A Fad or a Phenomenon? The Adoption of Open Innovation Practices in Large Firms

We surveyed 125 large firms in Europe and the United States with annual sales in excess of $250 million to examine the extent to which large firms are now practicing open innovation. Our results showed that open innovation is not a passing fad: 78 percent of the firms report practicing open innovation, none have abandoned it, and 82 percent of those practicing open innovation report that it is practiced more intensively today than three years ago. We also asked about specific practices for "outside-in" and "inside-out" open innovation. We found that customer co-creation, informal networking, and university grants were the three leading inbound practices in 2011; crowdsourcing and open innovation intermediary services were rated lowest in importance. Joint ventures, selling market-ready products, and standardization were the three leading outbound practices; donations to commons and spinoffs were least frequently used. We also found that large firms are more likely to receive freely revealed information than they are to provide such information.