University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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OIM are all methods that open the traditional way of innovating. Traditionally, new
products and services were developed by the companies themselves. Nowadays, in
research and practice these ‘closed processes’ have been opened up. Stakeholders
and companies increasingly interact and act as shared innovators (von Hippel 1978,
1988). The new basic principle is called ‘open innovation’ - a process to combine
external and internal competences in the innovation process by using different
methods (e.g. innovation workshops, idea contests). Previous research showed the
effectiveness of this approach (Franke et al. 2006; Lilien et al. 2002). Realising open
innovation, companies can use a number of methods (Lüthje & Herstatt 2004; Urban
& von Hippel 1988):
• A dialogue offers a tool to engage people in a serious discussion about a special
theme (Arnold 2007). In stakeholder dialogues companies discuss particular
and/or structural problems resulting from business activities with stakeholders
(Hansen et al. 1997). The dialogue’s focus is set on reducing social and
environmental impacts and improving corporate routines and processes towards
more sustainability or CR.
• Innovation workshops are interactive meetings providing a practical framework
and structured approach for generating and discussing sustainable solutions that
deliver breakthrough results (Arnold 2007).
• A web community is a virtual group that takes the form of a social network, an
internet forum, a group of blogs, or other kinds of web applications to interact,
share knowledge or develop issues (Franke & Shah 2003; Piller et al. 2005).
• An idea contest is a forum in which persons with a special interest in the topic
can generate and hand in creative ideas or concepts with regard to a certain topic
defined by an organiser, e.g. the company (Piller and Walcher 2006; Walcher
2007).
• Toolkits are an integrated set of software routines or utilities that are used to
develop and maintain applications and databases. They provide companies a
portfolio of information, services, news, forms, sample contracts, checklists and
software tools. (Franke & Piller 2004; von Hippel 2001). A toolkit can support
users to integrating their own needs independently into new product concepts
(Reichwald et al. 2007: 145).
Open innovation processes can be classified into different levels of interaction and
integration (see figure 1). At present, there is no generally accepted framework of
stakeholder integration. With respect to user integration Pobisch et al. (2007)
developed a category regarding user involvement and interaction in innovation
processes. In figure 1 the level of integration reflects the degree of how deeply and
comprehensively a user or customer is involved in the innovation process. The level
of interaction represents the degree of working together with other users or
companies representatives and the possibility of having influence on contents and
process development. For example, using a toolkit the users or stakeholders are
highly involved in the process, but cannot influence the contents or the routines so
much in contrast to workshops and communities. However, the level of integration of
idea contests is lower compared with toolkits or workshops, because the stakeholders