Ideas Sharing Through ICT in Innovation Processes: A Design Theory for Open Innovation Platforms

Since Henry Chesbrough’s remark on the importance of opening innovation processes to the cooperation of external entities, like partners, competitors or customers, open innovation (OI) gained momentum. Open innovation approach was started and run by different companies around the world. Meanwhile specific platforms were developed to support these processes, either by intermediaries aimed at helping companies to shift to an open innovation approach, or by firms which decided to adopt this approach trough their own created and managed platforms. Through a descriptive design theory perspective the paper analyzes the features (components) that these web-based platforms offer in respect to the requirements they have to fulfill in order to effectively support the open innovation approach