• Understand the principles of Open Innovation and related risks and opportunities. The student must also understand where innovation-related knowledge is located and have learned about distributed sources of innovation (inside and outside organizational boundaries), their characteristics and good-practice examples.
• Obtained knowledge about key approaches and related methods for search across distributed sources of innovation and their advantages, disadvantages, and fields of application.
• Understand prerequisites, constraints, and opportunities of local vs. distant search in generating innovations. The student must also understand the importance of users as a source of innovation and how the search processes for users’ innovation inputs can be designed.
• Have knowledge about specific approaches, tools, and real-life applications related to the use of Open Innovation in developing innovation.
• Cognitive and subject specific skills in accessing and leveraging innovation-related knowledge located in distributed sources as well as skills in assessing their organizations’ search competences for integrating knowledge from distributed innovation sources.
• Skills in orderly, analytical thinking, analyzing cases, and effectively reporting results in a written and oral form.
• Skills for systematically matching innovation-related problems with appropriate sources of innovation and solution search strategies

This course provides the foundation for managing open innovation processes in firms. Comparing closed to open innovation approaches, the course focuses on outside-in open innovation processes, i.e. sourcing external knowledge from and collaborating with users, universities, suppliers, competitors, and the like for generating innovation. Moreover, the course discusses the interplay between innovation, exploration, exploitation, and search, and the growing importance of efficient search approaches across widely distributed sources of innovation. More specifically, we will discuss the concepts of local vs. distant search and related search methods for accessing and leveraging innovation-relevant knowledge.

The Managing Open Innovation course will particularly highlight the role of users and user communities as a source of innovation. Finally, the course will introduce participants to concrete search applications such as crowdsourcing for generating inputs to organizations’ innovation processes.