Towards the back end of last year, open innovation guru Henry Chesborough released a report looking at adoption of open innovation around the world.

It revealed that 78 percent of organizations around the world have used open innovation in some way.  It was a heady claim, but a slight caveat applies as the study only looked at companies with revenues of over $250 million.

How common is open innovation amongst smaller organizations?  A recent paper in the Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research set out to explore the literature and find out.

How common is open innovation in SMEs?

The authors conducted a literature review of studies that explored the matter, and found a telling scarcity of coverage, especially in North America, with the bulk of the research in the area coming from the EU.

The review reveals that most SME application of open innovation is around commercialization of products rather than early stage activity such as research and development.

There is a particular concern around IP protection as the technologies themselves tend to be much more selective.  As such, the paper suggests a careful balance is required between protecting this IP and collaborating with external partners.

It also appears as though open innovation within the SME community is more for new product innovation than it is for incremental improvements, with new entrants to a market much faster at adopting OI than incumbents.

If SMEs are to succeed with open innovation, the authors suggest that different approaches to management can be hugely beneficial.

Can SMEs use open innovation?

Of course, there has traditionally been a degree of skepticism about whether smaller organizations can use open innovation effectively, which may be partly behind the lack of study into this area.

A few years ago, for instance, Stefan Lindegaard made the case for open innovation remaining the preserve of larger organizations.  His thesis is that whilst there are many instances of smaller companies contributing to open innovation projects, there are far fewer of them actually controlling the process.

There are growing examples of platforms such as Quirky and Marblar, or even TechShop and Genspace, offering smaller enterprises the chance to mingle with bigger ones, but there remains a sense that they are passengers rather than drivers.

It’s something that the academic literature would appear to support.  I wonder if much of the problem is that of definition?

It stands to reason that few small enterprises have the resources to operate an X-Prize style challenge, and it’s often these that attract most interest, whether that’s from participants, from the press or from academia.

With organizations of all shapes and sizes benefiting from access to the ‘crowd’ be that via crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, citizen science or even the sharing economy, it is perhaps as much an issue of what defines open innovation as it is anything else.