A blend of semi-open innovation & open sourceness: Accelerating innovation within a large Telecommunications company

Due to intense competition and time-to-market pressures, Telecommunications companies across the world are fostering and stimulating Research and Development (R&D) organizations to `open-up' to various degrees. This is a response to both an immediate `need' and perhaps due to the fact that the well proven open innovation paradigm has shown to be an effective strategy. Naturally, the degree of this `openness' may vary from one firm to the next. Additionally, this open paradigm may not be necessarily confined only to the R&D (traditional innovation drivers) parts of the business. In this paper, for example we witness that its influence can have far more reaching and valuable impacts. Subsequently, the paper outlines how a `Semi-Open paradigm' approach can be an essential ingredient in accelerating innovation capability growth - company wide. We present a firms recipe for success, which includes several novel innovation process methods and tools to capture and measure the valuable key innovation aspects the firm has identified. We find that one of the key culture aspects of this approach involves both a potpourri blend of top-down strategic alignment (fostering semi-open innovation) and combining pure (bottom-up) creative enthusiasm (using open-source software) via its people.