Knowledge Governance for Open Innovation: Evidence from an EU R & D Collaboration

This chapter highlights a particularly challenging arena for knowledge governance, by focussing on the issues associated with large-scale R&D programmes of ‘open innovation’. The chapter develops a theoretical framework for analysing these governance challenges by focussing on the interplay between the knowledge processes and inter-organizational relationships involved. This framework is subsequently applied to a case-study of a major open innovation programme, namely, a major inter-firm research programme sponsored by the European Union (EU) in the aerospace sector. Analysis of this case suggests that the stability and fit of governance mechanisms may be less important than their ability to adapt to the dynamics of the innovation process, and particularly to shifts between the open and closed networks which offer very different routes to appropriating value from that process.