Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology - Hardcover

Chesbrough, Henry William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578518377 ISBN 13: 9781578518371

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003

Synopsis

In today's information-rich environment, companies can no longer afford to rely entirely on their own ideas to advance their business, nor can they restrict their innovations to a single path to market. As a result, says Harvard Business School Professor Henry W. Chesbrough, the traditional model for innovation—which has been largely internally focused, closed off from outside ideas and technologies—is becoming obsolete. Emerging in its place is a new paradigm, "open innovation," which strategically leverages internal and external sources of ideas and takes them to market through multiple paths. This path-breaking analysis is based on extensive field research, academic study, and the author's own longtime experience working in Silicon Valley. Through rich descriptions of the innovation processes of Xerox, IBM, Lucent, Intel, Merck, and Millennium, and the many spin-offs that have emerged from these firms, Open Innovation shows how a company can use its business model to identify a more enlightened role for R&D in a world of abundant information, better manage and access intellectual property, advance its current business, and grow its future business. Arguing that companies in all industries must transform the way they commercialize knowledge, Chesbrough convincingly shows how open innovation can unlock the latent economic value in a company's ideas and technologies.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Chesbrough is an Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School.

Reviews

The great corporate research departments at companies like Bell Labs, IBM and Xerox were once the motor of American industry. But that may be changing, according to this probing academic study of corporate technological innovation. Chesbrough, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, argues that the old "closed innovation" model-vertically integrated research-and-development departments that develop technology in-house for the sole use of their corporate parent-is becoming obsolete in an age of mobile scientific workers, ubiquitous high-tech startups and a growing extra-corporate research establishment at university labs. Modern technology powerhouses like Cisco and Microsoft do little of their own basic research, he reports; instead they have dropped the "do-it-all-yourself" approach and pioneered a new model of "open innovation," in which companies import ideas from without and let their own innovations enter the wider marketplace. Drawing on case studies of companies like Lucent and Intel, Chesbrough suggests that companies make themselves more permeable to the flow of knowledge through such strategies as hiring professors and grad students as summer consultants, sponsoring university research, investing in and partnering with high-tech startups and venture capitalists, and disseminating their own innovations through spin-off companies or even by publishing it in the public domain. Chesbrough's sophisticated but highly readable discussion of these complex issues will give managers much food for thought.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1578518377
• ISBN 13: 9781578518371
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272