Cooperative innovation strategies – review and analysis

Background: As the terms innovation, innovation strategy and especially cooperative innovation strategy are owned and discussed by many business disciplines, they can have various definitions. But a defined innovation strategy is the first step to enable a generation of innovation in a constant way. There are different approaches how a strategy can be defined. One common approach of an innovation strategy which includes the idea of an exploratory and cooperative strategy is the Open Innovation method. It describes three possible cooperation archetypes of an organization and its environment. Caused by the increased importance of startups and their innovation approaches a transfer of the common Open Innovation approach to a cooperation between established organization and startups is the aim of this article and results in the description of the startup orientated cooperative innovation (SOCI) strategy. Methods: This article gives at first an introduction in the topic of innovation and innovation strategy and its different approaches. The Open Innovation approach is described and in a further step the transfer to the new framework of (SOCI) strategies is presented. Result: As a result, the paper presents a new framework for three archetypes of SOCI-strategies. Three archetypes of SOCI-strategies were identified, by relating the three archetypes of Open Innovation to cooperations between established companies and startups. The three SOCI-strategies are: Buy/rent a startup, spin-off and startup in coupled process. Conclusion: The SOCI framework can be seen as a helpful to categorized cooperations between established companies and startups in context of generation innovation and gives an overview which archetypes of startup cooperations are possible.