Bachelor 2024/2025

Open Innovations

Type: Elective course (Digital Product Management)

Area of studies: Business Informatics

Delivered by: Department of Business Informatics

Where: HSE Graduate School of Business

When: 4 year, 1, 2 module

Mode of studies: offline

Open to: students of one campus

Instructors: Zeljko Tekic

Language: English

ECTS credits: 4

Course Syllabus

Abstract

Open Innovation (OI) is defined as a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries. In essence, it encompasses a wide range of practices related to external knowledge acquisition and commercialization—from simple crowd engagement (such as choosing a new ice cream flavor) to the involvement of lead users in developing medical devices, R&D purchases, venturing, licensing agreements, and free revealing of inventions. In the OI approach, firms look beyond their boundaries to exploit the creativity and expertise of users, customers, experts, and online communities to co-create new products and services. By expanding firm boundaries, open innovation reshapes how companies—whether large corporations, SMEs, or startups—strategize, compete, create, deliver, and capture value. The additional layer of complexity brought by artificial intelligence (AI) further increases the importance of collaboration. In the era of AI, open innovation becomes a vital driver of competitiveness: it enables companies to gather and access data, acquire cutting-edge technologies, attract top talent, and leverage diverse expertise. To thrive in this landscape, organizations must master the art of complex, open collaboration. To prepare students for this context, the Open Innovation course covers the fundamentals of open innovation ideas, tools, practices, and strategies, aiming to equip students with the understanding, knowledge, and skills required to manage open and user innovation projects in their future workplaces. A distinctive feature of the course is a company-sponsored hackathon, where students participate in an intensive, practice-based co-creation process. The hackathon allows them to experience open innovation both as active participants—collaborating, prototyping, and pitching solutions—and as innovation-aware observers, who develop insight into what motivates companies to engage in such collaborations and how these processes are managed.

Learning Objectives

• The course is designed to help students understand, experience, and manage open innovation (OI), reflecting the fact that collaboration has become a central feature of contemporary innovation. Few firms today rely solely on closed, internal R&D; instead, most combine in-house efforts with partnerships, user involvement, and ecosystem collaboration. As a result, open innovation has become a mainstream approach in many industries, and future managers need to be fluent in its logic and practice. While grounded in research and theory, the course is practice-oriented and built around a company-sponsored hackathon, which gives students a concentrated co-creation experience. They learn from both perspectives: as active participants, developing and pitching solutions to authentic company problems, and as innovation-aware observers, analyzing the motives, practices, and challenges companies face when engaging in open innovation. The course highlights the role of the innovation manager, who must be able to design, coordinate, and extract value from collaborative innovation processes. By integrating case studies, analytical frameworks, and the hackathon experience, students gain a holistic understanding of how OI works across large corporations, SMEs, startups, and non-commercial organizations. In doing so, the course prepares students to contribute as innovation managers, product and project managers, ecosystem collaborators, and co-creators who can thrive in a world where innovation is increasingly open and collaborative, particularly in the development of new products and services.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• • Understand, explain and apply fundamental open innovation concepts and practices.
• • Understand and explain the main motivation for organizations to use OI, what OI practices organizations use, who are their main partners in OI, and how they profit from open innovation.
• • Understand, explain and critically discuss the differences between open and closed innovation.
• • Differentiate between the different types of OI tools (co-creation with users, crowdsourcing, Lead Users, Innovation Intermediaries, in-licensing, open source…) and choose the right OI tool for different problem sets.
• • Understand the basics of intellectual property rights and their role in OI.
• • Understand, explain and critically discuss the role of open innovation in managing Digital transformation and AI projects.
• • Analyze and synthesize companies’ open innovation strategies.
• • Effectively communicate innovative initiatives in oral and written form.
• • Productively work in groups.
• • Critically reflect on its own learning.
• • Analyze viable business models, develop an initial business model and test its feasibility • Co-create a minimum viable product (MVP) in a group • Shape technology-based ideas into workable business concepts and learn how to test them in the marketplace. • Differentiate and distinguish the different process activities associated with new product/process/service development, inside or outside an established firm.

Course Contents

• What is innovation and why does it matter – intro to the topic and the course
• From closed to open innovation: Innovation as a process and its models
• Open Innovation - cases across industries
• Sources of innovation
• Value appropriation mechanisms, IP rights, and Open innovation
• How technology is commercialized
• Business models and open innovation – user-centricity
• Strategy, big companies, startups, and ecosystems
• User Innovation
• Open and user innovation in Russia

Assessment Elements

• In-class discussions, engagement, and homework
  This class requires a high level of motivation and active class participation. This is not simply a lecture attendance, it is ENGAGEMENT and PARTICIPATION in the lectures, with deep preparation, timely and relevant comments and discussion, comments linked to the previous lectures, personal experience or other courses; opinion based on evidence, thinking, responding to the lecturer’s questions. Max number of points is 15.
• Case Discussion
  Students will receive a list of cases to read and prepare for ahead of each of the three case discussions. Prior to the discussions, they will be required to respond to a set of questions related to the selected cases. During the designated lecture or seminar sessions, students should be prepared to engage in critical discussions of the cases in class.
• Open innovation in Russia (team project)
  Each team is required to propose at least four open innovation (OI) projects initiated by Russian organizations for analysis during the course. The instructor will select three of these four projects for the team to analyze. Please note the following requirements and procedures: Project Selection Guidelines - Diverse Companies: All projects must come from different organizations. - Timeframe: Projects should have been initiated between 2017 and 2024. - First-Come, First-Served: To avoid duplication of projects across teams, a shared Yandex document will be used as a live database. - Database Entry: Teams must enter the projects they plan to focus on by listing the company name, a link to a reference, and a brief one-sentence description of the project (since some companies may have multiple OI projects). - Database Timeline: The database will be open for editing from September 20 at noon until October 18 at noon. - Penalty for Late Entry: Each day of delay will result in a penalty of -1 point from the team’s final score for the task Analysis Requirements For each of the selected projects, the following questions must be answered in the team presentation: 1. What was the goal of the project? 2. What was the organization’s main motivation for using open innovation? 3. What specific OI practices were employed by the organization? 4. Who were the organization’s key partners in the OI initiative? 5. How did open innovation create value for the company? 6. What were the main drivers and barriers to adopting and implementing OI from the perspectives of the company, industry, and country? 7. What did your team learn from these examples? 8. Are there any common patterns across the projects? 9. What could have been done differently in these projects?
• Exam
  The exam is taken in a written format based on a selection of open-ended questions offlime or online with proctoring (start exam platform). Time allowed: 90 minutes.

Interim Assessment

• 2024/2025 2nd module
  0.1 * Case Discussion + 0.15 * Case Discussion + 0.4 * Exam + 0.15 * In-class discussions, engagement, and homework + 0.2 * Open innovation in Russia (team project)

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• Chesbrough, H. W. (2003). The Era of Open Innovation. MIT Sloan Management Review, 44(3), 35–41.
• Tidd, J., Bessant, J. R., & Pavitt, K. (2012). Managing innovation : integrating technological, market and organizational change. Chichester [Etc.].
• von Hippel, E. A. (2016). Free Innovation. United States, North America: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.606752F7

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• Baldwin, C., Hienerth, C., & von Hippel, E. (2006). How user innovations become commercial products: A theoretical investigation and case study. Research Policy, (9), 1291. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsrep&AN=edsrep.a.eee.respol.v35y2006i9p1291.1313
• Brunswicker, S., & Chesbrough, H. (2018). The Adoption of Open Innovation in Large Firms. Research Technology Management, 61(1), 35–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/08956308.2018.1399022
• Chesbrough, H. (2020). To recover faster from Covid-19, open up: Managerial implications from an open innovation perspective. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.04.010
• Chesbrough, H., & Rosenbloom, R. S. (2002). The role of the business model in capturing value from innovation: evidence from Xerox Corporation’s technology spin-off companies. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/11.3.529
• Chesbrough, H., Lettl, C., & Ritter, T. (2018). Value Creation and Value Capture in Open Innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 35(6), 930–938. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12471
• Hienerth, C., von Hippel, E., & Berg Jensen, M. (2014). User community vs. producer innovation development efficiency: A first empirical study. Research Policy, (1), 190. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsrep&AN=edsrep.a.eee.respol.v43y2014i1p190.201

Authors

• Tekich Zhelko