Leadership and Culture Voorbeeldclausules

Leadership and Culture. Articles on open innovation tend to end up by stating that leadership needs to support people striving to be innovative. Yet very few articles actually analyze leadership in open innovation. Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxxxxx (2007) discuss leadership in open innovation communities. They state that consistent with the norms of an engineering culture the future leader of open innovation must first make strong technical contributions from a structural position that can bind the community together. This is enabled by two correlated but distinct social positions: social brokerage and boundary spanning between technological areas. An inherent lack of trust associated with brokerage positions can be overcome through physical interaction. Boundary spanners do not suffer this handicap and are much more likely than brokers to advance to leadership. Longitudinal analyses of careers within the Internet Engineering Task Force community (the world’s first open innovation community) from 1986-2002 support the arguments. Xxxxxxxx et al. (2006) point out that not only the technological systems need to change. The more external innovation is sourced by the firm, the more systems, processes, values and culture also need to be transformed. The companies in Witzeman’s et al. (2006) sample expressed resistance toward open innovation. Powerful forces inside the organization worked to harness current technology rather than search for new technologies from the outside. This is not strange, the authors argue. Company people are trained to think internally, and this tendency is strengthened by concepts such as core competences and Six Sigma. The leaders within this area are therefore those that manage to include the external sourcing in its procedures, for example as a standing point in its project management processes. This is indeed a challenge. This is also in line with Xxxxxxx et al (2006) who recognize that: