MANAGEMENT OF OPEN INNOVATION PROCESS AMONG SMEs IN THE FOOD SECTOR IN GHANA

ABSTRACT This study examines the management of open innovation among SMEs in the food sector in Ghana. Specifically, the study sets out to: examine the intent of SMEs in the food sector in opening up the innovation process, SMEs choice of partners and search criteria used to find collaborators in the food sector in Ghana and challenges of managing open innovation. Data for the study were gathered from both primary and secondary sources. The secondary data was obtained from the Revenue Unit of the Wa Municipal Assembly and the primary data were collected from managers and owners of hotels. To this end, key informant interview and interview guides were employed. An amount of 5 cases out of 43 hotels and guest houses were contact for information. Multiple case study and within case analysis were adopted as the design and analytical method used to analyse the data. The results revealed that the major intents of SMEs in the food sector opening up the innovation process is to acquire useful feedback and knowledge about customers’ taste and preference in order to meet their needs and preferences, to reduce cost of idea generation by partnering with training institutions and even recruit their employees from there, to significantly reduce its R&D budget but still has access to a large amount of ideas to refine and adopt and to create alliances or cartels in order to charge higher rates. With regards to the choice of partners and search criteria in finding collaborators, the study found customers’ huge experience in eating out at different restaurants and their potential to create a huge market as the search criteria. With respect to training institutions years of experience and the number of clients inform the choice of training experience to collaborate with. In terms of challenges SMEs in the food sector face in adopting open innovation ranged from the difficulty in signing formal open innovation contracts with competitors, firms adoption of informal open innovation process that goes on does not stimulate deep sharing of ideas, high employee turnover rate making the hotel jobs much more of temporal appointment and lack of streamlining of the innovation process. In this regard, measures such as a well-developed plan for open innovation, Ghana Tourist Authority eradicating industry competitors’ negative perception about competition and firms recognising the importance of internally generating and commercialising innovative ideas to competitors in an organised step by step process among others should be put in place