The influence of top management, innovation-culture and organization on open innovation, its impact on innovation success and cross sectoral learnings from benchmarking of an Austrian Biotech firm against a group of German companies

Abstract

In todays industrial environment open innovation undoubtedly is a key factor which contributes to innovation success. Although the concept of open innovation (OI) was published fifteen years ago, many companies still struggle with the implementation of this promising paradigm of innovation. The goal of this thesis was to investigate possible influencing factors of the innovation system on OI and to evaluate if the implementation of OI leads to innovation success. The analyses were performed with data from more than 30 German companies (peer group) which were provided from a larger survey at University of Economics, Vienna (WU). Moreover, an Austrian Biotech firm was benchmarked against the peer group, in order to assess its innovation management system and to deviate learnings from this cross sectoral comparison. In a first step, the peer group was characterized regarding implementation of shortand long term OI activities. It turned out that only 28% of these companies belonging to different industrial sectors fully adopted OI. Statistical analysis did not show any significant influence of innovation supportive management and innovation culture on the engagement in OI. This result, which is in contradiction to many literature studies, points to the fact, that the number of companies involved in this study might have been too small. Furthermore, the companies were quite heterogeneous concerning their size (between 45 and 11,300 employees) and their affiliation to different industrial sectors. However, it could be observed that an implemented formal innovation management system positively correlates with adopting OI methods and activities. Although the engagement in OI was rather low in the peer group, a statistically significant effect of implementation of OI on innovation success based on revenues with newly developed or improved products could be seen. No significant impact was seen on engagement with OI and revenue growth during the past four years. More than 100 questions belonging to 16 categories were analyzed during the benchmarking. The Biotech firm achieved a better ranking in eight categories and the peer group in average performed better in five categories. For three categories no differences could be observed. Furthermore 22 questions regarding tools, methods or behaviors were identified where the peer group in average achieved a higher ranking. Out of these 22, six questions were ranked very important for a follow up in order to improve the innovation management system of the Biotech firm. Possible improvements were suggested for those areas, for which the ranking was below the peer group.