out by SMEs enhance innovative performance, this positive effect is only identified for inbound open innovation activities when control exists and increases, acting this variable as a moderating factor. These results have important implications both for the management of companies and the development of public policies aimed at promoting OI in SMEs in developing countries. This research contributes to the literature as it deals with a developing country context and considers a wide range of OI activities.

With the exponential growth in investment attention to brain health—solutions spanning brain wellness to mental health to neurological disorders—tech giants, payers, and biotechnology companies have been making forays into this field to identify technology solutions and pharmaceutical amplifiers. So far, their investments have had mixed results. The concept of open innovation (OI) was first coined by Henry Chesbrough to describe the paradigm by which enterprises allow free flow of ideas, products, and services from the outside to the inside and vice versa in order to remain competitive, particularly in rapidly evolving fields where there is abundant, relevant knowledge outside the traditional walls of the enterprise. In this article, we advocate for further exploration and advancement of OI in brain health.

Successful research and development requires interdisciplinary collaboration, often across organisational boundaries and for extended timeframes, such as in innovation networks or ecosystems. Open Organisation (OO) research can support collaboration and knowledge exchange in such situations. It builds on established concepts of Open Innovation through enhancing the exchange of knowledge by the exchange of humans. This paper contributes to OO research by presenting an OO lifecycle framework, which analyses evolving organisational and collaboration characteristics and resulting management needs.

Since project managers still face problems in managing interorganizational R&D projects, it is a promising approach to manage these projects project-culturally-aware. However, an important prerequisite for a project-culture-aware management is that the involved individual organizations pursue a collaborative strategy. Therefore, our article provides a conceptual approach including a new tool, the Collaborative Iron Triangle, which supports both project sponsors and managers in different phases of the collaboration process to pursue a collaborative strategy in interorganizational R&D projects.

Open innovation programmes related to data and artificial intelligence have interested European policy-makers as a means of supporting startups and small and medium-sized enterprises to succeed in the digital economy. We discuss the objectives behind the typical service offerings of such programmes and propose a case for exploring how they align with the motivations of individual companies who are targeted by these initiatives. Using a qualitative analysis of 50 startup applications from the Data Market Services Accelerator programme, we find that applicants wrote most frequently about fundraising, acceleration and data skills. A smaller number of startups expressed interest in services related to standardization or legal guidance on General Data Protection Regulation and intellectual property rights, which are some of the ongoing priority areas for the European Commission. We discuss how the value propositions of these less desired offerings can be amplified by appealing the existing business motivations of data-driven startups.

This article proposes the solver-aware system architecting framework for leveraging the combined strengths of experts, crowds and specialists to design innovative complex systems. Although system architecting theory has extensively explored the relationship between alternative architecture forms and performance under operational uncertainty, limited attention has been paid to differences due to who generates the solutions. The recent rise in alternative solving methods, from gig workers to crowdsourcing to novel contracting structures emphasises the need for deeper consideration of the link between architecting and solver-capability in the context of complex system innovation. We investigate these interactions through an abstract problem-solving simulation, representing alternative decompositions and solver archetypes of varying expertise, engaged through contractual structures that match their solving type. We find that the preferred architecture changes depending on which combinations of solvers are assigned. In addition, the best hybrid decomposition-solver combinations simultaneously improve performance and cost, while reducing expert reliance. To operationalise this new solver-aware framework, we induce two heuristics for decomposition-assignment pairs and demonstrate the scale of their value in the simulation. We also apply these two heuristics to reason about an example of a robotic manipulator design problem to demonstrate their relevance in realistic complex system settings.

Recent years have seen the rise of citizens as contributors to hardware product creation. This trend has increased attention to open source hardware (OSH): a phenomenon that extends the intellectual property management and development practices in open source software (OSS) into the design of physical objects. OSH projects are different from OSS projects due to product type, and distinct from traditional closed source new product development (NPD) ones due to their openness. These differences challenge the degree of applicability of existing project success definitions in the OSH context. To investigate project success in OSH, we conducted a qualitative survey with practitioners. We report characteristics of successful OSH projects through three identified themes: (a) value creation – the big-picture impact, (b) quality of output – the quality of the hardware and accompanying documentation and (c) project process – activities that contribute to success. We contextualise by comparing OSH with selected literature on the success of OSS and NPD project management. While our study confirms a similarity between OSS and OSH in defining project success, it also highlights themes that are uniquely important to the latter. These findings are helpful for OSH development practice and could provide lessons for OSS development and closed source NPD.

Using the meta-analysis technique, this research comprehensively reviews the existing open innovation (OI) literature, systematically aggregates empirical findings on the impact of OI on performance to identify key moderators and statistically tests the significance of these moderators in influencing the OI–performance relationship. Based on a comprehensive dataset of 2,377,123 firms and sub-firm units in 171 studies published from 2003 to 2018, this research demonstrates that the OI–performance relationship is significantly moderated by three key factors: performance measure, OI approach, and level of analysis. This research helps explain the conflicting findings regarding the OI–performance relationship in the existing literature, and contributes to the understanding of the effectiveness of OI practice.

Against a pandemic, speed is crucial, and open innovation (OI) helps to empower the human capital distributed around the world to tackle the disease and to launch rapid testing of possible solutions. This article aims at showing an OI program - called “TEN” Transform Emergency Now! - ideated and developed by the University of Bologna to identify, design, and implement useful solutions to tackle specific issues coming from pandemics. With an action research-innovation management approach, the University developed two iterations to identify what elements to take into account to define a program that works for this effort. In TEN, Frugal Innovation (FI) principles were injected in a 10 days hackathon to favor the use of locally available resources and raw materials and exclude non-essential features. Results show that Frugality can become an element of OI by (1) pushing the team towards basic functionality and minimal features of the solutions and low-cost implementation. (2) Designing, in parallel with the solution, an ‘implementation network’, with a specific process design and program's organizational perspective. We believe that TEN has the potential to be an OI approach designed for emergencies.

Open-source hardware (OSH) development is a new design paradigm from a commercial perspective. Openly sharing designs of technical products is a step towards democratising access to new technologies for the benefit of individuals and communities in society. At the core of the open-source hardware definition lies the freedom for anyone to replicate the hardware based on the design. Thus, enabling this freedom is a step towards developing a successful OSH. Previous research supposes that a bill of materials and assembly instructions are enough for this. In this study, we question this assumption and investigate what other factors may influence replicability of an OSH. Using data from a survey and interviews with OSH practitioners, we identify and describe these factors, which relate to the documentation, the design and the context of the person replicating the hardware. Using these insights, we present a diagram of the replication process along with questions the person replicating the hardware would ask to check whether an OSH is replicable. Finally, we synthesise this information into practical advice for OSH projects to increase the replicability of the designs they produce, and thus the likelihood of their project's success.