3 March 2010

Call for papers: Commercialisation Processes and Open Innovation

A special issue of International Journal of Innovation and Regional Development

Since innovation has become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage and business investment in R&D and innovation has risen, innovative firms have become increasingly dependent on external sources of knowledge rather than in-house research. Intensified competition, need for rapid market entry/time to market (shorter product life cycles) and need for an access to additional competence (expanded technological opportunities) force them to innovate more quickly and focus their R&D expenditures, while seeking privileged and rapid access to complementary new knowledge in the public and private sectors.

A result of these driving forces has been the emergence of a new type of organisation of industrial research that is less centred in individual firms, based more on networks and markets, and in some cases, is more reliant on high technology firms. Therefore , rather than relying on internal resources for processes such as commercialisation, firms are increasingly participating in ‘open innovation’ (see Chesbrough 2006), i.e. active innovation-related collaboration between business partners, which may help firms to realize the value of new products, e.g. by acquiring technologies from external sources (Lichtenthaler 2008b).

Therefore, potential challenges may be related to factors such as the creation of partnerships with external technology providers and other partner companies (thus building a network of inter-organisational R&D that provides a means to coordinate diverse actors – including small technology firms, universities and science parks – that can all contribute specific competences and technological assets to the commercialisation process in high technology industries (Pellikka 2007, 2009).

The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring together papers which contribute to the understanding of the specific features of commercialization processes and open innovation models in high technology fields. Manuscripts are invited from both practitioners and management researchers and they may be purely theoretical or based on empirical research.

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • Open innovation and high technology sectors
  • Commercialization processes and open innovation
  • Regional innovation systems and open innovation
  • Knowledge-intensive business services and regional innovation systems
  • Inter-organizational relations and open innovation models
  • Open innovation business models for SMEs
  • Open innovation strategy in high technology industry
  • Firm-related growth and open innovation
  • Internationalization and open innovation
Important Dates
Deadline for submission of manuscripts: 1 September 2010
Notification of acceptance/rejection to authors: 1 December 2010
Submission of final manuscript: 1 March 2011

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