Originally published on Berkeley Haas Newsroom

British software developer Symbian beat Apple to market by five years by introducing an operating system for smartphones in 2002. Long before the first iPhone, Symbian built a network of partners and suppliers around its operating system that included the world’s largest maker of cell phones. By 2007, Symbian boasted a 63 percent market share.

Symbian appeared to have taken its strategy straight out of the open innovation playbook, a business strategy developed by Haas Adjunct Professor Henry Chesbrough, which asserts that "a company should make greater use of external ideas in its business and allow its own ideas to go out to others to use in their businesses.”

When multiple firms in a partnership cooperate to create value for customers, the partnerships succeed, argue open innovation theorists. That’s exactly what Symbian and its partners attempted to do. Yet by the end of 2014, the Symbian operating system had become so marginal that when IDG, a market research company, reported on the mobile OS market, it lumped it...

To learn more about Henry Chesbrough's book on open innovation, read the full article on Berkeley Haas Newsroom.