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Abstract:
To compete in a fierce business environment, an open innovation (OI) is a key strategy for developing new products and services. Digital platforms are viewed as a mechanism to foster the innovation processes which lead the transformations of business models across various industries in business ecosystems. This transformation has particularly affected large firms with traditional business models. While the adoption of digital platforms has introduced number of ways to explore the new knowledge, it also comes with the barriers. An understanding on the role of digital platforms for OI, especially in large technology firm, and the barriers emerged as a result of their adoption and use across OI process is still limited. This study addresses the gap. Adopting a qualitative method, this study offers a framework to map the digital platforms for OI. The findings entail several implications for innovation managers to understand the significance of digital platforms for OI.
Keywords: Open innovation, digital platforms, adoption, utilisation
Introduction
While OI has been in practice for over a decade-for example in the form of leveraging external knowledge from several sources (e.g. customers, suppliers, R&D Institutes, Universities etc), its present expression raised to the development of Web 2.0, which supplied the digital infrastructure for laypeople to dynamically generate content. A significant antecedent was the advent of online communities, "a virtual organizational form supported by digital platforms in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope" (Faraj et al., 2011, p. 1224). Online communities generally focus on knowledge transfer and exchange of ideas on topics of mutual interest to participants as an end in itself (Butler, 2001; Faraj et al., 2011, 2016; Gu et al., 2007). The arrival and growth of this organizational form exhibited an inclination for knowledge exchange on a wide scale, setting the foundation for more synchronised activity directed precisely towards innovation. OI directs the exchange of knowledge and ideas for the identification and generation of novel products and services. Digital platforms (DP) supply the digital space for people to gather and exchange knowledge and ideas from any place with an Internet connection. Since this advancement, there has been enormous progress in the number of firms adopting open innovation and in the breadth of. domains in which it is being utilised....