Background: To stay competitive and efficient on a global market, firms have to generate new products and service ideas using closed or open innovation processes. Open innovation activities emerge from both internal and external innovative resources and while SMEs could and do adopt a variation of innovation models, they tend to adopt open innovation activities. Collaboration is one of the most important factors of open innovation and SMEs collaborate to enhance their internal innovation activities and outcomes, as it provides them access to complementary assets and technologically knowledge. However, the literature is not clear as to how SME decide on prospect partners." Purpose:The overall purpose of this thesis is to map the structure of the decision-making process of SMEs regarding partner selection at the early stage of technology exploration (R&D stage) within open innovation and new product development. Method:The approach of this study is a qualitative research method with an abductive inspired research approach. The data are collected through interview study. A Theory Driven Thematic Analysis technique is used to analyse the data. The respondents are found by nonprobability sampling in form of purposive sampling. Findings:Our findings show that SMEs managers, R&D managers, and CEOs who participated within this research consider many practical factors that drive their decision making process regarding partner selection. The main goal they try to achieve when choosing partners is to build collaborations with: the highest quality of outcomes, most cost-effective activities, and most time-effective processes. Conclusion:SMEs, within our sample, do not follow a specific or pre-written strategies when choosing partners. Moreover, SMEs managers prefer to innovate internally without collaborations if they had the needed resources. If SMEs manager had to collaborate, they search for existing partners. However, if they had no existing partners to fulfil the needed resources, they search for new partners
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-35860 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Pommerening, Sebastian, Al Wawi, Bara |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Jönköping, Internationella Handelshögskolan, Högskolan i Jönköping, Internationella Handelshögskolan |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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