Open Innovation and network models: empirical research

From the twentieth century, the interest of many scholars was focused on the company system and the reasons that justified its existence. Among them, Zanda qualifies the company as an open organizational system, finalized, excessively complex, probabilistic, with all of the special regulation processes, capable of influencing the external environment and whose behaviour can be defined through a model of limited rationality . The company system interacts with the external environment, through the exchange of energy, information and knowledge, with the guarantee of survival and the development in time. The products that are offered to the market by the company are more and more enhanced by knowledge. In reality, the involvement in production processes of individuals outside of the company favours the exchange of cognitive resources and the birth of company innovation. In this direction, the knowledge that contemporary companies have are co-produced and shared when they are organized within a network: the company network concept identifies a whole range of companies that make use of free cooperative relations and that modify the mechanisms of company governance and economic sectors, as well as operation mechanisms of the market . The network exchanges, co-produces, shares and allows for information and knowledge to be repeated, aiming at the innovative nature of the processes and of the products . Furthermore, the growing virtualization of economic exchanges, cancelling the physical production space and hierarchy, now distributed and open, has allowed for the development of inter-connective flows between central and peripheral places compared with the availability of resoures. The network organisational model favours the paradigma of open innovation : the latter is identified in the process through which the ideas generated within the company as well as the ones acquired externally, representing input for activation of an innovative company process . Introduced at the begining of the Nineties, this management model of innovation consists of three phases: - the acquisition of knowledge from internal and external sources compared with the company system; - the creation of innovation within the company; - externalisation of the results achieved according to different methods. Reference is made to an open model as many methods of merging ideas and technologies in the processes exist and, in turn, in the markets: it is possible to use the innovation asset in the production processes within the company system (insourcing), or externalised through licenses (licensing) or in a free form (spin-off). Collaboration activated by the companies that operate in a network contributes to the generation of open innovation through the sharing of knowledge and of technologies, used to support the production processes. The model of open innovation differs from the closed model for the following aspects: - the generation of value originates from the use of internal as well as external ideas and technologies compared with the company. - company knowledge and the knowledge acquired have the same value - the business model plays an important role in converting company research and development into economic results; - the search for talents inside and outside of the company favours innovative company processes; - useful knowledge is distributed outside of the company; - the company must be capable of enhancing research produced externally, transferring it into the business model; - the use of combined technologies reduces costs and times of the innovative process; - open innovation determines new possibilities in terms of proceeds, through entrance to new markets. In order to set up the model of open innovation preconditions of a technical and legal nature are required. In light of this, the objective of this chapter is to investigate into the preconditions aimed at favouring open innovation in the territory included in the provinces of Frosinone and Latina. In specific terms, starting with the research carried out on a sample of companies, the state o fuse of technology within the companies analysed has been identified, establishing the technical preconditions. Subsequent, this work will interpret the preconditions of the legal infrastructure of the companies investigated, with a view to combining the knowledge and production of goods and services of each entity in an independent manner. In this sense, the analysis of network contracts stipulated on the territory of the provinces of Frosinone and Latina will intervene, according to the law 122/2010. Finally, according to the announced technical and legal preconditions, the profiles emerging from the local network model, with a key to open innovation, will be indicated.