There are essential conditions for building effective corporate innovation processes and involving users in various developments. Among other things, the company must have the absorption capacity to implement innovations and accept external/internal ideas. Absorptive capacity is the ability of an organisation to recognise new knowledge, acquire it, incorporate it into its processes and apply it to business objectives. Absorptive capacity is a competence that companies can typically build up in their research and innovation units in order to access knowledge, ideas and technologies from external sources. Absorptive capacity essentially underpins companies' open innovation activities.

 

 

The first step is to understand and recognise the value of external knowledge, expertise and ideas. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, an organisation can draw on a number of sources of knowledge. Potentially valuable knowledge must be identified and accessed, and then, once acquired, it must be analysed, interpreted and combined with the organisation's existing knowledge. Ideally, new knowledge can be integrated relatively easily into the organisation's knowledge base, but due to established ways of thinking and organisational culture, the company may simply reject new knowledge and ideas coming from outside. It is enough to refer to the "we didn't come up with it" or "it's not the boss's idea" arguments, and employees already know that it is not worth pursuing such matters further. The opposite case, where the organisation's attitude changes, is less common. Typically, this turnaround requires the transformation of existing knowledge structures and the restructuring of knowledge utilisation methods. The latter can change due to the strong will of management or owners, but it can also be forced by a crisis threatening the company and competition. Finally, the last capability, exploitation, refers to the competence of the company to exploit and utilise the acquired and internalised knowledge, for example in the form of new products, services and new businesses.

 

 

The user innovation practices presented in various publications suggest that user involvement is essential and offers numerous valuable benefits in product and service development processes. However, it should also be emphasised that it is not easy to incorporate user knowledge into various development processes. Before user needs and preferences can be incorporated into new products and services, three important obstacles must be overcome. First, the organisation must be made sensitive to understanding the value of the modifications and changes suggested by users. Second, appropriate corporate routines and practices must be developed to find relevant users. Finally, user input must be formulated and communicated in such a way that developers can easily understand and use this external knowledge and then integrate the resulting specifications into development processes. If any of these capabilities are missing, user contributions are likely to have only a modest impact on corporate innovation processes.