Enabling Knowledge Creation Through Outsiders: Towards a Push Model of Open Innovation

Open innovation is increasingly being adopted in business and
describes a situation in which firms exchange ideas and knowledge with
external participants, such as customers, suppliers, partner firms, and
universities. This article extends the concept of open innovation with a push
model of open innovation: knowledge is voluntarily created outside a firm by
individuals and organisations who proceed to push knowledge into a firm’s
open innovation project. For empirical analysis, we examine source code and
newsgroup data on the Eclipse Development Platform. We find that outsiders
invest as much in the firm’s project as the founding firm itself. Based on the
insights from Eclipse, we develop four propositions: ‘preemptive generosity’ of
a firm, ‘continuous commitment’, ‘adaptive governance structure’, and ‘low
entry barrier’ are contexts that enable the push model of open innovation.