Knowledge Management and Innovation

3Managing Knowledge to Innovate: Open and Distributed Innovation Models

This chapter discusses the knowledge processes supporting the interactive approaches to innovation, all of which consider that innovation results from the capability of organizations to mobilize and exploit knowledge distributed inside and outside their boundaries. Four approaches are highlighted:

1. 1) open innovation;
2. 2) user innovation;
3. 3) community innovation;
4. 4) crowdsourcing.

From the eighties onwards, many management authors recognized the importance of knowledge in the construction of competitive advantages [WER 84, BAR 91] and innovation capabilities [COH 90, KOG 92, HAM 94]. In the decade of 2000, the advent of a knowledge economy [FOR 00], as a consequence of the development of the Internet, led to a renewed interest in the way in which we relate to knowledge, particularly with innovation.

The concept of Open Innovation, made popular by Chesbrough in 2003, [CHE 03] constitutes a federating frame for these new approaches of innovation. Indeed, behind the banal idea according to which the innovating firm resorts to external knowledge and seeks to multiply valorization channels of the produced knowledge, a multiplicity of innovating practices lies hidden. In this way, we find the concept of “coopetition”, which implies that in a logic of business ecosystems [MOO 93, MOO 96], innovation partnerships between firms that can find themselves in competition elsewhere. A group of innovation practices also ...