Open and collaborative innovation for strategic growth

The increasing connectivity of society and business has fostered collaborations and sharing to the extreme. Open innovation, which was academically introduced in 2003 by Chesbrough, can be deemed as the result of a mass-diffusion digitalized fashion amid users, businesses, and other public or private institutions. Prior open innovation studies are copious beyond imagination. Nonetheless, this strategy arises as the very conundrum, a riddle far yet to be solved. In fact, thus far open innovation conception was evolving ceaselessly, assuming different facets time by time. Beyond the façade, open innovation is not simply a mode to develop novelties. On the converse, it can be integrally deemed as a new economic paradigm, which reflects societal zeitgeist and its changes over-time. If we ought to identify only two main traits of open innovation, then, we have to focus on two aspects: it entails collaboration between diverse actors by definition, and it is tied inextricably to digital technologies, to the point that it coevolves with them. Though, for either of the two topics there are large rooms for future researches. As a matter of fact, both of them are relatively new and underexplored fields. Despite many scholars have paid attention to collaboration impact on firm’s performance, their thinking is mostly tautological, likewise their findings. Plus, they do not address univocally what is the impact of different practices in collaboration. At the same time, the pace of evolution for digital technologies is such that it is hard to capture how it actually interplays with open innovation modes. Besides, considering both the technology and the collaboration sides, it is rather tough to explain their economic contribution to value creation. This fuzziness marks another main gap in open innovation studies. We argue that innovation future travels via online network and collaborations. We argue that innovation has future travels via online networking and collaborations Precisely the next inclusive internet will work as the open and collaborative net for innovation. Shared, timely and open internet innovations will be the new normal prospectively. There is no doubt this will have a huge impact on society. Perhaps, in the future this ecosystem will be largely more inclusive, with blurred boundaries between actors for actually a co-designed approach to innovation.