Tackling Societal Challenges with Open Innovation

What is it about?

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.

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Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- In this paper, we discuss how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges – as well as the tradeoffs and tensions that arise as a result. Open innovation aligns well with the growing stakeholder theory of the firm, and mobilizes knowledge from different entities towards useful and sometimes non-pecuniary objectives. ------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- 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. In this paper, we discuss how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges. For private firms, this relates to a number of tradeoffs and tensions that must be managed. ---------------------------- Author Perspective ---------------------------- As scholars of management, strategy, and innovation, we often focus on how firms can perform better. We have found that open innovation—using external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes—is a powerful source of competitiveness. However, we also believe that open innovation can address some of our societal challenges, such as health and sustainability, and in this paper we want to highlight this opportunity and some of the related tensions and tradeoffs that need to be considered.