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Siemens : A New Trend For Those Successful High Tech Companies

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Nowadays, a new trend for those successful high-tech companies is to utilize open innovation instead of the traditional “vertically integrated” innovation methods(chesbrough;2006). For example, Procter & Gamble, Qualcomm Inc. and IBM all introduced open innovation and have achieved remarkable success. Consequently, Siemens also set up open innovation to advance themselves with the use of internal ideas and external ideas in 2009. Siemens was set up by Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske in Berlin, Germany in 1874 and it started as a telegraph company. Until now, Siemens has developed to a globally manufacturing and electronics company, which also decentralized its operating structure into four main sectors: Energy, Healthcare, …show more content…

During innovation process, Dr. Thomas Lackner, the head of head of CT’s Open Innovation & Scouting in Siemens, recognized that “a more open collaboration” would be the right way for Siemens’s future strategy. In addition, Lackner noticed that Siemens’s decentralized structure block the internal thinking to some extent, and this structure would be the barrier and challenge to the development in Siemens (lakhani et al., 2015:3). To solve this problem, Lackner found out the open innovation can counter the decentralized structure, since open innovation is a paradigm allows the firms to use both ideas internally and externally to advance their own technology and through their business inside and outside the companies (Chesbrough:2003,2006). In addition, Open innovation models allow the firms to combine internal and external the concepts to leverage more ideas for value creating, as well as they are capable to capture more values since the firms apply the key asset, resource or position in the business operating on themselves and other companies. Besides, the using of external ideas and technology is able to reduce the cost and time in the process of product improvement, (Chesbrough 2007; Dahlander and Gann, 2010) in addition, as Granstrand et al. (1997: 13; cited in Chesbrough, 2006: 25) interpreted: “Large firms built up and maintained a broad technology base in order to explore and experiment with new technologies for possible deployment in the future” and this

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