Open Innovation in Industry 4.0—A Risk Assessment Framework for SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a fundamental role in the economy of a society. About 90% of the world's economy is made up of small and medium enterprises, which employ about 60–70% of the workforce and generate 55% of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Despite the important role they play in society, they have been slow to adapt to new technologies and innovation strategies, and in some cases these strategies are even non-existent. This fact has had a negative impact on both economic growth and the performance of these companies. Currently, digitalization and open innovation are two essential strategies for the growth of companies. On the one hand, digitalization aims to increase productivity and efficiency, and on the other hand, open innovation aims to meet the needs of customers more efficiently. Despite the many benefits, these strategies have not been adopted at the desired pace and doubts remain about how they should be applied in SMEs. In this sense, this work aims to investigate the impact of digitalization and open innovation on SMEs’ objectives and develop a model to evaluate the impact of their implementation and support decision making. To this end, a literature review was conducted to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) related to SMEs, digitalization and open innovation. A correlation was then made between SWOTs to identify risk factors that undermine the fundamental objectives of SMEs. This correlation was modeled to define a risk assessment and risk management framework that promotes the implementation of digitization and open innovation in SMEs.