Open innovation dynamics

Ondertitel:languaging in industry-academia collaborations

Summary Open Innovation Dynamics. Languaging industry-academia collaborations Open Innovation (OI) was introduced as a business model by Henry Chesbrough in 2003. OI revolves around the idea that useful knowledge for organisations is widely distributed. To survive, organisations must identify, plug into, and leverage external knowledge sources as a core process in innovation. This requires purposively managing the permeability of organisational boundaries. However, as innovation processes also require openness as a social attitude, the creation and guarding of a suitable level of permeability in the daily practice of OI can be challenging for both individuals and organisations. This dissertation considers innovation processes as real life multi-layered practices that are performed through talk and interaction. Hence, the central research question of this dissertation is: How does languaging enable openness in open innovation work? Choosing a language-centred approach to the collaborative processes within OI, aims to do justice to the central role of communication, currently underappreciated in literature on OI. After all, concepts like flexibility, commitment, trust and openness, said to be invaluable to the success of OI, miss empirical grounding in what is said or not said. Linguistic ethnography (LE), the study of social practices through the lens of language and communication, is chosen as an open-ended methodology. Chapter 2 explains how LE can contribute to OIstudies and more specifically to OI in industry-academia collaborations. Industry and academia are perceived as unlikely partners for collaborative knowledge work, because they have different reasons to collaborate and different attitudes towards openness. Through connecting the macro-environment and the micro-practices of the three industry-academia cases, it becomes possible to integrate the rapidly changing context of industry-academia collaborations as a dynamic factor and to evaluate the workings of OI by the actualisation of its linguistic practices in their own regard. As LE is an iterative process of data gathering, analyses and writing up findings, which also puts the researcher at the core of the investigation, chapter 2 pays separate attention to these specific aspects of the methodology. Chapter 3 sets out to answer the first sub-question: To what extent is openness performed in open innovation work? Inter-organisational collaborations between industry and academia can be troublesome due to different organisational backgrounds. This chapter investigates how such contextual factors shape what kind of knowledge is shared, to which extent participants interact to innovate and what role (dis)trust plays in this process. The concept of ‘project harvested knowledge’ is introduced to denote the different perceptions and debates about which topics can be discussed during project meetings. There is a discrepancy in the approach between the academic and industrial partner where the latter tries to control the proceedings of the meeting and expresses distrust in the research institute involved. This dynamic exists due to the level of operational secrecy, the short time to market, and the exploitative nature of the collaboration. This chapter concludes that, although openness is highly valued by the participants, there is difference in the types of knowledge that are allowed to be harvested as project knowledge, related to the openness or closedness of the collaboration process. Finally, expressions of flexibility and dedication are found to not necessarily lead to more trust, openness or sharing. Based on the misunderstandings between and negative perceptions of participants described in chapter 3, chapter 4 draws on the macro-environment of those participants to understand the micro-interaction and the reason for the perceived failure of the collaborations. This chapter focuses on the sub-question: How is openness shaped by the context of open innovation work?, and moves beyond the walls of the meeting room to map the context of industry-academia relationships in order to better understand the perceived threats, fears and irritations. OI is analysed from the viewpoint of liminality to understand the full extent of the interactional dynamics around openness. Analysing OI as a liminal process that crosses spatial, temporal and organisational boundaries offers an explanation for the lack of expectation management between partners and shows why silence is chosen over the risk of attributes being granted that don’t match one’s ‘face’. The relationship between the partners is evaluated by taking their identity into account and it is established that due to the high mobility of people and the change of network roles, industry-academia partnerships are laced with diffused identities and ambiguous approaches to temporality and time management. Furthermore, identity is influenced by organisational secrecy. The way in which collaborative partnerships have organised IP-protection does not account for the current liminality of network roles and interpersonal relationships. Finally, with group identity being such a dynamic construct, openness and secrecy are expressed by way of indirect inquiries and evasive wordplay. Chapter 4 thus nuances current theories on industry-academia collaborations and concludes by offering possibilities for further investigating the role of identity in OI work. Chapter 5 focuses on the imbalance between industry and academia established in the previous chapters and zooms in on the interaction to reveal how participants can use the meeting as a ‘genre’ to establish and alter the roles and identities of participants. First, interactional analysis shows that a meeting set-up revolving around academic presentations confirms an old role division between collaborators, where academic contributions are vulnerable to undervaluation. Secondly, so called ‘leading individuals’ can be identified who show critical discourse awareness that allows partners to reposition themselves in relation to each other. These individuals use interactional strategies to create a joint purpose, empower participants to jointly realign, and motivate them to openly share progress. This results in a power shift where academics feel free to pursue their agendas. This chapter shows that awareness of and ability to choose from a variety of linguistic options contingent on the social dynamics in the collaboration, can mould and remould the interpersonal relations and contribute to a positive evaluation of the effectiveness of the knowledge creation process. Hence, this chapter answers the third sub-question: How does interaction shape openness in open innovation work? This dissertation concludes with chapter 6, which evaluates how languaging enables openness in open innovation work. The answer to this question lies in the ability of individuals to use language to overcome their differences, reduce uncertainties and increase trust. To determine to what extent collaborators succeed in doing so, one needs to be aware of the interactional and contextual boundaries of openness and the linguistic choices that individuals can and do make to ‘make OI work’. Because of its exploratory nature and its variety of rigorous research methods, LE has made it possible to describe and explain OI-dynamics on an organisational and interorganisational level. This chapter further zooms out on the findings and reassesses the initial assumptions of this dissertation, which in turn leads to suggestions for further theorising OI. Finally, the managerial implications for the field are addressed to gain insight into how to enable OI in an industry-academia setting.

Jaar van publicatie:2020

Trefwoorden:Doctoral thesis

Toegankelijkheid:Open