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Productivity Resilience Resources

Accelerating Industrial Technology Digital (IDT) adoption in UK manufacturing through Open Innovation

Watch a short explainer video about how manufacturers can use an Open Innovation approach to effectively partner with industrial digital technology experts to future-proof their business.

Research overview

If solutions involving Industrial Digital Technologies (IDTs) that meet the needs of UK manufacturers are readily available, they can be obtained through market-based contracts or licensing agreements. However, some manufacturers may have more complex requirements that necessitate highly customized solutions or even the development of new technologies. In these situations, manufacturers and IDT providers may need to engage in Open Innovation.

Open Innovation (OI) means working with external partners to find solutions to innovation-related problems. It is a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries.

InterAct funded researchers offer new Open Innovation insights, allowing manuacturers to use an Open Innovation approach to effectively partner with industrial digital technology experts to future-proof their business.

Both systematic research and anecdotal evidence show that OI has many benefits, such as:

  • Improved time-to-market
  • Access to a wide variety of external knowledge
  • Reduced costs
  • Shared risk

This research was conducted by Dr. Andrei Gurca (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr. Kate Broadhurst (Loughborough University). This work was supported by the UKRI Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and the Economic and Social Research Council via InterAct [Grant Reference ES/W007231/1].

For further discussion or potential collaboration, please contact Andrei Gurca or Kate Broadhurst.