Open innovation and co-creation as drivers for valorisation opportunities in the care sector

Today firms increasingly acknowledge that new streams of knowledge are generated outside the borders of their own organization through open innovation and co-creation. This increasingly leads to more complex networks of firms collaborating in a voluntary and informal way. Using a case study research method, we investigate in this paper a network of 16 firms which were able to bring together their knowledge and capabilities and bundle it in a very tangible product, i.e. a prototype of the 'Patient room of the Future' (PRoF 1.0). The governance structure of this voluntary network has grown in an organic way. The further development of the PRoF 1.0 initiative and the commercialization of the final prototype introduce several questions about which type of network governance is required to make the project successful. The results of this case study show that the distribution of (decision taking) power between the firms in the network and the legitimacy of the network towards the individual firms are two important governance issues which are changing when the open innovation network evolves from the initiation to the valorization stage.

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