Major Corporations and Open Innovation: capturing value from disruptive innovation

How can major corporations get innovation advantages from Clusters of innovation? Entrepreneurship and the COI that energize it, are often understood as creating value via the startup. This chapter demonstrates how major corporations can exploit the entrepreneurial venture creation capability of COI to spur their own innovation capacity. It introduces the COI Fit and Location Matrix as an organizing framework for understanding how it can, through active engagement with the various COI components, accelerate and increase the pathways for technology commercialization, business model experimentation, speed and agility. The Matrix helps management to deploy a broad Open Innovation approach, clarifying when various transactional forms are most appropriate. The case examples investigated include the use of mergers and acquisitions, spin-outs, corporate venture capital, licensing and more. This chapter is also helpful to startup CEOs, many of whom will find that collaboration with major corporations is a necessary pathway to achieve global scale.