Is Open Innovation ‘old wine in new bottles’ or a new paradigm?”

The modernization in the system of management of the company, firm or a productive plant and qualitative changes in the requirements to products and services, that are provided for the customers, have set up the problem of the maximum opening product research and have influenced upon all company levels and its staff. Nowadays in order to meet rising demands of the society, practically all companies seek ways to increase their productivity and efficiency. That is why managing staff more and more often turn to so called innovations, which are considered to bring new ways and opportunities for the company to reach the new level of activity.

Moreover, nowadays in the modern studies of management, policy and sociology the Open Innovation paradigm is being rather relevant to the changing conditions of implementation of innovation and technology in firms, which activity connected to world market, and whose goods are tend to be on the top of the list. Nevertheless, in spite of the great range of practical researches large amount of works are rather common and do not reflect the definite features and characteristics of the proposed Open Innovation paradigm. According to Huizingh, “case studies may contrast high and low performing open innovation adopters to increase our understanding of why and how the effectiveness of certain practices is context dependent. We still lack knowledge about how to do it and when to do it.” (Huizingh, 2011 : 9).

Furthermore, in scientific literature (Blindenbach-Driessen and van den Ende, 2006; Tidd and Hull, 2009;) there is a turning point whether open or closed nature of innovation influence on firms’ activity and how this innovations should be implemented and whether the firms staff is ready for implementation. Another question is much more difficult what kind of open innovation can be judged as a real one or should it be describe as pseudo innovation or so called ‘old wine in a new bottle’ (Enkel et al., 2009; Huizingh, 2011; Fredberg et al, 2008). Unfortunately, there is no precise answer to this controversial point. If one company has implemented the open innovation, which was developed on the background of the previous companies’ experience, still with some modification, can it be judged as real innovation or not? Some authors (Groen and Linton, 2010; Gassmann et al., 2010) admit that innovation whether closed or open can help to generate successful company’s activity in specific contexts.

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