Türkiye'deki Teknokent firmalarında açık inovasyon uygulamaları

In today's world, international competition has been growing increasingly and to keep up with the times is the sole remedy to survive in this competitive environment that forces its actors to create innovations in every part of life. Therefore, in all developed or developing countries, companies are in a struggle for making innovations at all levels of production and sales as well as developing new products constantly. On the other hand, making innovation through using a firm's own internal resources makes it difficult to survive in the competitive environment no matter how efficient a company works. Even the largest companies with the most extensive in-house capabilities have difficulties in conducting technological innovation activities by themselves. As a matter of fact, even the competing firms use complementary R&D resources in cooperation jointly to reduce costs and risk when they conduct complex, time-consuming, and costly innovation activities. Furthermore, firms prefer to develop innovations with external suppliers, consumers, and customers instead of developing with only company employees. All these emerging developments indicate that a new paradigm that brings a new perspective to innovation and will shapes the future of it has arisen. This new paradigm is open innovation approach that serves as a bridge between internal and external knowledge. Open innovation that is known as the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge with a view to accelerating firms' own internal innovation, and expanding the markets through external use of innovation, respectively is a very important window of opportunity for the firms, which are obliged to improve their innovativeness continuously due to intense competition environment. On the other side, science parks give technology firms an opportunity to innovate, act as an intermediary between technology developer and technology deployer, and create value because of the fact that science parks transfer know-how and invention from universities and research institution laboratories to the market. By taking the collaboration and networking characteristics of science parks into consideration, it can be said that science parks are mediator and provider of open innovation for universities, research laboratories, start-ups, SMEs and large companies. However, some small companies in university-based science parks may be inclined to keep their innovation systems closed and prefer to stay in their own collaboration networks on the purpose of protecting their technological knowledge and know-how from greater and more competitive firms. Unfortunately, this orientation to closed approaches hinders those small companies from benefiting from university-based science park ecosystem and sharing knowledge with similar firms. In this context, the main aim of this study is to get status of open innovation in technology-intensive companies, which operate in science parks in Turkey. Besides, determining motivation factors during the use of open innovation, determining the problems and obstacles faced by technology-intensive companies that operate in science parks and revealing necessary strategies and improvement areas in order to benefit more from open innovation are also intended. A survey has been conducted to 102 technology-intensive firms, which operate in science parks in Turkey in an attempt to investigate open innovation practices, motives, constraints, and actions to compensate barriers on competition. Therewithal, some general information such as types, scales, structures, shareholder type and experience of firms has been investigated in order to understand their impact on the orientation towards open innovation. Furthermore, innovativeness levels of technology-intensive companies that operate in science parks have been also investigated to research relationship between innovation and open innovation. The data obtained has been analyzed with statistical analysis methods by using SPSS software package. Open innovation approach is not widespread among technology-intensive companies that are mostly small and medium-sized enterprises and operate in science parks in Turkey in spite of the fact that it is generally practiced by these companies. Inbound open innovation practices are used more by science park companies in comparison with outbound open innovation practices. The most used open innovation practices are customer immersion, collaboration, and lead users, respectively and the least preferred open innovation practice is idea competitions. The most important motives to practice open innovation are exploring new technological trends, accelerating time to complete R&D, and identifying new business opportunities. On the other hand, establishing new partnerships is the least important motive to engage in open innovation for technology-intensive companies that operate in science parks. The most common constraints on open innovation that are encountered by science park companies are administrative constraints, constraints regarding resources and costs, and constraints regarding management and organization. On the other side, constraints regarding human resource, brand and image are the least frequently encountered constraints by science park firms. Improving quality of products, improving marketing activities, and forming strategic partnerships are the most important actions to compensate barriers on competition for technology-intensive companies that operate in science parks. However, reducing production and increasing working hours are the least important actions to compensate barriers on competition.