Building strategic partnerships for managing innovation outsourcing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to uncover the mechanisms of organizations managing innovation outsourcing to business partners. In a business environment characterized by the development of deep, niche expertise in a particular domain, business partnerships can provide a source of innovative rejuvenation by outsourcing the innovation to business partners who have complementary skills and expertise. This paper addresses a critical challenge which the organizations are currently facing: how do you manage outsourcing of innovation to business partners effectively while maintaining your strategic competitiveness?Design/methodology/approach – Exploratory multiple case studies of over 30 innovative European and US companies were done. It involved 50 semi‐structured interviews with senior executives from research and development, product management, information technology, and marketing.Findings – The paper identifies three complementary models of managing outsourcing of innovation to business partner: a...