A dialectic view on open innovation

The paradigm of Open-Innovation allows software companies new forms of interactive innovation and its diffusion across socio-cultural boundaries. This process constitutes and is constituted by a heterogeneous network of interacting actors. In this interaction, seeds for innovation will be created and have to be adopted by the participants of the respective network. This paper studies the concept of Open Innovation from a dialectic perspective on innovation seeds, which regards diffusion and adoption as intertwined. Traditionally, innovation research mainly focuses on transferring processes, but in order to reflect on the interactive character of Open Innovation across socio-cultural boundaries, one has to enlarge this perspective. In this paper we have developed a theoretic model which integrates also the aspect of translation and transformation. Based on this theoretical understanding we have figured out competences to adopt innovation seeds that have been developed in a crosscultural setting. At the end of the paper we show how this model can be used to study empirically the behavior of a software company adopting externally created seeds.