Open Innovation challenges in large enterprises: a high hurdle?

The attention on open innovation in large enterprises rapidly grew among scholars and practitioners in the last decade. Nonetheless, recently academic research drew attention on the current limited understanding of the challenges faced by companies that undertake open innovation strategies. We address this knowledge gap by conducting a focused review of empirical literature, whose result is a taxonomy of challenges to open innovation strategies built on two dimension: internal and external to firms’ organizational boundaries. Thus, we validated the taxonomy through three explorative case studies on European large companies pursuing open innovation in mature industries. To analyse the challenges faced by the companies we use an original interpretation framework of the process of open innovation strategies implementation including three phases: negotiation, implementation, and exploitation of the results. Our results show that large companies face both internal and external challenges throughout the three-phase process. Within the organizational boundaries, main challenges concern the need of a gradual and incremental implementation of open strategies, studded with failures. With the endorsement of the top management levels, companies need to learn by mistakes in order to pursue an accountable and coordinated open innovation strategy. Outside the organizational boundaries, the main downsides of openness relate to the right application of a ‘Selective open innovation’ concerning partners, projects, technologies, and assets to be balanced with protection strategies (i.e. the protection of firms’ resources in order to avoid loss of new beneficial business opportunities). Our study provides useful suggestions for both scholars and practitioners, shedding light on the challenges that may hide behind the benefits of opening up the innovation process.