An issue of needs information disclosure in open innovation
According to spreading of the word “open innovation,” large enterprises in Japan have come to seen as active to collaborate with other organizations for the purpose of developing new technologies and new products. This may give a good opportunity for us to make use of many SMEs with excellent technologies in Japan, and thereby to increase innovation capacity of Japan as a whole. However, because the large enterprises do not usually disclose their needs information when they search outside technologies and knowledge, effective matching between the large enterprises and the SMEs that have appropriate technologies for them are hindered. Although this issue does not appear to be a core discussion point in the existing open innovation literature in English, it is actually a big problem for the people engaged in promotion of SMEs and regional industry. The TAMA Association established as an industrial cluster promoting organization have been achieving its performance in the matching activities between large enterprises and SMEs in both forms of non-disclosing and disclosing the needs information of the large enterprises, and its experience give us implications to make a solution for this issue of the negative attitude of the large enterprises to disclose their needs information.