#17 Technological change also means knowing when to close
Window #17 of 24 things we need to know about technological change is a tribute to Martin.
Martin spent his entire adult life researching, teaching, and working with innovation, and in particular with open innovation. The way I have understood it, open innovation is the idea that organisations do not innovate alone. They open their boundaries to collaborate with customers, suppliers, researchers, startups, and sometimes even competitors, because valuable ideas rarely live in one place.
Martin published widely in high-quality, peer-reviewed journals in innovation and strategy research. I had the privilege of being the “woman on the inside” (to paraphrase one of his early famous work “A man on the inside”), watching that work unfold from the kitchen table. Seeing the ideas form, the drafts evolve, the arguments sharpen. One of the articles he published while we were together was Closing Open Innovation, written with Marcus Holgersson, Henry W. Chesbrough, and Linus Dahlander, and published in Strategic Management Review. Martin was very delighted about the well-framed title, a title that Marcus had worked on for years as he saw that idea evolve.
The article addresses something that is rarely discussed: not how organisations open up, but how they close. Much of the literature celebrates the benefits of openness, collaboration, and porous boundaries. This study shows that closing an open innovation initiative is not simply the reverse of opening it. Once an organisation has opened itself to external actors, it creates technological, organisational, and relational dependencies that do not disappear on command. Technologies become intertwined. Routines settle. Relationships form. Exiting these arrangements takes time, care, and often comes at a cost.
The authors argue that closing open innovation involves its own strategic challenges. It requires deliberate decisions about what to retain, what to disengage from, and how to do so responsibly. By shifting focus from expansion to exit, the article reminds us that innovation is not only about growth and openness, but also about boundaries, endings, and restraint.
This matters far beyond innovation research.
One of the things we need to know about technological change is that opening is easy to celebrate, but closing is harder to do well. We are good at adopting tools, platforms, and systems. We are much worse at deciding when to stop using them, how to unwind them, or how to disengage without breaking what we have built along the way.
Technological change is not only about adding more. It is also about knowing when and how to close. Martin and his peers understood that. And this window is for him.
Photo: K Marøy
Read the full article: Holgersson, M., Wallin, M. W., Chesbrough, H. W., & Dahlander, L. (2022). Closing open innovation. Strategic Management Review, (December), 750-772.