How Innovation Really Works: Using the Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix to Drive Growth

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MISCONCEPTION 5: Open Innovation Turbocharges R&D

One of the biggest innovation trends over the past few decades has been “open innovation.” The concept was first introduced in 1983 and later popularized by Henry Chesbrough in Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology,¹ as well as related articles in the business press. The basic idea behind open innovation is that the amount of R&D done outside a given company will always dwarf what the company itself can do internally. Intel, for example, the largest U.S. spender, with R&D investment in 2013 of $10.6 billion, only represents 2.3 percent of the $456 billion total U.S. R&D. Accordingly, it is likely that research being done elsewhere is relevant to Intel. ...