Towards a sponsor’s role for supporting requirements engineering process in open innovation projects

Presently, globalization is causing companies to be more competitive, and one of the ways this can be achieved is through the use of Open Innovation Projects (OIPs). Although considerable research has been devoted to Open Innovation (OI), rather less attention has been paid to how the OIP sponsor deals with limited resources to implement the requirements of the OIP. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the concerns and challenges that the sponsor has in supporting the requirements engineering (RE) process to meet the OIP requirements. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate five companies in the automotive, steel, oil, health and electric power industries. The findings show that there is an evolving role for the sponsor to carry out the RE which is different from the OIP when the OIP first started. This is because the analysis of the requirements in OIP is constantly evolving during the project, and thinking about the requirements in the management phase of the OIP also needs to evolve to reach a solution. The findings can help future stakeholders to better set requirements for their OIPs as well as to proactively address problems of inadequate collaboration and empathy of the participants in OIP.