The Role Of Leadership In Open Innovation

Abstract

Open innovation ensures that there is a mutual flow of knowledge and skills between organizations. In this regard, the focus of open innovation is on forming mutually beneficial connections that can ensure competitive advantage. The market gets optimized processes and technologies, and the organization can achieve profitability. Although open innovation can have many benefits, it also brings challenges. The most important is the support within an organization to adopt open innovation. Employees are critical to open innovation. If organizations want to achieve successful open innovation, they must embed open innovation into the organization's mission and vision. This report maps the relationships between middle management leadership behaviors and employee open innovation behaviors. Leadership behaviors focus on developing the behaviors of employees and leaders themselves in relation to open innovation. Leadership encourages the development of employees' personal and professional skills. Leadership emphasizes decisions to build and maintain relationships and to promote open innovation behavior among employees, thus stimulating open innovation within the organization. Semi-structured interviews based on an exploratory qualitative method were used for this research. Interviews were conducted with 12 participants. Six leadership experts and six employees from different areas in the Netherlands were selected for this purpose. This research conducted a multilevel analysis and found that leadership behaviors drive important organizational changes related to open innovation and improve open innovation behaviors of employees. To implement open innovation within the organization, open innovation must be integrated into the mission and mandate of the organization. This creates effective collaboration between leaders and employees. Leadership can enable the use of leadership behaviors that can develop skills and competencies critical to open innovation. In addition, leadership behaviors have been found to influence employee behaviors related to open innovation when it comes to improving knowledge acquisition and sharing. In addition, employees are motivated to enter into external relationships with other organizations. Leadership behavior influences employee knowledge and skills. Leaders can influence the way employees acquire and share knowledge outside the organization and stimulate employees' open innovation behavior. Similarly, they can develop in the area of communication to foster useful long-term relationships. 9 In addition, more transparency, less time pressure, and the provision of support are important for gathering and sharing knowledge and building partnerships. This work has demonstrated effective leadership behaviors that can improve employee skills and competencies and specified the shift in organizational goals from open innovation to open employee innovation behaviors. Development within the organization can be accomplished by improving open communication and bonds between leaders-employees. In addition, there must be open communication between leaders and employees to motivate them to participate in open innovation activities. This research suggests that leadership behaviors can improve employees' open innovation behaviors by developing these behaviors in two phases of open innovation: obtaining ideas from external sources and idea integration. Open innovation involves individual employees and leaders, which can improve the output of open innovation in the organization.