Open Innovation: From Hyped Phenomenon to Sustainable Practice

Fifteen years ago, Henry Chesbrough coined the term “Open Innovation” to describe the process of managing knowledge flows across widely distributed sources of innovation for the purpose of generating new products, services or business models. Since then, Open Innovation principles and methods have been subject to an extensive amount of scholarly work that resulted in the development and implementation of numerous Open Innovation projects and initiatives.
Today, innovating organizations do not anymore decide whether to initiate open or closed innovation processes, but rather how to design optimal ways of openness and collaboration involved in their innovation activities. These designs are thereby dependent upon relevant boundary conditions on the individual, group, organizational, and ecosystem level. We discuss challenges arising from some of these boundary conditions and present experience-based ways for addressing them.