General presentation. Rethinking boundaries for innovation: exploring the shapes and stakes of the open innovation phenomenon

Economic and management studies have investigated the origin and dynamics of firm boundaries in-depth, dealing with their influence on the production and the commercialisation processes of goods and services. Recently however the analysis of the boundaries in their various dimensions (horizontal, vertical, within or outside the firm, in terms of communities, etc.) switched away from production and commercialisation, to integrate a focus on the innovative process. The question thus became: which are the appropriate boundaries to be designed in order to catalyse innovation? Whereas historically this core and strategic activity was mostly kept internal, firms progressively have been reconsidering alternatives between doing innovation by themselves, with others, or simply by buying innovative products on the market. Indeed, according to Chesbrough et al. (2006) adopting an open innovation strategy is a key to success, but not the only one as noted by Pisano and Verganti (2008). Hence, we have recently seen the development of new forms of distributed innovative models and practices such as markets for ideas, crowdsourcing, open source co-development, which shed new light on the analysis of firm boundaries.