Anna Yström

Linköping University | LiU · Department of Management and Engineering (IEI)

The concept of open innovation has gained traction among practitioners and academics. Many different aspects of open innovation have been researched, but the question of how to manage open innovation collaboration in order to achieve the desired knowledge flow across organizational boundaries remains only partly answered. Consequently, this article...

In a distributed world, relationships and partnering become even more critical for business, as delivering on rising and complex demands and addressing complex issues is more than one organization can do alone. Such a situation constitutes a huge challenge for many organizations. Building on an inductive case study of an open innovation initiative,...

The open innovation paradigm has created opportunities for the emergence of new actors to provide support for open innovation. It is acknowledged that knowledge creation is pivotal to innovation, but this has yet to be discussed in the context of open innovation intermediation. This paper based on a longitudinal study of SAFER, a traffic and vehicl...

This chapter asks how we can understand the managerial practices in open innovation, a recently popularized way of organizing innovative work. Open innovation implies opening up the borders of the organization, creating a context where conventional steering and managerial tools no longer apply. Utilizing a collaborative research approach, following...

Purpose: Innovation intermediaries have become key actors in open innovation (OI) contexts. Research has improved the understanding of the managerial challenges inherent to intermediation in situations in which problems are rather well defined. Yet, in some OI situations, the relevant actor networks may not be known, there may be no clear common in...

Industrial PhD students, affiliating to industrial firms and academic institutions, hold unique boundary‐spanning positions as they engage in knowledge co‐creation through university–industry collaboration (UIC). Despite much research on knowledge transfer processes and boundary spanners in inter‐organizational contexts, firms who engage in UIC rem...

Innovation management research often underestimates the social and political nature of innovation processes, leading it to fail to fully explain why many innovative projects experience delays and/or failure. As many organizations engage in collaborative innovation processes involving multiple partners, we must also recognize that such environments...

Industrial PhD students, affiliating to industrial firms and academic institutions, hold unique boundary-spanning positions as they engage in knowledge co-creation through University-Industry Collaboration (UIC). Despite much research on knowledge transfer processes and boundary spanners in inter-organizational contexts, firms who engage in UIC rem...

Organizations today need to adapt their operations for a more sustainable future, and the transition management literature has highlighted the need for individuals who can collaborate with others to find new paths forward. Essentially, these individuals are boundary spanners with specific skills and competences to bridge diverging perspectives and...

While several studies have outlined university-industry collaboration’s (UIC) direct impact in creating value for the participating actors, few have addressed its indirect and long-term effect on the surrounding context or ecosystem level. This study examined how collaborative knowledge-sharing activities in UIC contribute to shaping the surroundin...

As achieving environmental sustainability is a complex problem, it is often recognized that no organization can accomplish this systemic change by itself; thus, multi-actor collaboration is needed. Regarding the specific issue of increased energy efficiency, previous research has highlighted the need for collaboration and knowledge exchange among a...

Given that the innovation landscape is changing, and new forms of organization and management are emerging, this study discusses the potential benefits of action research for innovation management (IM) as it provides closeness to living emergent systems, generates rich insights as well as knowledge for both rigorous theory development and change in...

In the field of innovation management, the study of collaborative innovation has focused primarily on the type of networks to support innovation, the modularity of the product's architecture required to engage actors in collaboration, the strategies for patenting and knowledge appropriation, and the public policies likely to stimulate collaborative...

Collaboration has become a common way for organizational actors to engage in problem solving and innovation. Yet shifting from strategic interactions (driven by reduction of transaction costs) to transformational interaction (driven by collaborative transorganizational development) appears to be difficult to achieve in practice in a network setting...

This study explores how managerial practices can develop and enhance a creative climate in science parks. Based on a case study of one of the most important Italian science parks, Area Science Park, our results suggest that science park management can further enhance the park’s park potential and strengthen ties to its different actors by focusing...

This paper explores how experimenting with collaborative processes contributes to reinventing the purpose and practices of an organisation. Based on a case study of the Insectarium of Montréal, we focus on the 2-year collaborative process orchestrated by the director, involving employees, experts and visitors. Our findings show several organisation...

While it could be argued that globalisation would diminish the importance of a company’s location, research has shown that in an increasingly complex, knowledge-based and dynamic economy, regional collaboration has in fact become a critical aspect of enhancing competitiveness, locally as well as globally. Still, in order to create sustainable, inno...

Many organizations struggle to reap the benefits of working collaboratively to create innovation. This paper explores the challenges and tensions related to shifting towards joint value capture as opposed to value creation in collaborative platforms. It is based on collaborative research studies of three collaborative platforms within a Swedish aut...

The open innovation paradigm has created opportunities for the emergence of new actors to provide support for open innovation. It is acknowledged that knowledge creation is pivotal to innovation, but this has yet to be discussed in the context of open innovation intermediation. This paper based on a longitudinal study of SAFER, a traffic and vehicl...

Purpose – By increasing connectivity between multiple partners, the new paradigm of open innovation has been argued to stimulate creativity. However, there are still few empirical studies exploring what influence this new form of organizing for innovation has on the creative climate. The purpose of this paper is to start filling that knowledge gap...

Based on an action research process, this paper explores the challenges organizations face in practice as they engage in open innovation projects with multiple partners. It appears to sometimes be challenging to reap the benefits of bringing multiple, diverse partners together e.g. in open innovation collaboration, as it is difficult to turn the di...

Open innovation was introduced in 2003 as a new business model for how to transfer ideas or competence across organizational boundaries. Making this shift from closed to open innovation processes is argued to offer the possibility of creating and developing technology, services and processes in new ways. However, many organizations are still not en...

This paper explores the challenges organizations face in practice as they engage in open innovation projects with multiple partners. Open innovation as a way to increase competitiveness has become popular among many organizations, but its success is not guaranteed. It appears to sometimes be challenging to reap the benefits of bringing multiple, di...

This paper questions the applicability of traditional notions of intermediary activities, which are usually categorized as either brokering or networking, in cases of high uncertainty regarding technologies, markets or which actors to involve. In the case of collaborative open innovation, especially in circumstances when no single organization is a...

This paper investigates the relationship between open innovation and organizational creativity by assessing and discussing the creative climate in an open innovation arena. It is a case study of an open innovation arena called SAFER, where 27 partner organizations meet to innovate together. The study uses a mixed method consisting of a quantitative...

Despite the fact that Open Innovation (OI) has rapidly become one of the hottest topics in innovation management, comprehensive reviews of the state of the research field and its managerial implications are scarce. This could be one of the reasons why OI still represents a big challenge for innovation managers. This paper, based on a literature rev...

Seven years after Chesbrough published the first book on open innovation, the field has literally exploded, and is continuing to do so at an increasing speed. Earlier overviews have analyzed the current status of the field at different points in time. The purpose with this paper is to take this research one step further and analyze gaps in the fiel...

The undergraduate programs within electrical engineering, computer science and engineering and software engineering at Chalmers are currently under revision. Some notable problems for these programs are the long-term trends of diminishing number of applications and a low share of female students. This paper first describes the stakeholder's needs a...