Open innovation: openness on an external ecosystem to innovate stronger and further. focus on the relations between startups and large companies.

Abstract

This thematic paper aims to define and to explore a new and strategic way to innovate for a company: the Open-Innovation approach. This concept of innovation consists to an openness of a company on its external ecosystem to grow. By involving external actors in company processes, it allows a company to evolve and to adapt itself to a market, a situation or a target. Then, I will focus on a specific case of open-innovation, and one of the most common in our world: relationship between a large company and a startup. These kinds of structure are, by definition, completely different in terms of organisation, process and objectives, but they succeed to work together on projects. They take advantage of specific strengths of each structure that become complementary. I will first try to define the concept of innovation, the concept of startup and large company based on my literature review. It will help me to explain what I was doing when I was writing this paper (an internship in a consulting agency in innovation) and why it is useful to speak about open-innovation. In a third part, I will speak about the relation between startups and large companies (the reasons of this collaboration, the different modes of collaboration, the methods and the limits).