The Open Innovation business paradigm promises relevant competitive advantages and at the same time, it presents important challenges at strategic level. Particularly, issues like coworking, incorporation of external innovation, creation and value capturing, and evolution of the entire business model, must be incorporated into early modeling stages, in terms of actors, goals, resources, and tasks. In this context, iStar constitutes a suitable and well-known goal-oriented modeling tool, that can be applicable to any problem domain; nevertheless, in the case of Open Innovation, there is lack of support to manage the issues previously mentioned. In response, the present work proposes an iStar extension that allows the modeling process in a consistent, clear and intuitive way.
Nowadays, independently of its nature or size, organizations are operating in a highly dynamic and
competitive environment characterized by flexibilization of geographical barriers, permeability of
boundaries among enterprises, global changes guided by knowledge and technological development,
among others. In this context, the innovation constitutes an essential component that all business models
must have not only as a factor of differentiation and survival. This innovation can originate from internal
and/or external sources, and demands both strategic internal changes and the opening to generate
synergies with its environment. In this context, Open Innovation (OI) arises as a business paradigm,
based on inbound and outbound flows of value and knowledge that allows organizations to align with
its partners, customers, collaborators, competitors, and other stakeholders [
No matter the business paradigm applied, its subjacent goal model has the mission of facilitate the communication of the business model, establishing a common vocabulary among its different areas, and creating a common understanding of the organizations. Hence, the adequate selection and application of a goal modeling tool is critical.
iStar constitutes a well-known goal modeling tool that brings a set of elements capable to represent
the intentionality of business, and in order to identify which elements support the modeling of intrinsic
characteristics of OI, we perform a bibliographic review. The work of [
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a qualitative assessment of goal models to quantitative assessment based on time cost; hence, this work manages entities as Time Indicator to tasks, and Satisfaction Value with which a task is completed.
Creation and Capture of Value; and c) Knowledge generated from Coworking. Each of these areas present diverse restrictions when we use only standard characteristics of iStar to model them. These restrictions are resumed as follows: a. To model intentionality: OI requires to model occasional cooperation between the organization and external actors. Due that iStar does not manage occasional relationships, the solution might be to elaborate one model without the cooperation, and another model with the cooperation and its implications. However, the elaboration and maintaining of two (or more) models for each issue previously described, reduces the modeling agility and can be source of confusion, misunderstanding and errors. b. To model value management: OI requires differentiate goals involved in value creation (like “To increase product availability in retailers”) from goals involved in value capture (like “to obtain additional revenue due optimization of retailers agreements”). iStar does not allow to differentiate this nature in goals and qualities. c. To model the knowledge originated in coworking activities: When iStar models the goals of knowledge management, it does not differentiate whether this knowledge comes from external actors, or is generated within the organization. This differentiation is important because allows to quantify the level of dependence on external actors.
extension that brings: independence of business nature, feasibility and clarity to model IO issues; and ease of integration with other iStar extensions involved in enterprise modeling.
The present research arises from the convergence of several concepts that we briefly introduce
below. The first one is the transdisciplinarity, referred in [
Following this trend and based on our experience on OI modeling and adoption, we propose a set of
extensions to iStar. We start with the biological definition of Adaptation given by [
Creating a parallelism for our work, the adjustments denotes a set of changes to improve the business efficiency and/or effectiveness, while trying to reach the organizational mission. If the business benefit resultant of these adjustments is considered constant over time, we say that there is a (permanent) adaptation, usually involving a loss of skills, capacities, resources, structures or processes that have ceased to be used. On the other hand, if the business benefit has a limited lifetime beyond which it only represents costs to the organization, we say that there is a (temporal) transformation; in this does not exist loss, and there is a mechanism to return to previous state (of course, this mechanism has a specific cost).
technologies adoption, human talent rotation, customer offer renewal; and external factors like market
competition, threat of substitution, threat of new entry, buyer power, supplier power, government
regulation [
All adjustment has a start event, which arises by identifying some external product / service / information that contributes to satisfy a need or to create an opportunity. Period in which the adjustment represents a business benefit in terms of incomings, process improvement, knowledge increment, customer benefits, or similar. Only transformation has a specific duration, which is measured in periods (time units, months, fiscal years, trimesters, semesters, calendar years) If the adjustment has an end point, it is a transformation, and can and return to the previous state when: a) the business benefit disappears; b) the external threat disappears; or c) the cost or risk of maintain the transformation is greater than its benefits. If the adjustment has not an end point. It is a business adaptation, and it is considered permanent.
The adaptation involves some business areas considered critical for the business survival, and constitutes a critical success factor.
On the other hand, the transformation generally belongs to a specific business area, and has a low impact.
with the behavior of living organisms. This business analysis approach is called Living Organizations.
conducted applying Conditional Probability, environmental analysis (extended PESTLE and Porter’s
a mechanism to decide if the organizational changes are sustainable over time). We suggest that a quantitative metric that works around the point of no return might be considered as this mechanism.
( ) Where A is the event of TotalBenefitAdaptation-TotalCostAdaptation is positive B is the event of Trigger is maintained
Trigger is the external thread or opportunity that origins the adaptation The acceptation range to continue the adaptation depends on the environment variability. = ( ∩ ) (1)
it focuses on critical quality aspects like completeness, consistency and conflicts reduction.
which are developed in parallel with a monitoring task, and finally a closing task. An excerpt of this application is shown in Table 2. Due to the fact that our proposal is a new initiative to bring support to
List of concepts to be introduced [with concepts description]: List of concepts in Intentionality: Adaptation goals: they represent a permanent modification of process, politics, adaptation made permanent).
Transformation goals: they allow the organization to establish a non-permanent adjustment in order to obtain a specific business benefit.
List of concepts in Creation and capture of business value: The creation goals, which can support the achieving both creation goals of higher level, or capture goals.
The capture goals, which can support the achieving of creation goals only to model a new business innovation.
List of concepts in Knowledge generated from Coworking: The consideration that OI extension requires in Strategic Dependence (SD) diagram is indicated in 2.2 task, in relation to how associate the creation and capture goals. During goal evaluation, the Absorption and Generation links has the same behavior that contribution links.
The OI extension has no impact on SR diagram. G7 — Relate concepts introduced by the extensions with the iStar concepts G8 — Define extensions with a smallest possible number of modifications and new representations in order not to complicate the use of the modelling language (iStar) G9 — Propose careful and simple graphical representations, able to be drawn on paper without a tool
Our extension is conservative, which means that conserves all nodes and links of iStar syntax.
Our extension is proposed following a specific process; it is not an ad-hoc creation.
We perform a literature review.
The participation of OI domain experts and iStar experts is planned as part of studies that are developed in parallel way with the present research.
All concepts are described in the present research. Abstract and concrete syntaxes are provided with our proposal The correspondence between abstract syntax (metamodel) and concrete syntax (in our case, the graphical representation proposed) was verified. The concepts introduced by our proposal were related to the iStar concepts through specialization.
Our proposal has a minimized number of modifications in order to maintain the iStar scalability.
The graphical representation proposed is simple and easy to draw, as well as iStar.
Term Adaptation Coworking
Description From Latin adaptō, denotes the change(s) that an entity must develop at level of structure, behavior and/or functionality, to guarantee its survival and health relationships with this environment.
Defines a collaborative work in which, the activities are shared by people from different roles and disciplines, with the aim of generating synergies and creating and strengthening knowledge networks Business element considered vital to achieve the organizational mission. its noncompliance prevents success; however, its compliance does not guarantee success.
The business environment is dynamic, and is the resultant of interrelation forces at micro
level [
Term Description Transformation Permanent business change originated in an adaptation (progressively) or in a change of evolutive stage (disruptively).
Value capture Involves a set of related activities that allow retain for the organization, a part of the value that was created for the customer.
Value creation Involves a set of related activities that brings value to the product / service / information that the organization offers to the customer.
way to be modeled through iStar language. In conclusion, we proposed a set of entities and relationships that support the fundaments of Open Innovation: Intentionality; Creation and Capture of Business