Let's make money together: Exploring challenges in shifting towards exploiting business opportunities in collaborative platforms

While it lies at the very heart of the open innovation paradigm to change the nature and ways of innovating and profiting from innovation, many organizations still struggle to reap the benefits of working collaboratively to... [ view full abstract ]

While it lies at the very heart of the open innovation paradigm to change the nature and ways of innovating and profiting from innovation, many organizations still struggle to reap the benefits of working collaboratively to create and capture value. In theory, a collaboration encompassing a variety of competences and expertise can look very promising for achieving innovation in order to reduce time to market, reduce costs and sharing risks, but in practice, it can be difficult for a collaboration to achieve the desired benefits of this business model, due to a number of reasons such as unwillingness to compromise, political struggles and unrealistic expectations on one another. This paper explores the challenges related to shifting from a technological focus to a business focus in collaborative platforms. It is based on inductive research of four collaborative platforms within a Swedish automotive ecosystem. Data was collected by means of interviews with participants and representatives. The four cases explored are located in a region with a strong tradition of automotive manufacturing and research. With the long-term focus and specific characteristics of the collaborations, it can be argued that the four cases represent platforms for open innovation collaboration beyond a triple helix consortium or an alliance. While the collaborations studied have slightly different setup (one is incorporated with two main owners, one is a platform or community led by a large industrial actor, one is a research center hosted by a university, one is a project to create a platform for joint development), they all face challenges when they address the business aspect of their collaboration. The technical issues are certainly difficult and intriguing, but the real challenges are related to the questions: How are we jointly going to make money on this? This question is related to commercialization part of the innovation process. Despite that there is a clearly articulated business intention behind forming the collaborative platforms, shifting from discussing technical questions and focusing on technical problem solving to discussing joint business opportunities and taking actions towards commercialization is perceived troublesome by the organizational participants. While many of the organizations participate in a variety of multi-actor collaborations, they still appear inexperienced in how to turn ideas into business when there are multiple organizations having a stake in it. Our findings highlight five challenges; business infancy, strong ties club, locked positions, scattered notion of value and business strategy dissonance, and we propose a model of impediments to business opportunity exploitation in collaborative platforms. We found that the collaborative platforms were contexts characterized by ambiguity regarding the collaboration set-up as well as how to make business based on the collaboration. Several of the challenges have little to do with formal agreements and regulations, they are more related to the social dynamics of the platform. The technological focus formed a natural starting point, and engineers were the natural collaborators. While this worked out well for some time, it became clear that after a while, the core technical competence turned into a core rigidity. The main contribution of this paper is the theorizing of the challenges encountered when attempting to become more business oriented in collaborative platforms.