For manufacturers, remaining competitive depends on their ability to digitalize their business models (i.e., offer digital and digitally enhanced products and services). To achieve this, they must engage with new digital partners and help their existing suppliers, partners, and other stakeholders to digitalize. Orchestrating this growing ecosystem is challenging. Manufacturers struggle with this endeavor because of specific barriers associated with their existing legacy business model and related to their lack of digital vision, product-centric value chains, and a bias toward firm-centered profit formulas. To overcome these barriers, leading manufacturers have developed new approaches to ecosystem orchestration.

This article explores how firms can benefit from opening up the new product development process by integrating the principles of open innovation with the Stage-Gate process. It examines the potential opportunities of employing the principles of both inbound and outbound open innovation within new product development at a firm in the upstream oil & gas industry. A practitioner-oriented work model, named the open Stage-Gate model, can exploit the advantages of "openness." This model allows explicit consideration of import and export of know-how and technology through gate evaluations and also enables firms to continuously assess their core capabilities and business model. The application of this model can assist firms in capturing value from both internal and external technology exploitation in increasingly open innovation processes.