Abstract
Background: A firm’s cooperative strategies are a fundamental issue in the search for business growth avenues, but a system that eases the emergence of coupled open innovation appears to be missing.
Objectives: This paper describes a business networking tool to foster coupled open innovation emergence.
Methods/Approach: We adopted a methodology based on design science comparable to grounded theory because solutions emerged by testing a design artefact with companies.
Results: We designed and tested an artefact designed as a game to encourage participants to meet as many partners as possible. It is based on collaborative innovation mechanisms and gets inspiration from fields such as organization design, service design, and prospective design. The proposed artefact comes as prescriptive rules that support managers’ open innovation opportunity elicitation.
Conclusions: From a practical point of view, we contribute by helping companies find emergent open innovation opportunities. From a theoretical point of view, this artefact is part of an emergent theory of object-oriented coupled open innovation mechanisms.