Open innovation is a well-known and recognized concept. Introduced by Chesbrough in 2003, this concept achieved an incredible success in the academic world as well as in large companies. Defined by Chesbrough as “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology” (Chesbrough.2003), Open Innovation took an important place in the business world during the last 10 years. Indeed many large groups, as well as SMEs make use of this innovation process (i.e. Google, Orange, Coca Cola…). The application of Open Innovation improves the performance of research and development, but also the production and marketing (faster, less expensive, and more creative). However, the establishments of processes, which are an answer to the Open Innovation challenges, are not always accepted in any businesses. Moreover even the academic literature despite its enthusiasm for the concept seems to be mainly oriented in Open Innovation and its implementation within large groups (Lackner.2013; Mortara-Minshall.2011; Christensen et al.2005; Ferrary. 2011; Melese et al.2009; Kirschbaum.2005; Dogson et al.2006).
Our study provides a new innovative “way of entrance” in the Open Innovation paradigm. Today, the students, as potential future employees of the bands that are part of a commitment to Open Innovation, are themselves directly affected by the changes in the functioning of companies. But are they ready to work in an Open Innovation framework? Is the generation of today’s students more favorable than others to the development of the economy of sharing? And if that is not the case, how can universities and companies promote adhesion of future employees in these processes? Our explorative study focusses on the relationship between students and the concept of Open Innovation. This study based on a questionnaire (three different parts, 28 questions) was conducted initially on the students of the University of Strasbourg. Our desire is to extend the questionnaire to various European and world universities to monopolize as much data as possible. This approach is part of an innovative process with the investigating target on universities and students. Therefore the study has a three-dimensional character with a focus on the three major players in our societies: University - Enterprises - Students. To our knowledge, there exists currently no such study in the academic literature. Ultimately, the study will provide expertise on Open Innovation that will allow businesses to have their employees to be the principles of the factory of the future and to create adequate management structures to evolve in this new organizational context.
With the survey for this paper we already generated data from 151 students. Beside demographic information like the age or sex of the participants, we also captured their answers regarding their own sharing behavior, their embeddedness in their academic environment and their knowledge concerning Open Innovation. After the usual data management, we did a descriptive analysis with the participants’ answers and detected, that the majority (66%) of the participants had no knowledge about the concept of Open Innovation. In a next step we went on to estimate our first correlation tables and regression models, which have shown that students, whom are more connected to their universities and participating in extracurricular activities, tend to show significantly more (self-reported) sharing behavior than those who feel less embedded. Moreover our upcoming results suggest that people, whom perceive a lot of information and material sharing in their environment, also reported higher sharing rates. The last interesting result we can offer at this stage of our study is that it also seems, that whether the concept of Open Innovation was taught at the student’s faculty or not, had a significant influence on their behavior. Demographic factors like age and sex seem to have no influence on the sharing rates of our participants, while the years the participant has spent at university (which can be interpreted as a measurement for education) was strictly positively correlated with the self-reported sharing of information during exams. This last result has to be read with care, because with the length of a student’s university life, his or her chance to share information during exams increases with every exam.
The results up to this point can be interpreted in such a way that students environment plays an essential role whether they show sharing behavior or not. Furthermore it was recognized that faculties whom are teaching the concepts of Open Innovation also contribute to beneficial behavior of their members. From an organizational point of view one can now argue that if a university has the desire to increase the sharing rates of their students, it should offer structures whom are incentivizing such behavior, like increasing the number of lessons spent on teaching interacting concepts like that of Open Innovation or also to offer a higher amount of extracurricular activities. Of course we are aware that our results are still showing correlations and not causalities.
As we are very interested in expanding this survey to other universities to investigate whether there are regional, national or spatial differences among students, we are looking forward to find partners whom are interested in this field of research and progress the idea of taking a closer look at the future academic labor force. On the other hand it would be very interesting to do this kind of survey on a firm level and to compare generated results.
Also it would be from great interest to acquire social parameters like income within such a survey to check its influence on sharing rates.
By 1st August 2016 we expect our paper to be finished. The upcoming work until this date will be focused on checking the different specifications of our empirical model as well as to make the paper finally fit into a common academic framework.
Perception_of_Open_Innovation_by_students.pdf 