“Open” Lab? Studying the Implementation of Open Innovation Practices in a University Laboratory

The majority of Open Innovation contributions published in the last decade adopted a firm-centric perspective, and analyzed interactions at the firm level, thus leaving room for studies about the adoption of Open Innovation practices in non-corporate environments, and at different levels of analysis. The aim of this paper is to explore the adoption of Open Innovation practices in a non-corporate environment at the individual level, specifically in the context of an American university laboratory.Results show that despite the lab’s active orientation toward commercialization and collaboration with industrial counterparts, the degree of implementation of Open Innovation practices is still limited, the main determinant for Technology Transfer (TT) remains publication, and that online communities represent a potential mechanism to overcome the current gap in promoting lab research.The study contributes to the existing Open Innovation literature by assessing the perceived quality of Open Innovation practices at the individual level, and in a non-corporate context. For literature, this study is the first attempt to investigate the adoption of Open Innovation practices in a university laboratory. For university managers, the study proposes that while active commercialization efforts through Open Innovation practices are still limited, channels like online communities offer valuable — and yet untapped — resources for promotion of university activities.