Effects of open innovation on organizational capabilities and design

  • Open innovation (OI) research has evolved widely in recent years and many facets of facilitating OI, from managing specific innovation methods, challenges of external knowledge assimilation and IP aspects, to linking organizational and managerial patterns to innovation performance, have been studied. A field that is less explored is the impact of managing and organizing the variety of OI tools and partners in an OI ecosystem, as well as in open communities, on organizational capabilities. The biopharmaceutical industry with its significantly changing innovation landscape, moving towards increasingly leveraging external knowledge sources to successfully develop new products, was selected as an appropriate research target to investigate the impacts of OI on organizational capabilities and design. While collaboration has been prominent in this knowledge-intensive sector for decades, making use of firm-external knowledge sources further gained relevance and OI approaches became increasingly popular because firms expected to overcome severe R&D productivity challenges while at the same time meeting new patient-centric demands. Three core areas that have undergone major changes in recent years are identified: New partners join the system or change their role within the innovation process; advanced OI methods and tools are becoming available; and new virtual ways of co-working are now prevalent. This observation raises the question how pharmaceutical firms and innovators react to operating in a novel innovation ecosystem, particularly regarding their organizational capabilities and –design. The first project investigates patterns of innovation partnerships through an explorative interview approach with three identified key types of partners in biopharmaceuticals: Biotech companies, academic institutes, and contract research organizations. It provides a framework to manage different partners and four identified different archetypes of OI partnerships. The second project explores an in-depth case at one of the world’s largest healthcare firms, focusing on the management and organization of various OI methods within R&D. The developed multi-dimensional framework on the determinants for organizational design for OI shows that the complexities of open innovation tools applied, and the knowledge involved to deliver OI results seem to play a major role for designing an OI organization. The third project follows an explanatory approach and tests which factors determine successful collaboration among patients and among researchers in virtual healthcare communities. The article shows that researchers rely on knowledge organization while patients rather rely on social organization. The three projects map out the evolvement towards a biopharmaceutical OI ecosystem of new partners, methods, and tools and identify effects on organizational capabilities and management patterns on ecosystem, corporate, as well as community-level.

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Metadaten
Author:David Tamoschus
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:992-opus4-9844
Subtitle (English):the case of biopharmaceuticals
Publisher:WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management
Place of publication:Vallendar
Referee:Christoph Hienerth, Holger Ernst
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2024/06/26
Date of first Publication:2024/06/26
Publishing Institution:WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management
Granting Institution:WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management
Date of final exam:2022/01/19
Release Date:2024/06/26
Tag:Arzneimittelforschung; Capability-Ansatz; Fähigkeitenansatz; Offener Innovationsprozess
Capability approach; Open innovation; Pharmaceutical research
Page Number:180
Institutes:WHU Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group / Chair in Entrepreneurship and New Business Development
Licence (German):Copyright this PhD thesis