A select group of the world’s 1,000 largest corporate R&D spenders perform significantly better than their competitors over a sustained period while spending less on R&D than their industry rivals, according to management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton’s second annual global innovation study.  The study found that although R&D spending of these 1,000 companies rose last year by more than $20 billion, money simply can’t buy effective innovation.  However, a group of 94 “high-leverage innovators,” including Toyota, Apple, Christian Dior, Google and Caterpillar spend less than their competitors on research and development, yet consistently outperform their industry rivals across a broad set of performance measures.

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In this article, published in the Inside Knowledge magazine of March 2008 (http://www.ikmagazine.com/), Milton Correia de Sousa introduces de concept of knowledge brokers and how these can increase the effectiveness of open innovation processes. The article starts by explaining how the movement from internal R&D to external connect and develop opens the door to companies – large and small – to reach beyond their core competencies to remain competitive in an increasingly complex, uncertain and changing environment. The article further explains how knowledge brokers can act as intelligent change agents that stimulate innovation while keeping focus and creating momentum for action. The article provides also some examples and a case report.

This report aims at giving an overview of the emerging research field of open innovation in a phase that is still very fluid. The purpose of this report is to depict the major tendencies of publications through identifying the main themes in literature and investigating the research frontier. It also aims at discussing potentially important fields of investigation that are still left rather unexplored. This report builds on two main studies. First, a literature overview of the publications on open innovation published in key databases until November 20, 2007 was conducted. However, since the expression was coined as late as 2003, much ongoing research is still not found in the publications. In a second study, nine key researchers in the open innovation field were asked to define the frontier (from the UK, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria and the U.S.) in open innovation research. Their opinions were used as an additional input when trying to identify the future directions for research.