Open Innovation Activities in Swedish Cleantech

Abstract

Open innovation has a history of being researched on a few large companies in a qualitative manner. An often neglected field of research, but increasingly receiving more attention, is on open innovation activities among SMEs. Especially SMEs in the cleantech industry are of interest since cleantech companies can solve or develop solutions to the global environmental problems and contribute at the same time to economic growth. In this thesis, the continuum of open innovation activities among Swedish SMEs in the cleantech industry are explored using a quantitative approach. In the questionnaire, eight open innovation activities and different trends are measured representing two open innovation perspectives - exploration and exploitation. Thus, our research question is: “What open innovation activities are performed by Swedish SMEs in the cleantech industry?” Our findings show that the Swedish SMEs in the cleantech industry engage in many open innovation activities and that they have increasingly done so for the last three years. Motivations for open innovation are mainly knowledge, innovation processes, and market-related motivations while challenges mainly are resources and organization/culture. We didn’t find significant differences between the manufacturing and services industry. On the other hand, we found differences in customer involvement between small-sized enterprises and medium-sized enterprises. Small-sized firms are involving customers in their open innovation processes significantly more in the cleantech industry. Moreover, cluster analysis suggests Swedish SMEs in the cleantech industry are using a more complex combination of open innovation activities (i.e. SMEs in different clusters adopt open innovation activities in not a trend like manner) than the one-dimensional adoption found in earlier research (i.e. some SMEs in one cluster are simply more open than others in an another cluster).