Requirements Engineering in Open Innovation and Software Ecosystems- Exploring the requirements engineering practices in the industry in the context of Open Innovation and Software Ecosystems

Abstract: Software companies are experiencing extensive pressure to be more innovative. A shift from closed organizations and processes towards open structures, where knowledge from external actors is joined to internal insights, proposes new forms of collaboration for innovative development. Thus, organizations are getting involved in new paradigms like Open Innovation. Furthermore, they open their platforms and form alliances participating and benefiting from the capabilities offered by a Software Ecosystem. These new ways to innovate in a collaborative setting impact the requirement engineering processes creating the need to investigate how software companies perform requirement engineering when working with Open Innovation and shared platforms within a Software Ecosystem. Moreover, it is worth to research how innovative are the requirements that flow among the different actors in such a context. The purpose of this thesis is to study the industrial requirement engineering practices in the context of Open Innovation and explore how different actors interact and obtain different levels of innovative outcome. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted in the form of an online questionnaire. Answers were collected from 50 practitioners involved in organizations in the contexts previously described. Particularly, elicitation, decision-making, and the innovation outcome were the topics studied. Furthermore, it was analyzes how industrial practices or outcomes are influenced by the role or the experience of the organization in the ecosystem.