Barriers to Openness: The Case of Technology Development Zone Companies

Open Innovation promises higher outcomes from innovation processes through collaboration and sharing knowledge and the intellectual assets. Inclusion of suppliers, customers or users, partners, and even competitors in innovative processes can help to overcome constraints on internal resources. For ICT companies that operate in eco-systems of technology development zones (TDZ), open innovation approach becomes more critical mostly due to the scale and experience constraints. To understand the barriers of open innovation for ICT firms in TDZs can significantly help strategy and decision makers in designing policies and actions to empower innovation processes in order to overcome these barriers and hence to utilize open innovation for higher competitiveness. Various researchers examined the challenges of open innovation in various contexts, as well as the innovativeness and business performances of TDZ companies. However, there is still a room for research on exploring the dimensions of motives and barriers of open innovation practices of these companies. This study aims to explore the barriers for open innovation in ICT TDZ companies through surveys and in-depth interviews that are carried out in 102 ICT firms in TDZs in Turkey. By applying factor analysis, the main barriers to openness are identified and relationships of these barriers with the company’s characteristics explored. Findings reveal that the most frequently perceived constraints are financial and administrative problems