The shift from closed to open innovation in automotive industry

Abstract

Adoption of open innovation in each industry is a long process and implementation of such practices is hardly dependent from industry specifics. In industry like automotive, where number of standards are applying restrictions and at the same time imply strong push for improvements, it's important to measure the level of implemented collaborative practices in various processes of idea gathering, concept build, engineering, design and manufacturing. Thus proposed methodology is trying to capture the established practices, and then the process aspect, then involvement in standardization and community based partnerships, and finally community affiliation in collaborative innovation. Analysis on achieved results is to provide basic interpretation of numbers and how to read trends in process related dependencies. As the scope of the research was limited to automotive electronics suppliers, extending it to other domains and industries shall be easy, and can be used as comparison basis. However, as not all organizations operating in the industry had been interviewed and as the list of people was focused to ones having expertise (more than 10 years) and having at least some management experiences, additional limitation on completeness and possibilities is to miss important aspects or change of some values than currently presented. Finally the results and methodology can be used in individual organizations to measure their affiliated organizations and to understand their motivation for implementing open innovations with them.