A Survey of Practitioners Use of Open Innovation

In recent years, the influence of open innovation has become more and more important in the development of software products and services. However, open innovation is still unexplored for software-intensive organizations and its potential impact on the organization's innovative performance. In this paper we present the results of an empirical study carried out to gauge common experiences within open innovation in the requirements engineering process, and to understand the barriers and drivers for using open innovation. A web-based questionnaire was sent out to 54 industry practitioners, of which 35 answered. The results show that open innovation as part of the requirements engineering process is becoming more and more fully exploited from both the outside and inside. Moreover, potential drivers for using open innovation include, new generated ideas and higher costumer benefits, while identified barriers include, hard finding the right partner and lack of innovativeness.