The profile of the innovation buyer, a key variable for solving the loyalty paradox in open innovation management

Le profil de l’acheteur innovation, variable clé pour résoudre le paradoxe de la fidélité dans le management de l’open innovation

Romaric Servajean-Hilst () and Yasser Refass
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Romaric Servajean-Hilst: Kedge BS - Kedge Business School, CRG I3 - Centre de recherche en gestion i3 - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - Université Paris-Saclay - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: A firm generally prefers to develop its innovation projects with its close partners. However, while this makes it possible to capitalize on the relational rent born of habit, this habit also limits their ability to generate new ideas. And when it comes to identifying new partners for new ideas, navigating this unknown can be more costly than the expected gains. This is the paradox of loyalty in open innovation. This article looks at how to respond to this paradox in an extreme case: the search for innovative concepts and partners to solve business problems that require cutting-edge scientific and technical knowledge. Based on the crowdsourcing approach implemented at GRTgaz, it illustrates how a dedicated, new and hybrid function, Innovation-Purchasing, works. This case study is based on the literature on crowdsourcing and on the early purchasing involvement in innovation, on a study of the results of 3 successive crowdsourcing campaigns and on the PIC project, which consisted in supporting GRTgaz's Open Innovation team in setting up a new campaign. Based on an analysis of the four crowdsourcing campaigns and a presentation of three emblematic sourcings of innovative solutions and partners, this study sheds light on the practices and impacts of the Innovation-Purchasing function in this context. Firstly, it underlines its role in specifying the innovation target to identify and motivate new partners. Then, it shows the extent to which this function prepares the future exploitation of the innovation resulting from collaboration with these partners, while increasing their company's capacity for innovation. Finally, it identifies its role in the coordination of innovative ecosystems in the early stages, through the preparation and implementation of each crowdsourcing campaign.This enables us to sketch the profile of the Innovation-Purchasing function, a hybrid of the Purchasing and R&D functions, but neither of them. This article thus offers a range of skills to be mobilised for the development of companies' open innovation capacity.

Keywords: Open Innovation; crowdsourcing; ecosystem; sourcing; purchasing; buyer; procurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03422329v1
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Published in Observatoire Projet Innovation Conception – École polytechnique. Open Innovation au concret : transformer l’organisation interne pour l’ouvrir à l’extérieur, 7, Observatoire Projet Innovation Conception – École polytechnique, Paris, France., 2020, Les cahiers du Master P.I.C

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