How and why open innovation fail: European SMEs cases.

Open innovation has proven to be an effective strategic tool in achieving competitive advantage. However, at the same time, the research also points to the drawbacks of open innovation practices - related to e.g. resource constraints, power imbalances between partners. Those become particularly critical in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which by default are more limited in resources than large firms. Unfortunately, the success stories of open innovation are disseminated much wider than failures, which create biases in assessing and perceiving open innovation practices. That happens also because failure cases are generally less available and people are often resistant to share stories of unsuccessfulness. One specific challenge in studying OI failures is also to detach the OI failures from generally innovation and strategic failures. With this submission we share six cases of open innovation failures of SMEs from across Europe, providing insights for SMEs managers as well as policy makers on what could go 'wrong' in open innovation. This submission has implications for open innovation research as well as for strategic management literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]