Open innovation strategies in top R&D spending companies

The paper suggests an accounting-based methodology for defining open innovation adoption modalities, based on economic and financial transactions in inbound and outbound processes. The framework is applied to a sample of 274 top research and development spending companies operating in bio-pharmaceutical and technology hardware and equipment industries. For biotechnological companies open innovation represents a core activity, with most of them having high values of revenues deriving from joint development projects and licensing. On the other side, for pharmaceutical companies open innovation is somehow ancillary: even if most open innovation activities are widespread, their values are not really significant if compared to the total business volume. For companies in the technology hardware and equipment industry the use of spin-ins as a mean for incorporating external knowledge is a characteristic activity and also the acquisition and selling of innovation-related intangibles is quite pervasive. Further, a limited number of semiconductors companies have remarkable values of licensing revenues.