Open innovation in high-technology companies : Case study of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies

Companies innovation process is an important way to both achieve and sustain competitive advantage in today’s business world. The innovation happens in companies within a process consisting from three processes: the front-end innovation process, the new product development process, and commercialization process. The innovation strategy of companies is comprised from different attributes that the company’s emphasis and values in their decision-making process. The theoretical framework of this thesis is built on the principles on open innovation, aggressiveness strategy of the companies, and holistic analytical model developed to evaluate companies’ strategic priorities. The open innovation is scoped by selected strategic attributes in the companies, from which the overall innovation strategy of the company is formed. This study tries to analytically model the open innovation strategy of the case companies within biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. This study uses several critical factors index-based methods to evaluate the past experiences and future expectations of the companies’ top management personnel around the open innovation. In addition, an analytical hierarchy process method is used to specify and evaluate the case companies’ overall innovation strategy around open innovation parameters. This study evaluates the different innovation strategy types used in high technology companies. This study was able to quantitatively determine the innovation strategy types of the case companies using the innovation strategy index method, which was originally derived from manufacturing strategy index method. However, no correlation around the resource allocation index and innovation strategy index was not found.