Small firms mostly encounter the challenge of promoting innovations due to their limited resources. Accelerating the transfer of knowledge from external sources, knowledge spillovers enable the firms to acquire new knowledge and recognize invaluable opportunities. Thus, the utilization of knowledge spillovers would bring various beneficial consequences in all stages of open innovation process such as low cost knowledge acquisition, recognizing the opportunities of partnership, finding new ideas of commercializing unexploited technologies and adopting new methods of managing incentives and controls. However the spillover of knowledge would be available for all the competitors, only those strategically allocate their capabilities to explore new knowledge and exploit their innovations could gain more advantages.
In this regards, some interesting questions would arise:
1) What kind of institutional mechanisms can promote open innovation through strategic use of knowledge spillovers?
2) How can firms decrease the cost of openness by utilizing knowledge spillovers?
3) How would knowledge spillovers lead firms to integrate different forms of openness in order to experience the growth?
4) How can knowledge spillovers provide new ways for the firms to work with external actors?
5) How can knowledge spillovers widen the search breath and accelerate the process of scanning for the external expertise?
6) How can firms benefit from knowledge spillovers through different forms of open innovation such as Acquiring, Sourcing, Selling and Revealing?
I think our paper (written by Jeltje van der Meer-Kooistra and Robert W. Scapens) about product co-development projects can help you with finding an answer to your question. In this paper we describe in detail a product co-development project in which various small parties contribute their knowledge and learn how to become a system supplier rather than a supplier of specific components. This paper will be published in the journal Management Accounting Research in September and is now available on its website. You can also find the paper on Researchgate. The paper is entitled: Governing product co-development projects: the role of minimal structures.
Jeltje van der Meer-Kooistra
I think our paper (written by Jeltje van der Meer-Kooistra and Robert W. Scapens) about product co-development projects can help you with finding an answer to your question. In this paper we describe in detail a product co-development project in which various small parties contribute their knowledge and learn how to become a system supplier rather than a supplier of specific components. This paper will be published in the journal Management Accounting Research in September and is now available on its website. You can also find the paper on Researchgate. The paper is entitled: Governing product co-development projects: the role of minimal structures.
Jeltje van der Meer-Kooistra
Hi! You are using two words whose meaning has to be understood and defined if we want to make some rational comments and inspirations: these words are "knowledge spillover" and "open innovation".
I am working since 2007 in the field of open innovation services because I am the partner of NineSigma, which is the market leader in the open innovation service worldwide. I am the business developer in Italy.
MY understanding of "knowledge spillover" is: acquisition of knowledge from peer in my territory or outside ,free of charge and sustained by a reciprocity. It is not THE SOLUTION to a PROBLEM of MINE, but inspiration, connection to a new technology, and so on. WE have here in ITALY the so called DISTRICTS which were based on this kind of exchange, fertilization, learning from each other.
The general "sense" (or meaning ) of Open innovation (OI) can be described by a metaphor: for each problem you have, there is at least one (or more) solution in the world ! The organization that helps the enterprise to reach the solution provider is called "BROKER". There are some other meaning for Open Innovation, each of them generate a SERVICE. OI is a service which is paid to the Broker; the solution provider does not pay anything; the cost is paid by the seeker.
If you agree on this base then we can go further. Any comment is welcome.
In my opinion, you must start first with an analysis of the country/region of your interest. These mechanisms are not generally applicable. Based on the characteristics of the region, you must identify the most suitable tools. Please consider also the economic development and government support.
In our case, we start with a valoration of differents open innovation models and their application in our region (Bogotá, Colombia). In this case we identfy seious restrictions to apply models how of the technology maket places (Innocentive, NineSigma), in specific the limitations of SME cashflow to invest in R+D and technologie adquisition and transfer.
We abord the problem of open innovation an SME with other perpestive, and integrate the ICT to create a social network focused in innovation and regional actors (www.innovacionabierta.com.co) , in this network we share different contents related with innovation themes, grants to projects, and technology offers and requirements.
Actually we have near to 6000 suscriptors, 40% researchers, 40% business, and 20% public employs, NGO and other actors.
Dear Professor Jeltje van der Meer-Kooistra,
It is my honor to read your paper and I really appreciate your guidance.
Kind Regards,
Niloofar Masroori
Dear Mr. Renzo Provedel,
As you are one of the most professional businessman and scholar in OI issues, it is my honor to discuss about the role of knowledge spillovers in firm growth through OI with you. Now I am writing my PhD proposal research on this issue and it should be interesting and worth enough to increase my chance for a scholarship from Australian, Canadian or American Universities. Actually, I really need help for shaping my ideas and provide a framework for my research. Thus, I appreciate your support and invaluable knowledge and time you spend on my question.
As my master thesis is entitled "Identifying Knowledge spillovers affecting Entrepreneurial Innovation", I read a lot of research about knowledge spillovers. So what I understand is that the scholars have defined knowledge spillover as the unintentional or unintended transfer of knowledge. At micro level, firms utilize knowledge spillovers in a great extent through collaborations, interactions and reverse engineering activities especially small businesses with limited resources. Though the interviews with biotech based organisations, I have found out that although they use and benefit from these kind of knowledge externalities, they have not been aware of the effects of knowledge spillovers on their innovation. They got surprised when I told them that these kind of low cost ways of accessing to new knowledge is a specific subject in business and economics literature. Therefore, I concluded that small firms (even subconsciously) are using knowledge spillover as a shortcut to promote their innovations.
Now I wonder what is the role of knowledge spillovers in OI and how small firms could use them to experience a sustainable and profitable growth.
Thank you for your help a million times.
Best Regards,
Niloofar Masroori
Dear Niloofar,
as someone already said, the region/business sector is a factor which shouldn't be neglected. As seen within research, Open innovation plays a different role, depending on a country's development (e.g. Human resources, culture, technology) - while some benefit from getting basic knowledge they are lacking, others are able to generate new knowledge, especially tacit one, which is difficult to imitate and presents an important advantage, such as proposed by the reatively new 6th generation innovation models.
Mybe, it's an idea for you to research different countries/sectors and get valuable and usable insights.
Good luck,
Marko
Technical Report LEARNING FROM THE MOST INNOVATIVE: A COMPARISON OF SLOVENIA ...
HI, I am back with some comments and ideas about spillover and innovation.
First, I want to tell you that NineSigma (and some other brokers) created a digital platform, called NineSights, as a collaborative platform between "seekers" and "solution providers". It has been designed to facilitate the OI process; and being OPEN, it can become, for a smart entrepreneur, a kind of observatory about technologies, about the needs of very large corporation and also an opportunity to say to the world the specific knowledge of the enterprise itself. You can register yourself, free of charge, and navigate and experiment. You will see large corporation presenting their strategies (see "gallery" section) and their needs as short description/request and/or RFP (request for proposal, well defined requests sustained by NineSigma OI process); you will see also some offerings, which can be also inspiring SMEs innovation; and you can recognize some trends in large fields as Chemicals, Automotive, Packaging, Hi-tech. There is a large space to spillover ! More ideas, trends, needs, leader names than a specific help for your SME innovation.
The key idea I want to transfer to you is that there are some "digital spaces" where you can access information and participate to discussions (like Forum or working group) which are very similar to "in presence space" as the italian districts or technologic poles of innovation as in many countries of the world. Digital space can be very useful, according to a SME strategy of search/participation, tailored by the SME to the specific environment. Another interesting opportunity are the "CONTEST" organized by large companies and / or by the broker. Look again in NineSights the on going CONTESTS.
The last point I want to touch is a simplified model of Innovation, I have been applying for years with large companies, based on a recursive view of innovation. This is a model of innovation, generated in a collaboration I had with an important school of Coaching in Italy. The scheme is the following: when you innovate you are proceeding in a circular way which deals with 3 different issues: IDEA GENERATION, PROBLEM SOLVING, EXPRESSION (which is the activities of communicating, influencing, sharing with others, with your stakeholder). For each of them you apply your intelligence and in the case of EXPRESSION you ask the help of other people around you or outside your walls. It's a kind of "spillover" when you engage people into your project and innovation. But your are not "listening", you are requesting active responses.
If you have some doubts or questions please do not hesitate to post.
Have a nice day, Renzo
Ms Masroori,
About 5 months down the road I saw your question and thought I would give a quick response. I would agree with the view articulated by Mr Provedel on "knowledge spillovers". Do bear in mind the word "spill" -- nobody deliberately spills milk, coffee, wine or food or for that matter knowledge. You have to be there when somebody talks about her ( in deference to females) their work. If you are alert enough, you might pick up the gist of what underlies what that somebody is talking about.
I used to work for an American MNC in Massachusetts, USA., a world technology leader at the time We were often warned not to talk about our work in bars/pubs/ restaurants -- walls have ears! Spillovers can occur in the places I have just mentioned -- and when it occurs, I would say it is a real case of spilling.
These days firms including SMEs join networks hoping to pick up some good or even half-baked ideas. Large firms also join such net works... they may be giving away something very small or something not generally known to others. SMEs may benefit but they may not depending upon the resources availble to them, which I must point out is often rather limited. But, the big boys could pick up some idea and with the resources available to them, can take the idea, investigate it, and come up with something more interesting than originally envisaged by that researcher from that SME who more or less spilled the idea, often without knowing what he/she has done. (You might want to watch the film, Torn Curtain... to see how spills could occur. It starred Paul Newman, if I am not mistaken.).
I am writing this as former technologist and technology manager, and as hands-on, roll-up-my-sleeves innovator, in amongst other things AI/ES, and in electrical devices for homes, and for use elsewhere.
Then I became an acdemic with an interest in technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, subjects I have taught. One of my students studied knowledge spill-overs in EU funded R&D consortia. We found that spill-overs was not as we thought it would be when partners joined the consortia, i.e., considerable spill-overs would occur; this was not generally the case for SMEs. There were many reasons, which I shall not go into at this time. [ I must say that reciprocity, while desirable may not occur, or at least to the extent we hope for...]
Finally, here is a question for you and other readers: how would you assess the extent and quality of the spill-over? Food for thought? Perhaps!
(AI/ES = Artificial Intelligence/ Expert Systems)
Best wishes
PS: Not quite the quick and short response, I am afraid.
Dear Prof. Phil Barbonis
I really appreciate your efforts in drawing my attention to the main point of the context.
The point you mentioned was the exact problem in measuring knowledge spillovers. As I have focused on the knowledge spills over SMEs during interaction at interpersonal level and collaboration between firms, I have been so concern about measurement. Unfortunately, I could not find a questionnaire in the existing literature because the subject has not been developed by researchers yet and it can be assumed as a new perspective. Therefor, I myself have attempted to make a questionnaire but as you know the reliability of such a new questionnaire should be under investigation at least for a few times and still I have doubted it measures the variables accurately.
Since I've started to read about knowledge and innovation (after changing my major from Civil Engineering to Business), the context of tacit and implicit knowledge made me fascinated. So I've read more than 150 papers and tried to link the context with the notion of knowledge spillovers! At this time, I found out that measuring tacit knowledge spillovers could be much more difficult to be measured comparing to implicit knowledge spillovers. So my supervisor guided me to keep the assessment of Tacit and Implicit knowledge spillovers for my own research interest and focus on the linkage between knowledge spillovers and Innovation for my master thesis.
At the end, I want to express my gratitude about your invaluable time spent on guiding me and it is my pleasure to be advised by such a thoughtful professor like you who knows the exact missing piece of puzzle.
Warm Regards,
Niloofar Masroori
Note: Please accept my apology about the possible grammatical or vocabulary mistake
Dear Ms Masroori,
I am pleased that you did finally respond since I made my comments in Nov 2015 – I assume you had been busy.
If you ask me, it is extremely difficult to consciously transfer tacit knowledge and therefore tacit knowledge spillover – I assume spillovers are unplanned, unconscious – as you intend to “measure” will be extremely difficult. “Measurement” for me implies an accurate, precise and objective exercise. Thus, in my view “measurement” of tacit knowledge spillover, as I see it, as do many scientists ( in the hard sciences) and engineering, is not possible. We may have to have recourse to what social scientists call “indicators”, which as the name auto-suggests is far removed from any notion of accuracy and precision, and just simply very rough impressions of some aspect. Which aspect it is, will depend upon the researcher, upon his aims, and his target audience. My view is, of course, one view and there may well be numerous and conflicting views. I do not have the monopoly of wisdom. I will be happy to read of how you progress.
As for questionnaires, I think it may be difficult to find one readily available. But, you can try to develop your own questionnaire and use it on large sample, drawn from several countries. You would want to determine and report content validity, face validity, criterion validity, etc, and reliability. Others might be persuaded to use your questionnaire and thus lead to greater acceptance.
Finally, I am not a professor, just a simple PhD.
Do not worry about your writing – it is relatively good. I have seen many badly formulated questions and what’s worse, even badly formulated responses.
Best wishes.
Niloofar,
This paper may help
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299747565_Towards_a_talent-driven_outward-oriented_globally-competitive_SME_framework_Discussion_Paper
Technical Report Towards a talent-driven outward-oriented globally-competitiv...
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