What Skills and Competences are required to Implement Open Innovation?

Once companies open up their innovation process, the internal structures change, new tasks and challenges emerge, and employees are no longer expected to have technical-scientific or managerial expertise only but in addition, they should possess certain specific competences and skills. However, the description of these required capabilities often remains vague. This paper focuses on the human resource involved in and driving open innovation: competences and skills for open innovation professionals. We developed and validated scales for measurement open innovation skills and proposed the open innovation specialist profile. In addition, we analyse the differences in open innovation skills depending on the stage of open innovation implementation in the firm, size of the firm, country and industry. This research is based on the large-scale European survey, including 528 large, medium, and small companies from 35 countries located in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]