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Open innovation has attracted significant attention as companies respond to increasing innovative complexities by opening their organizational boundaries to interact with stakeholders along the innovation funnel. However, knowledge from customers and users is not always easily translated into solutions that can be commercialized. Micro‐level challenges of open innovation projects that might be impeding commercialization remain under‐explored in the literature. To address this research gap, we use a collaborative staging approach inspired by actor‐network theory to focus on micro‐level negotiations of actors' concerns at the project level. Analysing data collected via ethnographic research and participant observation in a longitudinal qualitative case study, we investigate how managers and designers navigated value creation and capture when conceptualizing an app for hospitalized stroke patients. Our findings reveal an action‐oriented staging approach to collaborative open innovation efforts and selective enactment of business models depending on whether the focus is value capture or value creation. Furthermore, we point to a repertoire of staging moves that managers and designers can use to facilitate productive negotiations and network alignment as value creation opportunities co‐evolve and to conceptualize value offers in collaborative open innovation processes.

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Sustainable transitions typically require collaboration between multiple actors in the value chain or value network. Recent research has emphasized mapping of stakeholders and values as a starting point for identifying opportunities to realign these relationships, followed by business model experimentation to enable change. However, a simple mapping exercise does not consider the interplay between actors' concerns, business models, and interpretations of sustainability. Pedersen et al. (2022) advocated that aligning concerns is essential to collaborative design and innovation, and requires continuous negotiation between multiple actors. Here, we present a microlevel in‐depth case study to examine how alignment across central value chain actors may be facilitated through the staging of numerous negotiations during the innovation process. Drawing on the staging negotiation spaces co‐design framework, we provide insight into the content of multiple negotiations concerned with different aspects of sustainability during the development of a more sustainable laundry service system on the Danish island of Bornholm. Our findings illustrate how both value chain actors and a third‐party intermediary stage negotiations, and elaborate the framework by attending to the strategic navigational efforts of network alignment through negotiations.

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