How to Manage Open Innovation: Organizational Approach based on a French experience

Academic work done on open innovation denotes on the one hand, the use of external and internal knowledge sources to accelerate internal innovation, and on the other hand, the use of external paths to markets for internal knowledg. Open innovation is a global approach to innovation management analyzed from different angles, such as the technological, human, competition and market aspects. Although various research trends have contributed to understanding open innovation, a key element is missing from the debate: organizational framework as a lever to accompany the implementation of an open innovation model over the long term. This paper therefore aims to fill this gap in research on open innovation by addressing the following research questions: What organizational framework (structure, coordination, etc.) should be put in place to develop an open innovation process? Concretely, in this paper we set out a new approach to managing open innovation: i.e. identifying the organizational framework for integrating outside knowledge. To do this, we focus on organizational set-ups and stakeholders during the early phases of inbound open innovation. We analyse this question on the example of a French group