Open Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Leveraging External Ideas and Collaborations to Drive Business Growth
Abstract
Open innovation has appeared as a significant catalyst of entrepreneurial growth, facilitating firms to move beyond conventional boundaries and harness external knowledge, partnerships, and resources. Whilst showing considerable promise for business development, open innovation additionally showcases distinct challenges for entrepreneurs, including intellectual property (IP) rights management, partnership coordination, and the external incorporation of innovations into existing business models. Even with its surging popularity, there remains a shortage of empirical research investigating how entrepreneurs efficiently integrate and manage open innovation strategies, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups. This paper examines this gap by investigating the enablers, barriers, and practical outcomes of open innovation from the entrepreneurial outlook.
The study adopts a qualitative research method, using semi-structured interviews with business owners and CEOs across a range of industries who have implemented open innovation practices. Purposeful sampling guarantees the inclusion of participants actively and deeply involved in external collaborations, like incubators, research institutions, and corporate partners. To intensify the depth and reliability of the findings, triangulation is accomplished through the combination of secondary data sources, comprising business plans, partnership agreements, and innovation–related documents, which supplement the primary interview data. The thematic analysis approach, as defined by Braun and Clarke (2006), is adopted to determine patterns and insights within the data.
Whilst qualitative research fundamentally entails smaller sample sizes, preferred participants are justified by their applicability to the research question, ensuring an in-depth study of open innovation dynamics. Possible constraints comprise self-reported biases and the subjective interpretation of qualitative data. To reduce these concerns, member checking and double - checking of data sources are implemented to boost the study’s validity and reliability.
This paper expands the existing scholarship by providing an insightful understanding of how entrepreneurs manage the intricacies of open innovation, especially in resource–constrained environments. It offers implementable conclusions for entrepreneurs, policymakers, and investors working towards promoting innovative ecosystems that support sustainable business growth.
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Article Details
Accepted 2026-04-07
Published 2026-09-30