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208 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

One-stop centres
(sell others’ideas
Merchants –e.g. Ebay)
(codify/commercialize IP)
Marketers
Architects (market ideas profitably)
(orchestrate the system

Missionaries
Explorers (advance ideas
(discover ideas) towards a cause)
Investors
(fund ideas)

Figure 9.5 An opening innovation system

R&D is Connect and Develop – collaborative networks that are in touch with
99% of the research that we don’t do ourselves.’
Managing knowledge to achieve open innovation rests on many of the
knowledge processes and features of enabling contexts discussed in this book
(team work, network building, communication technology, supportive organi-
zational design and leadership, supportive HRM practices). We must be very
careful, however, about depicting the open innovation model as a new panacea
for innovation. The jury is out, for example, on whether the model is equally
applicable across contexts, on how far the model is applicable to innovation in
services as compared to products and on how far many organizations actually
have the human or organizational capabilities required to support an open
innovation model (Fredberg et al., 2008). As Witzeman et al. (2006) observe,
open innovation implies a major cultural shift: ‘Harnessing external technol-
ogy for innovation requires a fundamental change in employee thinking. The
“Not Invented Here” syndrome is replaced with the “Invented Anywhere”
approach’ (p. 27).

>> PRACTICE PERSPECTIVES ON INNOVATION
Practice perspectives have featured less centrally to date in studies of innova-
tion. Communities of practice (Chapter 8) have been studied in relation to their
positive effects on learning and incremental change but even here their role in
relation to more radical forms of innovation and change is open to question. As
Fox (2000) observes, ‘communities of practice theory tells us nothing about
how, in concrete practice, members of a community change their practice or
innovate’ (p. 860). Practice perspectives were introduced in Chapter 1. Like pro-
cess accounts they highlight the situated nature of knowledge and the very pro-
visional, improvisational and iterative ways that things get done in innovation.

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