Tackling Societal Challenges with Open Innovation

Abstract

Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. This introduction discusses how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges—as well as the trade-offs and tensions that arise as a result. Against this background we introduce the articles published in this Special Section, which were originally presented at the sixth Annual World Open Innovation Conference.

Moving toward responsible value creation: Business model challenges faced by organizations producing responsible health innovations

“…This caveat, which signals the need to avoid a narrow micro-level focus, resonates with the innovation management literature underscoring the "interdependencies" between organizations that are central to their success within an innovation system (McGahan et al, 2021). For Chesbrough and Bogers (2014), distributing knowledge and capacities across organizational boundaries and for purposes that are not solely financial is pivotal to leverage the benefits of innovation.…”

“…Different organizational forms should find the managerial and financial support adapted to their respective value proposition and capacities to produce responsible innovations or contribute to responsible value chains and value networks. Because "innovative ideas and practices traverse" organizational boundaries, innovation managers should certainly become proficient in establishing and maintaining partnerships with organizations that share a strong interest in responsible value creation (McGahan et al, 2021).…”

Adoption of open innovation in the COVID-19 emergency: developing a process-based information coordination system

“…Whereas open innovation is mostly associated to the business field, the open R&D movement that is characterizing the global answer to COVID-19 can be more specifically discussed with reference to not-for-profit actors and motivations (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014), and societal challenges (Chesbrough and Di Minin, 2014;Santoro et al, 2018;Tardivo et al, 2017;Ahn et al, 2019), especially for what concerns the measurement of social, cultural, environmental and economic issues (Ahn et al, 2019;Bornmann, 2013), and the involvement of different groups of stakeholders (Spaapen et al, 2007). The relevance and scarcity of research on these issues is also confirmed by two recent special issues published respectively in 2019 on R&D Management journal (Ahn et al, 2019), and in 2020 on California Management Review journal (McGahan et al, 2021), as well as by a very recent work of Eppinger (2021) who proposed six distinct innovation attributes to deliver societal benefits.…”

“…The relevance and scarcity of research on these issues is also confirmed by two recent special issues published respectively in 2019 on R&D Management journal (Ahn et al. , 2019), and in 2020 on California Management Review journal (McGahan et al , 2021), as well as by a very recent work of Eppinger (2021) who proposed six distinct innovation attributes to deliver societal benefits.…”

Resource Scarcity and Humanitarian Social Innovation: Observations from Hunger Relief in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Organizational capabilities are routines or manifestations of observable corporate structures and processes that determine how firms transform inputs into outputs (Collis, 1994 ). However, as we explain later, selecting which organizational capability to use in developing innovation is difficult because there are inherent trade-offs in terms of the resources and effort invested in them (McGahan et al, 2021 ). We thus try to determine the relationship between the resource scarcity and organizational capabilities of HSEs in ordinary and extraordinary operating environments for developing social innovations.…”