Internal and external facilitators of open innovation for companies in Turkey

Open innovation refer to an innovation approach where new ideas and new knowledge inflow and outflow through organizational boundaries by a collaboration with customers, suppliers, research centers, competitors, strategic alliances etc. Open innovation is becoming a widely used approach since it provides agility, flexibility, concentration on core competencies, identifying and diversifying risk and sharing uncertainty. The aim of this thesis, firstly, is to identify the Internal and External facilitator factors of open innovation from a comprehensive review of the literature. Secondly, the aim is to analyze and rank the most important facilitators of the open innovation for companies in Turkey. Several varied methods as exploratory factor analysis, Kruskal-Wallis H and Mann-Whitney U Nonparametric tests and Score-based analysis of rank-ordered data are used during the analysis. Findings indicate that companies should give importance, attention, rigor to the factors "company's culture", "open innovation funding", "open innovation technological resources", "effective communication with direct customers", "open innovation oriented new product or process development" and "government or European Union incentives" while planning, applying, executing and controlling open innovation approaches and activities. Yet, there has not been any study that comprehensively analyzing open innovation facilitator factors for the companies in Turkey. This study contributes to the literature by determining facilitator factors and their importance for open innovation. This study also has several implications for the practitioners. For instance, existing business owners or new entrepreneurs can easily analyze market conditions, accomplish main goals and destinations of their companies, decrease risk and decrease uncertainty while implementing and managing open innovation approaches and activities by considering the findings of this study. Moreover, this study also acknowledges and informs the impediment factors for open innovation. Future research directions are also suggested.