Open In­nov­a­tion and Brand­ing

Course content

Driving and successfully implementing entrepreneurship and innovation does not depend solely on the organization, its managers, or its entrepreneurial founder or corporate chief executive. Rather, the most important contributors and co-creators of new insights, ideas, and innovations are to be found among the networks of co-operating stakeholders, customers, and end-users. Open innovation and stakeholder engagement in innovation processes demand particular considerations, processes, and capabilities, which generate valebale knowledge for the organisaiton and its stakeholders. This course focuses on the role and meaning of branding for establishing and successfully managing stakeholder relationships, in an era and context in which open innovation represents the primary path for innovation. The open innovation and stakeholder co-creation research that informs this course highlights the essential determinants of open innovation strategies, as well as the challenges and issues involved in engaging multiple stakeholders in an innovation process. Accordingly, open innovation may take different forms, in terms of collaborative ties and the intensity of collaboration; the form or level of this openness also is governed by various factors and circumstances across the firm and its external environment. Both innovation and company performance depend on these levels of openness, so this course encourages students to gain a clearer understanding of the effects, using real case analyses. To develop their understanding of the obstacles to open innovation, students will consider case companies that either represent best cases or have not yet embraced this logic in their business models.

The course introduces the concepts of open innovation and strategy, compares and contrasts these to closed forms of innovation. These are discussed in relation to the dfferent governance forms (mechisms) used by organisations to mange flows of knowledge in and out of the organisation. Organizations must start by finding and engaging the right stakeholders for co-creation (e.g., customers, resellers, suppliers, non-governmental organizations), whether organizations or individuals, who offer novel insights and experience but also are motivated and able to reveal their ideas and beliefs through communication with the firm (online or offline). The complexity of open innovation implies that engaging customers demands very different considerations and processes than does engaging resellers, universities, or non-profits. Therefore, a second objective of the course is to encourage understanding of the meaning of branding when open innovation is a central feature of companies’ innovation efforts. Combining these teaching objectives, this course will integrate insights from contemporary literature dealing with complex and dynamic contexts in which stakeholders call for transparency and authenticity, along with analyses of a set of companies in which the integration of open innovation and branding is apparent. A central question will govern the analysis of the literature and cases: What are the key issues, processes, and capabilities associated with brand management when openness has become the primary mode for a company’s innovation?