Open Innovation (OI) & SMEs - Explorative Analysis of Public Support Needs for OI ecosystems, makerspaces and for crowdsourcing

Especially in recent years, Open Innovation (OI) has become established as an important new tool for innovation development and thus economic development. In addition to classic R&D cooperation, open innovation also includes new forms of cooperation such as cooperation across known industry boundaries or the inclusion of a "crowd", which has not yet existed in this form. Large and medium-sized companies are now even creating their own ecosystems and funding agency-like structures to cooperate with startups and SMEs in particular. However, there are still hardly any concrete empirical findings on these new forms of OI cooperation. The austria wirtschaftsservice Gesmbh (aws) therefore approached the IMC University of Applied Sciences Krems to find out what kind of concrete support is needed by Austrian companies, especially SMEs, that are active in the field of open innovation. For this purpose, we conducted 11 qualitative expert interviews with open innovation managers of SMEs and large companies as well as with further OI experts. From these interviews and further selective literature research, we were able to identify four key areas in which the aws can become active and thus expand and strengthen its support offering in the area of promoting open innovation: (1) consideration of maturity levels & cooperation, (2) the aws as an OI multiplier, especially for start-ups, (3) intellectual property-specific measures, and (4) connectivity to the classic RTI funding system.