Harnessing external technology for innovation

Companies continuously seek to innovate more quickly and more effectively both within and often beyond their core markets and product lines. This has resulted in the practice of "open innovation" wherein firms recognize that all components of an innovation do not need to come from within, that they can accelerate their own efforts or perhaps even broaden the scope of these efforts by acquiring some of the required technology externally. Research across multiple business segments has identified a number of practices that firms have adopted to identify external technology with which to bolster their own innovation processes. These practices have been assembled into a topology that provides a framework for categorizing the different methodologies and organizational structures for "sourcing" external technology.