It is More Blessed to Give than to Receive - Open Software Tools Enable Open Innovation

Open Innovation (OI) has attracted scholarly interest from a wide range of disciplines since introduced by Chesbrough [1], i.e. ”a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology”. However, OI remains unexplored for software engineering (SE), although widespread in practice through Open Source Software (OSS). We studied the relation between SE and OI and in particular how OSS tools impact on software-intensive organization’s innovation capability. We surveyed the literature on SE and OI [3] and found that studies conclude that start-ups have higher tendency to opt for OI compared to established companies. The literature also suggests that firms assimilating external knowledge into their internal R&D; activities, have higher likelihood of gaining financial advantages. In a case study, we observed how OSS tools Jenkins and Gerrit enabled open innovation [2]. We mined software commits to identify major contributors, found them be affiliated to Sony Mobile, contacted five of them for interviews about their and their employer’s principles and practices with respect to OI and tools, which they gave a consistent view of. Our findings indicate that the company’s transition to OI was part of a major paradigm shift towards OSS, while the adoption of open tools was driven bottom up by engineers with support from management. By adopting OI, Sony Mobile achieved freed-up developers’ time, better quality assurance, inner source initiatives, flexible development environment, faster releases and upgrades. Particularly, the introduction of a test framework was proposed by Sony Mobile but implemented by other contributors [2]. However, the benefits are gained through investing significant attention and resources to the OSS community in terms of technical contributions and leadership. BODYSharing software tools enables open innovation, brings faster upgrades andfrees up resources, but demands investments in the open community REFERENCES[1] H. W. Chesbrough. Open innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting fromtechnology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 2003.[2] H. Munir and P. Runeson. Software testing in open innovation: An exploratory case study ofthe acceptance test harness for Jenkins. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conferenceon Software and System Process, ICSSP 2015, pages 187–191, New York, NY, USA, 2015.ACM.[3] H. Munir, K. Wnuk, and P. Runeson. Open innovation in software engineering: A systematicmapping study. Empirical Software Engineering, DOI 10.1007/s10664-015-9380-x, 2015. Volume 4 of Tiny Transactions on Computer ScienceThis content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike License. Permission tomake digital or hard copies of all or part of this work is granted without fee provided that copies are not made ordistributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.CC BY-NC-SA 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.