Unfolding Fifty Shades Of Open Innovation: Stimulating Insights & Foresights

Since the concept of Open Innovation was coined by Henry Chesbrough in 2003, it has increasingly gained popularity in academic research and attracted interest of practitioners and policymakers alike. A recent search (December 2014) performed in Scopus revealed a mere 5 hits in 2003, a more significant 161 hits in 2009 and over 300 hits in 2013, considering exclusively journals, conference papers, reviews and editorials listed in this internationally recognised database of peer-reviewed literature. From the business perspective, according to Google search, looking for “Open Innovation” in April 2003 returned about 200 hits, while performing the same search 10 years later provided over 450 million links. It is obvious that Open Innovation became a paradigm which has attracted attention not only among academics, but also business entities and beyond. More and more people handing out their business cards show titles related to open innovation, like chief open innovation officer, open innovation specialist, head of open innovation to name a few. Job offerings website Monster.com search with the skill “Open Innovation” produced from tens to hundreds of job ads depending on your country of interest (conducted in March 2015). The debate about being open or not has reached new arenas and disciplines. For example, open data is booming where data owners (often public bodies) are wondering how much and under which conditions they can open-up databases and files. At the same time, the business world is eagerly looking for new opportunities to grow via open data which usually creates more jobs, desperately hunted by governments…