How to Manage Outside Innovation Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Businesses are conscious of the possible benefits of "open innovation" - relying on outsiders both as a source of ideas and as a means to commercialize them - but they have fought with accurately how to open up their product development to the outside world. For starters, many executives have modest notion how exactly to move and manage initiation that is exterior. Particularly, should external innovators be corresponding as a competitive market or as a shared community? Collaborative communities are possibly best known through Linux and other open source software efforts that are regulated loosely by social standards and "gentle" rules to encourage open access to information, transparency, joint development and the sharing of intellectual property. Competitive markets are strikingly different. As an alternative to collaborating, external innovators in a marketplace will develop multiple competing assortments of complementary goods, components or services.

Customers then pick from among the offerings that are different, and this often leads to cutthroat competition - and little collaboration - among the innovators. Businesses must believe carefully which strategy makes the maximum sense for their aims because the dynamics of communities and markets are so drastically different. An in-depth investigation of those problems reveals that the choice between communities and marketplaces is not as obvious - nor as clear-cut - as it might first seem.

PUBLICATION DATE: July 01, 2009 PRODUCT #: SMR323-PDF-ENG

This is just an excerpt. This case is about TECHNOLOGY & OPERATIONS