4. Why is inter-organisational collaboration important for open innovation?

Open innovation is defined by opening the own innovation process to others, ideally integrating them into the process. Thus, open innovation is strongly related with inter-organisational collaboration. An optimal open innovation strategy would exploit multiple ties to multiple institutions.

Most of the challenges we are facing today are too complex and too large to tackle in isolation – thus we need a new approach, new shared value through innovation. The challenges also call attention to the quadruple helix model of innovation where civil society joins with business, academia, and government sectors to drive changes far beyond the scope of what any one organization can do on their own.

So actually, Open Innovation is almost always related to inter-organisational collaboration, as long as it is not “just” crowdsourcing with individual persons (as often seen in challenges or contests, e.g., the Bombay Sapphire Glass Contest, Swarowski Design Contest or Lego Ideas.