The Open Innovation Journey in Emerging Economies: An Analysis of the Brazilian Aerospace Industry

Abstract

Open innovation is the systematic integration of collaborative, sourcing and revealing practices into a firm’s business strategy, which is not implemented at once, but through a journey. This paper investigates this subject in an emergent economy context, the Brazilian aerospace industry, presenting the critical analysis of a questionnaire-based survey performed by means of personal in-company interviews in 22 firms. It comprises a wide range of practices associated with open innovation, connected to a conceptual model. Open innovation elements were found in the sample, with no open business strategy behind them, though. Deficiencies regarding funding, R&D maturity and intellectual property protection prevent the cluster from being fully open innovator. The culture company in the sample was nevertheless found to be very prone towards openness. From that we conclude that open innovation in the cluster is still “unfreezing”, but with great potential to emerge once these problems are solved.