Open innovation management: challenges and prospects

Innovation is the key to maintain competitive advantage in a market and gain leadership. Open innovation is a pioneering mechanism with increasing number of studies in the literature. However, there is lack of studies on open innovation in South Korea. In addition, there are still number of issues unclear in open innovation theory because of its wide concept. Therefore, the research aims to analyse the characteristics of open innovation in South Korea and examine the challenges of open innovation theory. The research surveyed about 85 South Korean companies to investigate whether there are significant differences in open innovation activities in four environmental factors (industry type, company size, market type, and R&D intensity) and to examine current challenges of open innovation and its nature The results of the survey indicated that South Korean companies’ open innovation generally diverge from main trends in open innovation shown in existing studies.