When, on 21st September 2006, ‘The Economist’ compared incumbent telecommunication operators with dinosaurs that could soon face extinction, most readers were ready to agree. The mixture of declining revenues and fierce competition was believed to shake the market and soon to dethrone former national champions. However, there are ways to fight that extinction and one way is to open up for competitive advantage. This paper reflects on a case study at Deutsche Telekom, the German national telecommunication operator. The aim of this study is to analyse to what extent the open innovation paradigm has been embraced inside this now multinational company. Using empirical evidence from 15 in‐depth interviews, we identify 11 open innovation instruments and detail their value contribution. We can show that Deutsche Telekom has successfully enhanced its innovation capacity by opening up its traditional development process and embracing external creativity and knowledge resources.

In this paper, we study the influence of innovator roles in highly innovative ventures. In order to obtain a differentiated picture we take into account the degree of innovativeness as a moderating variable. To test our hypotheses we use a sample of 146 highly innovative new product development projects. We choose a rigorous sampling design and apply state-of-theart measures for the degree of innovativeness. Furthermore, we apply multi-trait-multimethod methodology (MTMM) to enhance the validity of our study. The results show that innovator roles have a strong influence on innovation success but these influences are positively and negatively moderated by innovativeness. The moderating influences depend on the type of innovativeness. Remarkably, with increasing technological innovativeness innovator roles which create inter-organizational links with the outside world appear to be more important than intra-organizational linker roles, and support from high-ranked organizational members turns out to have a significant negative effect on project success with higher degrees of technological innovativeness. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed and consequences for innovation research and innovation management are shown.

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An extensive body of literature indicates the growing influence of virtual communities not only on social interaction, spending free time and working, but also on the interaction of companies with their customers to exchange information on products and to develop innovative ideas. However, engaging in virtual communities poses certain challenges to companies which more often than not results in failure to establish a successful collaboration with customers. This leads to the following questions: What are virtual communities and how can companies establish successful interaction? Why and how can interaction with a community lead to an improvement of the innovation process? This article develops a comprehensive concept of the collaboration between companies and virtual communities called communitycompany interaction quality (CCIQ). Based on insights from academic literature, this paper reviews factors influencing the quality of community-company interaction, suggesting an integrative framework. After developing a working definition for virtual communities in innovation, a summary of findings regarding interaction quality in context of humantechnology interaction and behaviour related to innovation is proposed.