IHS-Kompakt: Approaches to Legal Certainty in the Open Innovation Process Date: , Theme: Workshop
Open Innovation (OI) is an approach to strengthening innovation performance through the deliberate involvement of stakeholders in the innovation process. Using five scenarios, partners from the IHS project GROWTH demonstrated how the legal framework for the OI process can be designed.
The IHS project GROWTH implements participatory transformation processes and innovation methods across organizational boundaries. The focus is on cooperative innovation processes with companies, research institutes, customers, and suppliers.
How do you handle the contributed know-how when a person wishes to leave the OI process but is not from your own organization? Dr. Pamela Wehling and her legal advisors from the GROWTH project explored this and other questions in December 2025 in IHS Compact. To this end, they developed five clarification cases for the different phases of the OI process—such as the initiation, concept, and development phases. The cases show which rights and obligations the participants have and how legally structuring the framework conditions can help proactively counter potential conflict situations in collaboration.
As a recommendation, they advised the roughly 30 participants to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) early in the OI process and to agree on a legal framework for all parties involved in the process.
The speakers also referred to an article titled “Approaches to Legal Certainty in the Open Innovation Process” in the journal “Transfer & Innovation,” issue 3, 2024, where the approaches presented can be reviewed in detail.