Henry Chesbroughs (2003) concept of open innovation provides a promising and important tool for synthesizing research on innovation collaboration (Lundvall 1991, Naas and Orstavik 1998, Piore and Sabel 1984), user-driven innovation (von Hippel 1988, Lundvall 1986) and the dynamics of IPRs (Chesbrough & Di Minin, 3007) into a bottom-up, micro based perspective on new patterns of industrial organization. Adding the aspect of globalization implies including perspectives on multinational corporations, FDI and the internationalization of R&D (Dunning 1977, Doremus et al 1998, Narula and Zanfei 2005).
However, there are no robust theories on the dynamics of open innovation to serve as the basis for policy development, and empirical evidence is not sufficient (chessbrough et al 2005-4-5) to conclude on extent, nature and possible heterogeneity between e.g. sectors (Malerba 2005) and economies (Lorenz and Lundvall (eds) 2007).
This project will investigate if these challenges can be met by a) building on the theoretical foundation already laid by innovation studies (Fagerberg et al 2005). and by b) using existing European data on innovation behavior (i.e. micro-data from Community Innovation Surveys) as the basis for providing descriptive statistics and running econometric analysis of open innovation. Following from this it will c) consider the need for new innovation indicators, and d) discuss policy implications.