Facing the open innovation dilemma-structuring input at the company's border

Open innovation makes the company's border permeable for knowledge exchange with outside world. Various ways exist on which ideas can flow into the company's product development process as well as flow out into the market. Each direction faces its own challenges. However bringing input to the company poses the problem to prepare the input in the expected way and to identify the proper receiver within the company. Here we show that a framework supports pre-clustering and evolvement of input before transferring it into the company. From a conducted case study we learnt that the contributed ideas mainly concerned the embodiment level, but also principle and function level. Our results demonstrate how the framework can be instantiated for a specific tool. The framework is not method specific and thus can be applied to various open innovation approaches aiming into the company.