Building economic growth in Scotland through Open Innovation
The challenge
Open Innovation practices offer an opportunity to drive a step change in Scotland’s innovative capacity and realise faster economic growth. To support the realisation of these gains Strathclyde researchers, working in partnership with industry partners and government agencies, investigate the barriers and challenges to the adoption of Open Innovation practices across the economy.
The Strathclyde contribution
Strathclyde researchers worked with organisations across the private and public sector through structured workshops and events to understand the effectiveness of innovation management practices.
The research involved interaction with hundreds of SMEs and consultation with business, organisations and public bodies to create a body of knowledge on what works in supporting open innovation. This included understanding what constitutes a good innovation process and what the activities are in that process that need to be most closely managed to support long-term organisational and competitive health.
Using these insights, the team worked across multiple organisations and used longitudinal action research to co-create, and then evaluate, new innovation processes for organisations.
The impact
The Strathclyde team’s Open Innovation model has enabled companies to accelerate their technological innovation and has led to a change in company cultures to support and embed innovation. In doing so, Open Innovation has increased the growth of individual organisations, and supported them to compete in global markets.
In one example, the team worked with a regulated utility to integrate Open Innovation approaches into its business practice – demonstrating the mechanisms needed to move between government-centred, compliance-based regulation and a performance-oriented regulatory regime. The management processes that were co-designed were adaptable to types of innovation while delivering a timely and cost-effective commercially viable products to market.
