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Nowadays companies are operating in an uncertain and dynamic environment that is characterized by changing customer preferences and rapidly changing technologies. One of the strategies adopted by companies to better adapt to changing environments is the shift from a closed to a more Open Innovation (OI) model, whereby external collaboration becomes more and more important.

Speed, focus and flexibility are the new “black” in the competition arena. A competition that requires a more convergent and collaborative behaviour among market actors, through commercials and technologies network able to favour the development and text new ways to transfer value from firm to the market.

The crisis of the traditional innovation model find a possible solution in the open innovation paradigm, that promoting resources and knowledge sharing, allows to identify new way to test and develop co-created products and services.

A challenge that requires to look at market as a forum of actors, that are not isolated respect to the business, but that strictly are influenced and influence the business activities. A new vision of the environment surrounding corporate boundaries, based on comparison and collaboration with external entities such as start up, clients, universities and research centres, public administration, suppliers, and competitors.

Clearly for corporation is not easy choose and select initiatives, activities and methodologies to involve other partners in open innovation strategies. Furthermore these initiatives depending from the “maturity” degree of the organisation and from expected goals, but a possible start-point is the involvement in open innovation strategies of the actors positioned on the top of value creation process. 

In the last years a more collaborative behaviour finalized to satisfy more efficiently consumer’s needs, has bring organisations to interact more intensively with consumers, until to include them in the value creation process through mechanisms as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

Fruitful open innovation strategies could come, also and maybe principally, from a more intensive collaboration with organisations that work in the transactional environment of the business.

Traditionally in the transactional environment there are all business’s raw materials suppliers. When a corporation adopts a new behaviour respect to its boundaries, and starts to think creatively and differently, actors around it become technologies suppliers, not only raw materials suppliers.

But who could be innovation solutions suppliers?

• Start up: Respect to mature businesses, start up are more flexible, thus more focused and proactive because free from procedures and organisational divisions. Enterprises can benefit from the collaboration with young businesses that need to grow up quickly validating their business model. Enterprises can acquire innovation from start up, reducing timing and costs related to the development of new innovation, at the same time start up have the opportunity to be guided by methodologies and resources provided by more experienced organisations. 
• Universities & Research centre: merge practice and theory is another way to improve the innovation degree of an organisation. Collaboration with researcher team and department, skilled and specialised, can be an occasion to enterprises to discover new ways to innovate business. Universities run the fully functioning prototype, organisations can acquire the commercial license to launch the product on the market, or consider a university spin-off.
• Public Administration: recently another collaboration form that derives form an open innovation approach is the collaboration between organisation and public institutions. In these cases, we can observe a classic situation of overlapping need and goal. PA have access to a large data about citizens (thus consumer) and at the same time, they work to offer at marginal costs service to community. Enterprises can collaborate with PA to develop solution able to increase the efficiency degrees of public services offered to the community.