Open Innovation as a bendable management technology

This paper opens the black box of the management concept of open innovation by analyzing how the Device Development unit in the medical company, Novo Nordisk, translates open innovation into practices in 14 projects with different outcomes. A literature review produced three groups of activities that can support open innovation: network building, an improvement in knowledge flows and exchange, and the exchange of technology and licenses. The analysis shows that the commercially successful projects did apply many of the recommended practices from open innovation, even if some of them originally began as internally focused projects. Only one successful project out of six actually established a new business model, which many authors consider to be an integrated part of the open innovation approach. The analysis also shows that even projects that applied many or even most of the open innovation approaches recommended in the prior literature did not automatically become commercial successes.