Open Innovation and Access to Knowledge

The world is full of unexploited knowledge and brilliant ideas that are never realized. Innovators often fail to take note of external innovations and sometimes they are not even aware of the market for internal ideas. “Open innovation”—that is, using external knowledge and sharing internal knowledge with external players—is a promising step towards reducing this fundamental mismatch between the global supply and demand for knowledge.

In open innovation projects, innovators from the private sector and academia voluntarily disclose innovation processes and results to other (potential) innovators. They make internal knowledge accessible to the outside world and attract external expertise in exchange. By doing so, they are able to improve their innovativeness.

The success of open innovation projects hinges on the incentives of innovators to share their knowledge and to interact with each other, as well as on the matching of knowledge supplied and demanded. Institutional environments of different quality, for example, in terms of different intellectual property right (IPR) systems, may affect innovators’ incentives to share knowledge and thus the pool of knowledge available for follow-up innovations. To build an efficient institutional environment that fosters both open innovation and competition between innovators, contributions from policy-makers, the private sector, academia and non-governmental organizations are all essential.

How can knowledge sharing be encouraged and supported by redesigning existing IPR systems? Going beyond the purely legal aspects, how can the culture of knowledge sharing in a society be developed and sustained in general? How can the ideas of individuals be better traced and integrated in the innovation system? How can information and communications technologies be used to improve intermediation and communication between innovators? How is it possible to reconcile the social benefits of free knowledge flows and innovators’ private benefits from preserving their knowledge advantages?