The purchase of innovative components: a new link between open innovation and black box integration

The work aims at signalling the relevance of the purchase of innovative components as a means to carry out open innovation strategies in the presence of black-box approaches and complex product development. Indeed, the wide literature on open innovation is continuously evolving with many contributions, but the relationship between open innovation and black-box approaches was never explored. Specifically, the purchase of innovative components has never been considered as an open innovation practice, even though it refers to the acquisition of innovative components that allow an OEM to incorporate innovative efforts of its suppliers and enhance the innovation of the overall end product. Hence, the paper proposes argumentation to prove the real compatibility, finding two general features among all the practices of the open innovation paradigm. This allows to extend the open innovation paradigm to black-box buyer-supplier relationships, but also suggests scholars to reflect on the existence of any closed innovation.