Innovation Strategy, from R&D to Open Innovation;
Review and Recommendations
Manouchehr Ansari*
Associate Prof., Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran
Lecturer, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Iran
PP: 527-546
Abstract
This paper aims to review the concept of innovation strategy and elaborate the relationship between corporate strategy, innovation and innovation-strategy. In this regard, first, the literature on innovation strategy and open innovation is explained and some useful tools are presented. Each part of the review is concluded by an assertion. Finally, a conclusion constructed for the (seven) extracted assertions and a contingency process model of innovation strategy selection is presented to elaborate the conclusion. In brief, strategic perspectives to innovation are mostly assumed to have more introverted orientation, emphasizing the role of internal resources and distinctive competencies as the main drivers for long-term competitiveness. In recent years, the context for technological innovation has been changed and confronted by concepts like outsourcing, vertical disintegration and the use of open standards that led scholars to consider open innovation strategies as a new phenomenon of strategic management. Moreover, innovation is advised to go beyond new product development and become integrated with companies’ business models in terms of content, structure and governance. In general this reviews shows that, the need for business model renewal, the need for technological competency, breadth and depth of the knowledge, cost of R&D, privacy and the extent of control over R&D process could be considered as the main determinants of innovation strategy.
Keywords: Business Models, Innovation Strategy, Open Innovation, Research and Development.
Introduction
Innovation for competitive advantage
Innovation and innovation-strategy are common topics in management and organization literature. However, the current state of knowledge on these issues is characterized by many fragmented definitions and conceptualizations where it is not easy to form an overall view on these concepts and trace their evolution. To define innovation, we can present Damanpour’s (1991) understanding of innovation: An innovation can be a new product or service, a new production process technology, a new structure or administrative system, or a new plan or program pertaining to organizational members. Over recent years, these issues have been developed more and have become a critical part of the companies’ strategy and policies. As stated by Keupp, Palmié, & Gassmann (2012), “over the last 20 years, the global economic regime has become increasingly liberalized, while a focus on innovation has replaced traditional cost oriented business models in many firms. Since the 1990s, these developments have triggered an exponential growth in the innovation literature, and many novel topics have emerged, such as international innovation, headquarter–subsidiary relationships, knowledge management, and ‘open innovation’ business models”. Moreover, theoretical frameworks such as the knowledge-based view (KBV) and resource-based view (RBV) of the firm or the dynamic capabilities perspective that have emerged since then have offered many new ways of theorizing about innovation (Keupp et al., 2012; Kovàcs, Van Looy, & Cassiman, 2015). New concepts including lateral marketing, lateral thinking and the blue ocean strategy have emerged that create conditions for implementation of innovation and development of innovative strategies at organizations (Hittmár, 2014). Emergence and development of the abovementioned concepts has led to a fragmentation in the innovation literature, so that its present state is characterized by many inconsistencies (Keupp et al., 2012).
However, this fragmentation and variety in the literature shows the importance of innovation and its diverse links with organization strategy and strategic management. Necessity of innovation has usually been justified by the concept of competitive advantage, where innovation is considered a factor for survival in dynamic local and global markets where the degree of competition is constantly increasing. In other words, in order to attain a sustainable competitive advantage in dynamic markets, firms must reinforce their innovative capabilities. Innovation is a main strategic tool; thus, adapting systematic innovation could help companies to gain a superior performance and a competitive advantage in such complex and dynamic environments. Moreover, “innovation is a basic precondition for long-term success, growth, performance continuance, and firms’ survival. For these reasons, the industries and firms accept that innovation is considered as a strategic necessity, not a strategic choice” (Malek Akhlagh, Moradi, Mehdizade, & Dorostkar Ahmadi, 2013).
A clear example of the abovementioned approach is German Mittelstands whose critical success factor is continuous innovation; “German economy’s solid performance is attributable in part to the exporting prowess of so-called mittelstand, which are the backbone of Germany’s manufacturing sector. A typical Mittelstand firm is a small to medium, family owned enterprise, often located in a small town or city” (Griffin and Pustay, 2013). German labor costs are high, but the labor force is well educated and quality oriented. The Mittelstand account for about 60 percent of Germany’s private sector workforce and 38 percent of corporate sales. The Mittelstands do face many challenges, of course. Labor costs in Germany are much higher that China or Brazil, so they must continually innovate and improve their product lines. To do so, they rely on skilled craftspeople trained by Germany’s educational system. However, Germany is facing demographical challenges for doing so (ibid). In other words, it could be said that German industry and economy needs continuous innovation and have a so-called innovation pull. Germany has tried to confront this challenge by developing immigration laws, vocational trainings abroad and attracting foreign skilled workers and non-skilled refugees (ibid).
Thus, by increasing the competition in the world of business, innovation has become the engine of competition and determiner of competitive power of organizations and industries. Therefore, strategic management of innovation has turned into an important component of a firm’s strategy and a major contributing factor to the firm’s competitive advantage (Kuepp et al., 2012).
On the other hand, as stated by Gassmann, Frankenberger, & Csik (2016), for a long time a typical targetfor innovation in most cases has been the product or new service which has been delegated to the R&D department. Sometimes processes have also been the subject of innovation projects. However, in the changing environment of business and competition, companies have been forced to revise their innovation strategy to not only innovate continuously in the area of technologies and products but also adapt innovative and innovation-friendly business models (Gassmann et al., 2016); “But is it enough to innovate in product or services and have an strong R&D sector? There are many companies with excellent technological products. Especially in Europe, many firms continuously introduce innovations to their products and processes. Yet, many companies will not survive in the long term despite their product innovation capabilities. Why do prominent firms, which have been known for their innovative products for years, suddenly lose their competitive advantage? Strong players such as AEG, Grundig, Nixdorf Computers, Triumph, Brockhaus, Agfa, Kodak, Quelle, Otto, and Schlecker are vanishing from the business landscape one after the other. They have lost their capabilities of marketing their former innovative strengths. The answer is simple and painful: these companies have failed to adapt their business models to the changing environment” (Gassmann et al., 2016). Thus, the desire for innovation in products, services or business models is an important part of organizations and companies, and has been perceived to have a considerable effect on companies performance (Kalkan, Özlem, & Mutlu, 2014; Karabulut Tuğba, 2015; Prajogo, 2015; Ezzi & Jarbouri, 2016).
To sustain their innovation competency, pioneer companies have implemented different strategies depending on their size, business context and culture. While German Mittelstands have established a culture of continuous innovation in the form of a global born-SMEs, other large companies may explicitly plan for innovation in their R&D units. Anyway, maintaining an innovation strategy is the basis of success in innovation and performance improvement (Malek Akhlagh et al., 2013).
In the future, not only there will be competition between products and services but also between business models; thus, the type (e.g. classic, disruptive or…), target (e.g. product, technology, business model) and sources of innovation (e.g. market, customers, or…) may vary depending on the internal condition and external environment of the companies. All of these choices will shape the elements of an innovation strategy to be proposed to an innovative organization. We are going to present some tools and explanations regarding these choices.
Iran as a country with a significant population of young graduates has been faced with a challenge to create sustainable employment especially in knowledge-based industries. When Iran reached an agreement with world powers entitled JCPOA[1] in 2015, many foreign companies flocked into Iran; just at the first 9 months of 2015, more than 145 delegations from 48 countries with about 3800 members arrived in Iran (Badri, 2015). A main theme of cooperation expressed by Europeans (e.g. Germans) and Asians (e.g. Chinese) was scientific cooperation with Iran. On the other hand, many Iranian authorities state that Iranian companies with a large volume of potential high-quality knowledge-based workers can cooperate with western companies (e.g. Germans) and satisfy their need for skilled workers.
However, there is a big dilemma for attaining such partnerships and gaining the expected results; R&D Abilities, R&D dimensions and company scales of the two sides are not comparable. Thus, these dialogues may lead to brain drain from Iran to Germany and no partnership may ever take place in practice. Not only innovation systems but also R&D management in Iran has faced many barriers and obstacles (Ale-Ebrahim, Ghazizadeh, Golnam, & Tahbaz Tavakoli, 2007). Due to structural shortcomings, a large number of organizations and industries have not yet been able to position themselves in the market. Although there are about 1141 R&D units throughout Iran and they are geographically decentralized, most of them are inactive or have no organic contact with industries (ibid) to manufacture or commercialize their products. Under such circumstances,, Iranian companies and institutions willing to cooperate with foreign partners must know their organization, working technology, business model and contextual factors involved in order to decide whether they are prepared to enter R&D collaboration and what type of innovation strategy may be better for them.
With regard to the abovementioned discussions, we are going to review the literature on innovation strategy to provide some tools and a possible framework for business practitioners to select their innovation strategy. Thus, our research questions could be shaped as follows;
To find answers to and explanations about the abovementioned inquiries, in the rest of this paper, we review the literature and conclude partially through a series of assertions. Finally, we construct our conclusion for extracted assertions.
Strategy, innovation and Innovation Strategy
Innovative strategy is the basic tool that determines the innovation direction of the business. Innovation strategy is based on business strategy and strategic goals (Hittmár et al., 2013.( As mentioned before, “Strategic management scholars have long emphasized the importance of innovation for a firm’s competitive advantage and performance. However, the current state of knowledge about the strategic management of innovation is characterized by conflicting theoretical predictions, persisting knowledge gaps and theoretical inconsistencies” (Keupp et al., 2012). Therefore, the strategic management of innovation represents an important component of a firm’s strategy and a major contributing factor to a firm’s competitive advantage. Consequently, the strategic management of innovation has become a central topic in the area of strategic management (ibid).
It seems that innovation has been primarily defined under differentiation business strategy; “According to Porter (1985), the winning business strategies are those that enable the company to gain a competitive advantage in the market. A company has competitive advantage whenever it has an edge over rivals in securing customers and defending against competitive forces. In particular, the firm implements three different strategies to gain a competitive advantage: diversification, cost leadership and innovation (differentiation). The last business strategy (innovation) is aimed at developing new products and services different from those offered by competitors. A successful differentiation strategy anticipates the customers’ needs and behavior to incorporate one or several new features into a product or to develop a completely new product. The approaches of differentiating a product take many forms: superior technologies incorporated into the product, high-quality product, superior product’s performances” (Crema, Verbano & Venturini, 2014).
Table1 presents a classification of innovation strategies. Although it seems incomplete as concepts like open innovation and open business models are not mentioned in this classification, it shows how companies may adapt different approaches to their innovation strategy; from following the market, being market leaders and international replication to prospection, aggressiveness and proactiveness. Table1 shows that although innovation can be primarily considered under differentiation strategy, it can also be followed through cost leadership and market following business strategies. This table also certifies our previous claim about fragmentation and evolution in the literature of innovation strategy.
Table1- Classification of innovation strategies; reprinted based on Karabulut Tuğba (2015)
Classification | Author(s) |
First to market, follow the market leader, applied engineering, develop me-too products | Ansoff and Stewart (1967) |
Prospector, defender, analyzer, reactor | Miles and Snow (1978) |
Cost leadership (innovation follower) product differentiation based on innovations
(innovation leadership) |
Porter (1980) |
Technological innovator, rapid copier, cost reducer | Lambkin (1988); Hultink and Robben (1995( |
Aggressiveness, analysis, defensiveness, futurity, proactiveness, riskiness | Venkatraman (1989); Morgan and Strong (1998), Akman and Yilmaz (2008) |
Prospector, defender, analyzer, reactor, balancer | Wright., 1990; Parnel. (2000( |
Product innovator, process innovator, late enterer, non-innovator, original initiators | Manu (1992); Manu and Sriram (1996) |
Proactive innovation strategy, reactive innovation strategy | Gilbert (1994) |
Technological innovator, rapid copier, cost reducer | Hultink and Robben (1995) |
Customer oriented, process oriented, initiator oriented, learning oriented | Lynn and Mazzuca (1998) |
First to market, rapid follower, niche player, response to changing market needs and wants | Roger (2001) |
Technological leadership or followership, market position, timing of market entry | Burgelman, Maidique, and Wheelwright (2001) |
Innovators, imitators | Massini, Lewin, and Greve (2005) |
Leading innovator, follower, imitator, defender, technology importer | Guan, Yam, Tang, and Lau (2009) |
Domestic and international innovator, domestic and international replicator | Kylaheiko, Jantunen, Puumalainen, Saarenketo and Tuppura (2011) |
Assertion 1
Innovation is considered a driver for achieving competitive advantage and higher performance for prospective companies at dynamic environments. Primarily considered under (but not limited to) differentiation strategy, innovation strategy considers internal and external conditions of companies and determines the most appropriate type, target and sources of innovation for the organization to gain competitive advantage and have a better performance than its competitors.
From internal resources (RBV) to external outsourcing
As stated by Crema et al. (2014), “the literature on strategic management has generated several theories over the past 30 years. The industrial organization strategy model, developed also by Porter (1985), was completed in the 1990s with the theory of resource-based view, which subsequently evolved into the competence-based competition and in the dynamic capabilities view. These new strategic perspectives assumed a more introverted orientation than the case in the Porterian perspective was, emphasizing the role of internal resources and distinctive competencies as the main driver for long-term competitiveness.” One of these resources is innovation, which could be considered as an internal competency that shall be reinforced inside the organization through R&D units.
As mentioned by Hervas-Oliver, Sempere-Ripoll, & Boronat-Moll (2014), “The resource-based view (RBV) perspective stresses that a firm’s unique internal resources at least partially determine a firm’s performance. RBV establishes a correspondence between a firm’s unique set of resources and capabilities and its level of performance. Through this internal perspective, innovation stems from better organizational routines and other core functions”. Within the RBV, a broad range of resources were identified, including all types of assets, organizational processes, knowledge capabilities and other potential sources of advantage including innovation.
However, by emergence of new business models (e.g. crow-sourcing) and advances in technologies (e.g. open source technologies), RBV and introverted approach to innovation changed over the years. “In recent years, the changing context for technological innovation characterized by increasing outsourcing, vertical disintegration and the use of open standards have led scholars to study a new phenomenon of strategic management: the “open innovation”. In recent years, numerous studies have focused attention on the “open innovation phenomenon”. The open innovation paradigm has become more widespread and attracted the attention of an ever-growing number of managers and scholars because many firms, especially small- and medium-sized ones (which often do not have an adequate R&D staff), have started turning to external sources of innovation (Chesbrough, 2003)” (Crema et al., 2014).
Assertion 2
In recent years, the changing context of technological and business innovation has prompted companies and scholars to consider a new paradigm of extroverted innovation entitled open innovation -beside introverted RBV theories- to elaborate the relation between innovation, organization and strategy.
In general, if we are looking to propose an agenda for collaborations between Iranian innovation bodies and interested foreign partners, new approaches beyond introverted theories like RBV, and internal R&D systems, should be incorporated in our review. Thus in the rest of this article, we will continue the review with an extroverted view of innovation strategy, open innovation and open business models and try to find a coherent relationship between them.
From Open Innovation to open business models
We reviewed introverted strategic approaches to innovation and innovation strategy from Porterian view to resource based view that consider innovation as one of the unique internal resources available for the firms to improve their performance and competitive advantage. By emergence of new concepts including outsourcing, vertical disintegration and the use of open standards in recent years, a new phenomenon of strategic management, that is, the “open innovation has been introduced by scholars. Open innovation could be defined as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and to expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively” (Chesbrough, 2006, p.1).
“An influential and expanding stream of literature in innovation research argues that in the face of increasing global competition, rising R&D costs and shortening product life cycles, companies can no longer rely on the traditional model of closed innovation” (Saebi & Foss, 2014). Since 2003 when the concept of open innovation was theorized and promoted by Henry Chesbrough, hundreds of papers have been published on different aspects of this issue. A bibliometric analysis on one decades of research on open innovation by Kovàcs et al. (2015) has reported four primary themes inthe research on open innovation;
With regard to the abovementioned theme analysis, the factor that distinguishes open innovation literature from the broader literature on R&D collaboration is the enhanced focus on the user-centric perspective at open innovation.
Assertion 3
Instead of internalizing all innovation and R&D initiatives, companies may focus on some limited idiosyncratic attribute(s) and then cooperate with each other to complement and exchange their R&D competencies. This cooperation can provide a more specialized and user-centric mode of strategic partnership, external sourcing and strategic management of innovation and technology.
By the way, open innovation cannot be proposed for any company and organization because it has its own pros and cons. Decision makers should make a trade-off between these pros and cons and select an appropriate level of openness in their innovation strategy: “Firms face two interrelated and strategic decisions when they engage in innovation such as what balance to strike between the exploration of new opportunities (March, 1991) and the exploitation of existing capabilities and how to best allocate scarce R&D resources between internal activities and external alliances (Chesbrough, 2003). Open innovation emphasizes an organization’s efforts of engaging and collaborating with external sources and its partners in its innovation process. The decision whether to adopt an innovative path internal to the company or whether to rely on collaboration with external partners basically depends on the availability of in-house capabilities and skills and the desire to individually control the development and use of innovation. Extensive openness can negatively affect companies’ long-term innovation success because it could lead to losses of control and core competencies. On the other side, a closed innovation approach cannot answer to the growing demand for a shorter life cycle of innovation and a reduced time to market. In consideration of the linkage between strategy and innovation, literature has analyzed the influence of strategy on the adoption of different collaborative innovation formats” (Crema et al., 2014).
Assertion 4
In general, as stated by Pisano (2015), it could be said that to choose open innovation as an approach to innovation strategy, companies should do a cost-benefit analysis. On the other hand, to be externally or internally innovative, you should do a trade-off based on factors like privacy, extent of control on R&D process and cost competency.
There are some tools and frameworks to facilitate the trade-off which can be applied for selection of the right open innovation strategy or right level of openness for innovation strategy; Saebi and Foss (2014) differentiated inbound open innovation strategies based on the breadth and depth of external knowledge search. Figure 1 depicts the resulting 2 × 2 matrix of inbound open innovation strategies. “Search openness” or “breadth of knowledge search” captures the diversity of a company’s external sources of knowledge, often defined as the number of different types of external parties involved in the innovation processes of the company. Crowd-sourcing is an example of an open innovation practice that relies on a diversity of external sources to provide knowledge input to its innovation activities. “Depth” of knowledge search refers to the intensity with which companies draw knowledge from external sources and is often measured as the number of external partners”.
Figure1-Typology of inbound open innovation strategies, depicted based on Saebi & Foss (2014)
Saebi & Foss (2014) have described each of the abovementioned open innovation strategies as follows;
Assertion 5
We can differentiate and select inbound open innovation strategies with regard to the breadth and depth of external knowledge search into four types of collaborative, network-based, market-based and crowd-based innovation strategies.
As mentioned by Saebi and Foss (2014), “An influential and expanding stream of literature in innovation research argues that in the face of increasing global competition, rising R&D costs and shortening product life cycles, companies can no longer rely on the traditional model of closed innovation. Thus, increasingly they depend on accessing external sources of knowledge and collaborating with individuals, companies and other organizations that possess relevant knowledge that may be deployed in the context of the company’s innovation process”.
This openness in innovation has been recently deployed in the context of business models and elaborated into the concept of open business models. By increasing adoption of open innovation practices, “open business models” have emerged as a new design theme (cf. Chesbrough, 2006). In fact, Chesbrough (2006) has tried to merge the concepts of business model and (open) innovation through a new concept; open business models. Open business models could be defined as business models using external sources for innovation or external vehicles for commercialization of non-core innovations. In other words, “an open business model includes external resources in at least one of its value creation and capturing activities” (Weiblen, 2014). “In an open business model, openness in terms of collaboration is so central to the firm’s current logic of value creation and capturing that it could not be explained without it” (ibid).
The spectrum of innovation that starts by new product development (NPD) and continues with open extroverted innovation could be developed into open Business Models; “Business model innovation becomes more and more relevant. Innovation strategy has to cover not only products and processes but also business models. Here it is important to reflect: Most new business models has been developed by trial and error. However, similar to designers in the area of mechanical engineering, business model designer should learn from the past. 90% of all business model innovations are recombinations from existing business model revolutions. In other words: it is possible to become innovation leader in the own industry by imitating successful solutions from other industries”(Gassmann et al., 2016).
Assertion 6
The spectrum of innovation that starts by New Product Development and continues with open extroverted innovation could be developed into open Business Models.
From open innovation to open business models and innovation alignment
The necessity of alignment between innovation strategy and overall business strategy and between Innovation strategy and innovation ecosystem within which the company lives has been emphasized by scholars like Pisano (2015) and Adner (2006). In other words, innovation strategy should be articulated in the way that innovations made in the organizations support the overall business strategy. As mentioned in the previous section, selection of appropriate innovation strategy (to be either open or closed) is a trade-off and depends on the company, privacy and cost competency, the technology used by the company, the need for technological competency and the need for business model innovation (as cited by Gassmann et al., 2016).
As stated by Adner (2006) “determining how innovation will create value for potential customers, how the company will capture that value and which types of innovation to peruse. Just as product must evolve to stay competitive, so must innovation strategies as the environment change.” In this regard, Pisano (2015) has proposed a matrix to choose appropriate innovation strategy based on two aspects: the need for business model renewal and need for technological competency. In general, it could be advised to construct a comprehensive innovation strategy determined by the need for business model renewal and the need for technological competency (ibid). These typologies of proposed strategies are reflected in figure2. “When creating an innovation strategy, companies have a choice about how much to focus on technological innovation and how much to focus on technological innovation and how much to invest in business model innovation. This matrix, which considers how a potential innovation fits with a company’s existing business model and technical capabilities, can assist with that decision” (ibid). Four types of routine, radical, disruptive and architectural innovations could be followed depending on the need for business model or technology renewal (Pisano, 2015);
Assertion 7
To connect innovation to corporate strategy, four types of routine, radical, disruptive and architectural innovation strategies could be advised depending on the need for business model or the need for technology renewal.
Figure2-The Innovation Landscape Map, based on Pisano (2015)
Conclusion and Discussion
So far, we have reached 7 assertions. We found out that under RBV and KBV approaches, innovation usually has been considered as an internal source of competitive advantage and performance (Assertion1). In recent years, the changing context of technological and business innovation have persuaded companies and scholars to consider a new paradigm of extroverted innovation entitled open innovation (Assertion2). Open innovation could be elaborated by RBV approach if we consider probable a set of companies or people that have devoted their resources to an specific type of innovation and collaborate with each other in order to achieve collective R&D and/or innovation (Assertion3).
We have tried to conclude the rest of assertions into a general contingency process model for innovation strategy selection as depicted in Figure3. From Assertion7, we could select among 4 innovation strategies based on the need for business model renewal and the need for technology renewal. Then, as mentioned by Assertion4, we could have a trade-off on pros and cons of an open innovation to be followed by the organization based on factors like R&D costs, privacy circumstances and extent of required control over the innovation process. If we choose to continue with an open innovation strategy, then we can select among 4 inbound open innovation strategies (collaborative, network-based, market-based and crowd-based innovation strategies) with regard to the breadth and depth of external knowledge search (Assertion5). As stated by Assertion6, the spectrum of innovation that starts by New Product Development and continues with open extroverted innovation could be developed into open business models but this is a choice and is determined by internal and external situations.
The contingency process model for innovation strategy selection proposed through Figure3 can consider the possibility of following an open innovation for product and services, technologies and/or business models of the companies under investigation.
Fogure3-a contingency process regarding innovation strategy selection and development
We propose that future studies investigate the relationships between Figure1 and Figure2 based on the concepts of technology and external knowledge search that are almost the same and shared by the two figures. However, the former is more internalized and company-oriented than the latter.
The model presented in Figure3 sums up the assertions extracted about innovation strategy and open innovation. It should be developed in theory and practice. To do so, the framework should be implemented and deduced from real cases of Iranian and foreign companies. In this regard, the authors welcome all collaboration and assistance.
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*E-mail: mansari@ut.ac.ir Corresponding Author: Manouchehr Ansari
[1]. Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is an international agreement on the nuclear program of Iran reached in Vienna on 14 July 2015 between Iran, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council; China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States—plus Germany),and the European Union.
[2]. Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Application in the Middle East