Innovation seems to be on everyone's lips, but its definition is not the same for everyone. For some innovation is technology or insight and for others - inventing things that makes life better. One of the best definitions is that innovation means viewing the same things differently. When you discover things that were always there, but suddenly they link in another way and compose new things (Archimede- Eureka). Open innovation is the contrary of the traditional model of vertical integration of innovation where internal research and activities of development conduct to internally developed products that are further sold by the company. Although the Open innovation idea goes back to the 60s, it was for the first time coined in 2003 by Henry Chesbrough and his team, at Berkeley Business School. They defined open innovation as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively”. But this is considered to be a tidy definition, because it stresses both the inflows …show more content…
At the moment, intensive collaboration processes of the participants are located within virtual communities. Within these communities are developed quality products that can compete with products ever created by a traditional process of innovation. One example is the Wikipedia project or software "open-source". In such a community, the initial ideas of the participants are taken up by other members of the community and are designed and developed step by