Access, Transparency, and Stakeholder Engagement in Radical Open Innovation: The Role of Branding

Through an empirical case of complex, radical environmental innovation, this paper offers a novel perspective by applying brand logics to sensemaking at micro, meso, and macro levels, highlighting institutional, meaning, and human-level barriers to cooperation, knowledge sharing, and absorptive capacities. By adopting a sensemaking perspective to study actions, meaning and knowledge in the innovation ecosystem, we follow decision-making processes of micro level actors as they work collaboratively in an innovation ecosystem. The paper provides two main contributions to the open innovation literature: Firstly, actors pull from micro, meso and macro level frames in order to make sense of the innovation processes and to give meaning for them to justify their engagement in these processes and to facilitate the development of common value frames within which learning talks places. We suggest that value frames should be considered as a nested system from which actors pull from across micro, meso and macro levels. Secondly, that micro level actor interactions where there are competing, or even antagonistic value frames can be bridged by focusing on human elements and brand logics that provide a common symbolic meaning across the innovation ecosystem. Sensemaking elements functioned to bridging functional value frames with meaning value frames at several levels of mutual identity.