How to Develop Highly Creative Capabilities in Large Companies? The Case of Open Innovation Labs.
This article analyzes highly creative capabilities as a set of resources and capabilities. They make it possible to access a variety of distant knowledge, to articulate them and preserve their redundancy in order to generate novel and original ideas. We develop an exploratory case study of the open innovation laboratories installed by three large French companies. The article investigates the nature of these capabilities and the organizational design installed in an open innovation framework. Results focus on the distributed character of these resources in an inter-organizational space, and the new trade-off between control and freedom required for their exploitation.