Engineering open innovation - towards a framework for fostering open innovation

Abstract

Open innovation is an emerging innovation paradigm that can greatly accelerate technical knowledge innovation in software companies. The increasing importance and density of software in today's products and services puts extensive pressure on excelling the discovery, description and execution of innovation. Despite that, software engineering literature lacks methods, tools and frameworks for full exploitation of technological advantages that open innovation can bring. This paper proposes a software engineering framework, designed to foster open innovation by designing and tailoring appropriate software engineering methods and tools. Furthermore, this paper discusses the methodological and process dimensions and outlines challenge areas that should be reviewed when transitioning to software engineering driven open innovation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.