That tension became central to my research with Prof. Asta Pundzienė. We wanted to understand why some born-digital SMEs perform better than others when, at least on the surface, they appear to operate with the same advantages. If these firms are already designed for a networked economy, why do networks translate into performance for some, but remain mostly decorative for others?
Our empirical study examined born-digital SMEs from the United States, Sweden and Lithuania, operating in ICT, health services and medicine, and financial services. The results were useful academically, but they also revealed a managerial lesson that has become more important to me now, as we build the Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) Open Innovation Centre.
The lesson is simple, but slightly inconvenient: networks are not enough.
This sounds almost too obvious. Of course, networks are not enough. Most executives would agree. Then, five minutes later, we would all go back to building more networks, attending more ecosystem events, creating more partnership maps, and congratulating ourselves for being connected. The problem is that connection is easy to mistake for collaboration.
Where Collaboration Breaks Down
A company can have many partners and still not know how to innovate with them. It can sit in several ecosystems and still fail to extract useful knowledge. It can have memoranda of understanding, innovation breakfasts, startup days, university visits, and impressive-looking group photos, while the actual business impact remains somewhere between unclear and imaginary.
This is not because people are pretending. Usually, they are not. It is because collaboration is a much more demanding capability than networking.
Our research made this distinction visible. Partnership networks, by themselves, were not enough to explain superior performance. What mattered was relational collaboration: the ability to co-create innovative products and services with partners and to share the value created through that collaboration. In other words, not the number of relationships, but the quality and structure of those relationships.
This is a useful finding because it challenges a comfortable assumption in the world of innovation. We often speak as if bringing actors together is already a major achievement. Sometimes it is. In fragmented ecosystems, even getting the right people into the same room can be progress. But it is only the beginning. The room does not innovate. The room only creates the possibility that innovation might happen, assuming someone knows what to do next. That “what next” is where many initiatives fail.
A company meets a university. The university presents its expertise. The company explains its challenges. Everyone agrees there is potential. Then the conversation gets stuck. The challenge is too broad. The relevant experts are spread across departments. The company cannot clearly say what decision it needs to make. The university does not know how much commercial urgency is real and how much is exploratory. Nobody wants to overcommit. Nobody wants to share too much. Nobody is quite sure who owns the next step.
So the collaboration remains positive, polite, and mostly useless. I slightly exaggerate. But only slightly.
The Discipline Behind Openness
This is why I believe open innovation is often misunderstood. The real work of open innovation is managerial. It requires deciding what should be opened, to whom, for what purpose, under what rules, and with what path to value capture.
This matters especially now because companies are facing a type of uncertainty that does not fit neatly inside their organisational boundaries. Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, digital health, energy systems, platform business models, sustainability and regulatory complexity are not problems that one department, one supplier, or one internal R&D team can solve alone.
The relevant knowledge is distributed. Some of it is inside the company. Some of it is in universities. Some of it is in startups. Some of it is with customers, suppliers, regulators, public institutions, or international research communities. Some of it is probably sitting in the head of a doctoral student who has not yet learned how badly the world needs better PowerPoint slides.
The point is not that companies should open everything. That would be naive. Some knowledge must remain protected. Some capabilities must be built internally. Some partnerships are not worth the coordination cost. Some ecosystems create more noise than value. The point is that companies need to become much more disciplined about where openness improves strategic decision-making.
That is harder than it sounds. Many companies can identify trends. Fewer can select which trends matter. Even fewer can translate those trends into concrete innovation challenges, mobilise internal and external partners, test assumptions, and turn the result into a business model, process change, new product, or strategic capability.
This is where many companies get stuck. They know the world is changing. They can feel the pressure. They can name the technologies. They can produce the slide with the burning platform. But knowing that the kitchen is on fire is not the same as knowing what to cook next.
This is why I increasingly think that the most important open innovation question for executives is:
“What uncertainty do we need to reduce, and which external knowledge would help us reduce it faster?”
That question changes the conversation.
Why Companies Need a Better Interface with Universities
This is where the traditional model of university-business collaboration often underperforms. Not because companies lack problems, or because universities lack expertise. Usually, both exist. The problem is that the connection between them is too often accidental.
Someone knows someone. A faculty member has a contact. A company reaches out to one researcher. A project appears if the timing, funding instrument, personalities and administrative process somehow align. Occasionally, this works very well. But as a system for helping companies make faster and better innovation decisions, it is too slow, too fragmented and too dependent on luck.
If markets move faster than internal organisational capabilities, and if knowledge is increasingly distributed across ecosystems, then companies need a better interface. They need an interface that can help translate business uncertainty into a well-framed challenge, identify the right internal and external capabilities, structure collaboration, and test ideas before major investment decisions are made.
This is the role we are building with the KTU Open Innovation Centre.
The ambition is different. We create a structured, neutral, business-facing mechanism that helps companies frame strategic innovation challenges, identify relevant capabilities inside and outside the university, test ideas in real environments, and reduce the risk of investing in new technologies or business models.
Partner. Open. De-risk.
The three words are simple, but the logic behind them is demanding.
“Partner” means that the first task is not to introduce random actors to each other, but to find the right combination of expertise, incentives, and strategic relevance.
“Open” means that the innovation process is deliberately connected to external knowledge, but not in an uncontrolled way. Openness needs boundaries. Otherwise, it becomes exposure.
“De-risk” means that the purpose of collaboration is not just to produce ideas, but to improve decisions before larger commitments are made. A good collaboration should sometimes lead to a pilot. Sometimes, to a new business case. Sometimes to a larger R&D project. And sometimes to the useful conclusion that the idea should not be pursued.
That last outcome deserves more respect. Killing a weak idea early is not a failure. It is good innovation management. Expensive failure after two years of enthusiastic ambiguity is the more traditional option, but I would not recommend it.
Deeper work around shared challenges, co-created solutions, mutual commitment, and clear value logic. We need companies to bring real problems, not just general interest. We need universities to respond with coordinated competence, not fragmented expertise. We need formats where international knowledge does not remain inspirational, but becomes usable. This is the gap that KTU Open Innovation Centre aims to address.
My research did not start as an argument for creating an open innovation centre. But it increasingly feels like it explains why such a centre is needed.
