Open innovation using open source tools: a case study at Sony Mobile

Abstract

Despite growing interest of Open Innovation (OI) in Software Engineering (SE), little is known about what triggers software organizations to adopt it and how this affects SE practices. OI can be realized in numerous of ways, including Open Source Software (OSS) involvement. Outcomes from OI are not restricted to product innovation but also include process innovation, e.g. improved SE practices and methods. This study explores the involvement of a software organization (Sony Mobile) in OSS communities from an OI perspective and what SE practices (requirements engineering and testing) have been adapted in relation to OI. It also highlights the innovative outcomes resulting from OI. An exploratory embedded case study investigates how Sony Mobile use and contribute to Jenkins and Gerrit; the two central OSS tools in their continuous integration tool chain. Quantitative analysis was performed on change log data from source code repositories in order to identify the top contributors and triangulated with the results from five semi-structured interviews to explore the nature of the commits. The findings of the case study include five major themes: i) The process of opening up towards the tool communities correlates in time with a general adoption of OSS in the organization. ii) Assets not seen as competitive advantage nor a source of revenue are made open to OSS communities, and gradually, the organization turns more open. iii) The requirements engineering process towards the community is informal and based on engagement. iv) The need for systematic and automated testing is still in its infancy, but the needs are identified. v) The innovation outcomes included free features and maintenance, and were believed to increase speed and quality in development. Adopting OI was a result of a paradigm shift of moving from Windows to Linux. This shift enabled Sony Mobile to utilize the Jenkins and Gerrit communities to make their internal development process better for its software developers and testers.

A method for analyzing stakeholders’ influence on an open source software ecosystem’s requirements engineering process

“…-the informal and collaborative RE processes within OSS ecosystems (e.g., [2,6,7,9,12]), -how awareness of the dynamics behind stakeholder interactions and interrelationships may be used to analyze their agendas (e.g., [1,10,14,15,18,34,35]), and -how social network constructs may be used to characterize the stakeholders' interactions and influence on the RE process of the OSS ecosystem (e.g., [15, 22-26, 28, 29, 36, 37]).…”

Affiliated participation in open source communities

“…Activities are inbound or outbound and classified as pecuniary (related to competitive assets and producing rewards) vs. non-pecuniary (related to non-competitive assets without immediate rewards). Inbound activities use input from outside the organization and outbound activities exploit internally developed innovations [24].…”

“…They still display strong hacker mentality, but are uncertain how being paid affects the engagement with the community. Munir et al [24] postulate that software organizations that want to benefit from open innovation via FOSS engagement need to adapt their internal processes. Observation 7.…”

“…If the community engagement is not seen as a long term investment but rather as seeking "freebies," we are probably dealing with a rather short term uninformed vision. Munir et al [24] explains that FOSS participation can be costly. Open innovation is costly and it is not always easy to start it.…”

From Closed to Open Innovation in Emerging Economies: Evidence from the Chemical Industry in Brazil

“…The open innovation approach has already been analyzed in many large multinational knowledge-intensive companies, such as Intel (Chesbrough, 2003), Procter & Gamble (Huston & Sakkab, 2006), Fiat (Ciravegna & Maielli, 2011), Sony Mobile (Munir et al, 2017), and IBM (Dittrich et al, 2007) just to name a few. Most research on open innovation still approaches organizations and institutions in developed economies (e.g., Chesbrough, 2017;Lopez-Vega et al, 2016;Ullrich & Vladova, 2016).…”