Co-innovation Dynamics

2Conditions and Impacts of Client–Supplier Open Innovation Governance

How is client–supplier Open Innovation organized? Under what conditions is it organized? And what is the impact on the performance of the relationship? All of these questions were what guided the context of interpretation for the governance of client–supplier Open Innovation.

In order to create this basis of interpretation, having not been identified in the literature, we began by comparing different academic theories from the perspective of the different players of this collaborative innovation (different positions in companies, client companies, as well as suppliers, of different sizes, of different sectors of activity, in addition to institutional and intermediary players).

From this first research work, we have derived a first model and hypotheses on the links between its different elements.

This model was then tested with a sample of 160 supplier companies cooperating with a client on an innovation project (Figure 2.1). They were asked to describe in detail how this cooperation was managed, under what conditions and toward what aims.

This allowed us to detail our model in a very efficient way, in addition to confirming or refuting the importance of certain elements and the hypotheses linking them.

Figure 2.1. Summary description of the sample of the quantitative approach

In this chapter, we describe ...