Working With Your Competitors

The University of Calgary website posted a new study from the Haskayne School of Business which examines 20 years of ‘open innovation’ in the Canadian energy industry. The authors found that industry finds it easier to employ open innovation methods to address strictly non-competitive environmental issues, such as managing tailings ponds. They are also more likely to employ open innovation in pre-competitive early-stage technologies than in competitive production technologies. In the 1990s, innovation intermediaries were set up as cost-effective ways for companies to do R&D as they were shedding their own R&D departments due to low commodity prices. In more recent years, the motivation for innovation intermediaries has been to work together to address the environmental challenges faced by the entire industry.

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