Hopping Tables — An Introduction to the SMR Special Issue on Open Innovation

Since the publication of Chesbrough’s (2003) book, Open Innovation (OI) has emerged as an influential concept within the domain of Innovation Studies. Open innovation — a distributed process based on purposefully managed knowledge flows — focuses on the need for an organization to transcend its boundaries by searching for new business models that both source and seed knowledge and technology externally (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014, p. 17). Chesbrough’s OI work spawned an active conversation in a community of scholars that has generated numerous research papers, which have garnered significant citations. A recent Google Scholar search on the term “open innovation”...