Establishment and Development of the Innovation-Promoting Organization for Open Innovation

Abstract

　A great deal of recent researches focuses on open innovation for industry. Some of these describe public supporting organizations and independent agents to promote open innovation for companies. While these cases present general functions and roles of these organizations, there have been few studies focusing on the functions, roles and characteristics of such agents both outside and inside the company. This research aims to analyze and clarify the roles of such innovation-promoting organizations established by companies and investigate their strategy for successful open innovation. In this paper, we investigated the case of a Japanese cosmetic company, which has established a group company as an innovation-promoting organization, and discovered the following characteristics, functions, and roles which are necessary for an organization that promotes open innovation: outside agents which closely support the top management, flexibility, entrepreneur credentials, wide and deep support for specific projects, provision of venues for discussions between the members of the project group.