The Open Innovation Research Landscape: Established Perspectives and Emerging Themes across Different Levels of Analysis

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the main perspectives and themes emerging in research on open innovation. The paper is the result of a collaborative process among several open innovation scholars — having a common basis in the recurrent Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on “Researching Open Innovation” at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. In this paper, we present opportunities for future research on open innovation, organized at different levels of analysis. We discuss some of the contingencies at these different levels, and argue that future research needs to study open innovation — originally an organizational-level phenomenon — across multiple levels of analysis. While our integrative framework allows comparing, contrasting, and integrating different perspectives at different levels of analysis, further theorizing will be needed to advance open innovation research. On this basis, we propose some new research categories as well as questions for future research — particularly those that span across research domains that have so far developed in isolation.

Keywords: Open Innovation, Review, Research, Theory, Contingencies, Knowledge, Collaboration