Sponsor’s perspectives on open innovation projects : Results of a qualitative study

Currently companies seek to constantly develop innovative solutions so that they remain competitive in the market. However, there is a lack of understanding on how to develop innovation skills, as well as the problem of not having a single interpretation of what constitutes the innovation process. Even though some studies published on this subject, few studies have investigated the sponsor's perspective on open innovation projects. In this work, a qualitative study has been carried out to investigate five sponsors and their perspectives on open innovation projects in the automotive, steel, oil, health, and energy sectors. The results of this study showed that the sponsors have an organizational perspective and a task perspective on the projects and they are not the same. The organizational perspective focuses on building relationships between the base organization (sponsoring company) and the project team (temporary organization), seeking to create an adequate solution to the problem they are seeking to solve. The second perspective, the task point of view, focuses on the partners that carry out the tasks that they think will produce innovative results. The experiences shared here can help other stakeholders to better understand the reality of open innovation projects.