The 3rd Annual World Open Innovation Conference co-hosted with ESADE in Barcelona, Spain, brings together renowned academic scholars, leading companies and innovators in the Open Innovation space. R&D Management has agreed to provide a Special Issue comprised of the best papers submitted to the conference.
Open Innovation describes “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries” (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014). It provides insights into how firms can harness inflows and outflows of knowledge to improve their innovation success. It has become a popular (and well cited) area of innovation research.
The digital age provides new enabling factors for generating, sharing, retrieving and storing data, information or knowledge that could dramatically impact how organizations manage their boundaries. In many cases, managers need to let go of the traditional logic of managing knowledge for innovation that may reside inside or outside the organization, but instead need to find new ways of managing the entire ecosystem where complementary partners are co-innovating new solutions that they can only establish together.