Abstract:

Innovations are widely regarded as a key source of competitive advantage in an increasingly turbulent environment (Crossan, Apadyin, 2010; Dess, Picken, 2000, Tushman, O'Reilly 1996, Zastempowski 2019). Enterprise strategies are being changed by growing customer requirements and competitive pressure. In particular, organizations are currently interested in creating and implementing innovations with a high level of market flexibility (Liczmańska-Kopcewicz et al., 2018). Significant benefits for innovation-oriented companies stimulate their willingness to anticipate consumer needs and wants and respond accordingly and simultaneously imaginatively before other competitors identifies such possibilities (Siguaw et al., 2006; Liczmańska, 2016). More and more companies are actively identifying and anticipating customer needs, and then responding to them appropriately, creating greater value for buyers (Liczmańska, 2016). The location of innovative processes is largely shifting from the company's internal environment to the inter-organizational space. Permanent competitive advantage is possible to achieve thanks to the integration of relations between producers and their environment (Chang, 2017; Zakrzewska-Bielawska, 2016; Buganza, Verganti, 2009). Customers have become natural external partners in the open innovation model (Buganza, Verganti, 2009, Sopińska, 2013). Researchers and business practitioners involved in the company's development strategy are increasingly focusing on cooperation in networks (Czakon, 2012; Czakon et al., 2019) or cooperation with clients that have been undertaking value co-creation (Prahalad, Ramaswamy, 2004; Thomke, von Hippel, 2002 ). Enterprises that care for sustainable development (Liczmańska et al., 2019), satisfaction, and thus the loyalty of buyers, try to provide new solutions to meet the articulated and hidden, as well as the future needs of their buyers (Blocker et al., 2011; Wiśniewska, 2014). Models of open innovations based on bilateral partnership cooperation between enterprises are virtual communities, which actually cease to be merely providers of ideas but become partners of innovative solutions that have a much greater impact on the course of the innovation process (Sopińska, 2013).