The Role of Collaborative HRM on Open Innovation Culture and Open Innovation Performance

The Role of Collaborative HRM on Open Innovation Culture and Open Innovation Performance

Bhandari, Trishla (TU Delft Technology, Policy and Management)

Verburg, R.M. (mentor)
van der Voort, H.G. (graduation committee)
Pachos-Fokialis, N. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Management of Technology (MoT)

2021-08-24

Open innovation is a collective bidirectional flow of knowledge and capabilities across organizations. Open innovation aims to build mutually beneficial relationships among corporate that can lead to competitive advantage. The market benefits by getting new and improved products faster, and the organization benefits financially and gains brand recognition. Although open innovation has its benefits, it comes with many challenges, the first being the organizations' readiness towards engaging in open innovation. Humans are the essential resource for open innovation in an organization. If organizations want to be successful in their open innovation objective, they need to manage human resources strategically. Open innovation has significant challenges; using strategic human resource management, organizations can navigate the challenges and benefit from open innovation. This paper has identified a relationship between collaborative human resource management practices and open innovation. HR focuses on strengthening the employees, teams and managers capability towards open innovation. HR promotes a change in leadership, culture, and engages in employee skill development. HRM has less to do with management making decisions to engage in partnerships but rather focuses on creating an open innovation mindset in the managers and promotes open innovation in the organisation. The paper has done a multi level analysis and found that HRM can promote a cultural change towards open innovation, affecting employees', teams and managers abilities and decision-making towards facilitating open innovation. To develop a culture of open innovation, open innovation must be addressed in the organization mission and vision. This will create a collective sense of purpose within employees and management. HR can further organize collaborative HRM (CHRM) practices that can develop unique skills and capabilities required for open innovation. Moreover, CHRM practices have been found to affect the management mindset towards open innovation and improving their leadership, knowledge sharing and risk-taking abilities - making them open to the idea of engaging in partnerships. CHRM practices affect the skills of the employees; together, they can affect the ways employees source and share knowledge from within and outside the organisation and help them create an open mindset. It can also help them learn how to build mutually beneficial and long-lasting relationships. There is a strong focus on teamwork based abilities and skills, which affect open innovation culture. Collaboration is a significant behavioural attribute for open innovation. These skills correspond to improved knowledge and skill sharing, sourcing and relationship building as well. The thesis has identified effective practices that can develop the skills and capabilities of employees and shift the organizations focus towards open innovation by moving towards a cultural change. Cultural change can be achieved by addressing the communication and relationships between employees and management. Open communication of the success and failures of partnerships need to be addressed. Sharing these stories will encourage employees to also engage in such activities. A framework to measure the open innovation performance of an organization has been proposed. A set of qualitative and quantitative indicators has been identified to help organizations measure their open innovation outcome. The study identifies that to CHRM practices can develop the capabilities of employees in an organisation and achieve a cultural change towards open innovation . Open innovation affects individuals and teams and can lead to elevated levels of open innovation performance which can be measured.

Collaborative Human Resource Management, Open Innovation Culture, Open Innovation Performance

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4833d1b1-3ea0-4e35-bf78-aed852c0a568

Student theses

master thesis

© 2021 Trishla Bhandari