Introduction

Zusammenfassung

In the past, researchers and managers in the field of technology and innovation management associated strong internal R&D capabilities with innovativeness. Ideas and inventions were generated within the firm’s own research labs and further developed into commercial products by the firm’s own engineering department. Eventually, the market diffusion of innovations was driven by the firm’s own marketing and sales department via the firm’s own distribution channels. Overall, firms only sporadically shared their innovative results with others as a means to generate competitiveness. The underlying opinion of innovation managers and researchers was that “successful innovation requires control”. This strongly self-reliant way to innovate was coined Closed Innovation by Chesbrough in 2003.