Open Innovation within the Hospital: Lessons from an Additive Manufacturing Initiative

New paradigms in healthcare offer hospitals the opportunity to play a greater role in innovation and to explore the potential offered by open innovation (OI).This article investigates how, and under what conditions, OI could enhance the innovation performance of hospitals.We analyze the case of Greater Paris University Hospitals and their unique experiment involving a large in-house 3D printing platform operated in collaboration with a specialist services provider.Our study reveals that on-site OI can lead to significant product, managerial, and process innovations for hospitals.However, our study also suggests that such OI initiatives will not fully succeed unless hospitals can capture a share of the value they create.This, in turn, requires the capability to maximise dissemination across the organization and to reach internal consensus on how value will be captured from the OI initiative.