Nätverkskonstruktion och innovationsprestation : Variationen av sökdjup och sökbredd i öppna innovationsnätverk

Sammanfattning: Abstract  Title: Network construction and innovation performance – the variation of search depth and search breadth in Open Innovation networks.  Authors: Robin Cianelli, Jenny Nilsson and Sarah Wennström  Supervisor: Henrik Sällberg  Department: School of Management, Blekinge Institute of Technology  Course: Bachelor’s thesis in Business Administration, 15 credits  The study aimed to investigate how companies construct there open innovation networks and how they in turn affects the innovation presentation. It was distinguishing between the product innovation and the process innovation to investigate if the companies constructed different open innovation networks for different innovation types. This was investigated by looking at how many different extern collaborators the companies were using and how deep these collaborations were. The studies hypotheses were that the search depth and the search width would have a positive influence on the innovation presentation and that the search depth and the search width would have a greater impact for the product innovation than the process innovation. To investigate this a selection of 91 small and middle big Swedish companies in the manufacturing industry where asked to answer a web survey and our collected data was processed by multiple regression analyzes. The results showed that search depth and width in open innovation networks had a positive influence on the innovation performance when the company wanted to do product innovations, but only search depth showed a significant positive correlation for process innovation. This could be explained with the fact that processes innovations are very complex and can look very different even within the same industry.