Abstract:

The collaboration between industry and higher education institutions in an open innovation context has been seen as an important aspect of economic development. Promoting open innovation with universities requires adequate support from industry to improve their collaboration during the product or service development phases, according to the structure of the open innovation process described in the literature.

The extant literature shows the application of quality function deployment in different areas. However, the quality function deployment has been less used in the field of innovation, and particularly in open innovation. Therefore, this paper illustrates the employment of the quality function deployment in improving open innovation between industry-university. A case study presented the approach, which was conducted within firms located in a Romanian industrial area. As a result, the relationship among different processes of industry-university collaboration in open innovation and the main determinants of such collaboration was assessed. The advantage of this approach is the establishment of the importance of the analyzed processes in supporting collaboration between industry-university in an open innovation context. In this way, attention can be focused on the influential processes of open innovation between industry-university.

Keywords:

Open innovation, processes, determinants, QFD.