Enterprise Innovation

14A Methodology for the Setup of a Virtual Innovation Factory Platform

14.1. Introduction

The business innovation in virtual enterprise environments (BIVEE) aims at deploying advanced methods for boosting creativity and innovation with an open innovation approach, for supporting their lean implementation and for monitoring the concrete outcomes, managing innovation ventures in a collaborative networked industrial setting.

The open innovation model is theorized by Henry Chesbrough, who is considered to be the father of this approach; in open innovation, the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology [CHE 03]: “is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. This paradigm assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology”. Open innovation implies to gain access to distributed knowledge. New value is created from a new innovation environment, composed of people inside and outside the company. It is a way to accelerate innovation, and it can give the capabilities to improve velocity (time to market reduction), direction and new business paths.

An important aspect is to establish a methodology to quantify open innovation levels. There are a lot of existing works in the literature that try to define the concept of open innovation, but there ...