Understanding new corporate innovation strategies: Hybrid high-involvement approaches and the increasing importance of individual absorptive capacity

Driven by the challenges of digitalisation and increasing market dynamics, corporations must develop new strategies for innovation and knowledge management. This paper describes hybrid high-involvement innovation (HHII) as an emerging approach to corporate innovation. Through nine interviews, we explore the experiences and actions of experts in German corporate innovation programs in an effort to understand and systematise new approaches to corporate engagement in innovation. We categorise HHII benefits, antecedents, and emerging challenges, indicating the importance of innovation engagement activities and capabilities on the corporate and individual levels. We additionally identify and adapt key design elements of HHII to support its development and implementation in corporate environments, thereby examining the use of open innovation initiatives as vehicles to enable internal and external crowdsourcing of new ideas. This paper develops the concept of individual absorptive capacity (IAC) and explores its increasingly important role in open innovation initiatives such as HHII.