Evaluating open innovation in practice: a performance measurement system

As Open Innovation (OI) initiatives become increasingly central to firms’ innovation strategies, organizations deal with persistent challenges in measuring their performance and overall impact. At the state-of-the-art, existing OI performance measurement approaches remain fragmented, often context-specific, and limited in their ability to integrate qualitative and quantitative indicators or capture the processual and multi-level nature of OI. This study addresses these limitations by proposing an OI Balanced Scorecard designed to assess the multidimensional impact of OI initiatives across organizational levels. Building on performance measurement and management literature, the framework structures OI impact along four interrelated dimensions (i.e., input, initiatives, output, and outcome) linking resource allocation, innovation activities, direct results, and long-term value creation. The Scorecard was collaboratively developed through a multi-stage participatory research design involving 21 organizations within a collaborative research initiative. The study contributes to OI research by offering an integrative and actionable approach to impact measurement, while extending performance measurement literature by demonstrating how scorecard-based systems can be adapted to uncertain, inter-organizational innovation contexts