Open Innovation or Innovation in the Open? An Exploration of the Strategy–Innovation Link in Five Scale-Intensive Services

Abstract

This chapter explores the strategy–innovation link in open service innovations. The increased attention to the role of the firm's external environment on innovation has important implications for strategy. However, our literature review reveals that the strategy–innovation link is ambiguously treated in extant theory, especially with respect to open- and service-innovations. Therefore, we inductively explore innovation practices in five large scale-intensive service firms to establish the link between their strategy and open innovation practices. To our surprise, we find that explicit innovation strategies lack in all five firms. The findings also suggest that the logic of innovation and strategy is hard to integrate in practice for these firms. Based on our empirical exploration, we contradict existing research on the role of strategy and open service innovations and detail implications based on our study.