Special Issue of R&D Management on “Open Innovation in the Digital Age”

Submission Closed.  Over 188 paper submissions received! 

Conference Chair: Henry Chesbrough, UC Berkeley / ESADE
Conference Co-Chair: Wim Vanhaverbeke, Hasselt University / ESADE / NUS
Academic Program Chair: Marcel Bogers, University of Copenhagen
Industry Program Chair: Solomon Darwin, UC Berkeley
Associate Program Chairs: Ann-Kristin Zobel, ETH Zurich & Jonathan Sims, Babson College

We are proud to announce our call for papers for the 3rd Annual World Open Innovation Conference, and the first to take place in Europe. Open innovation describes “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries” (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014: 17). It provides insights into how firms can harness inflows and outflows of knowledge to improve their innovation success (Chesbrough, 2003; Enkel et al., 2009). It has become a popular (and well cited) area of innovation research (Dahlander & Gann, 2010; Huizingh, 2011; West & Bogers, 2014). Current research on open innovation covers an increasingly wide set of theoretical and managerial domains, such as small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), new units of analysis, different high and low tech industries, and not-for-profit organizations and public policy (Vanhaverbeke et al., 2014; West et al., 2014). Moreover, increasing attention has been paid to the contingencies of open innovation processes (cf. Cassiman & Valentini, 2015; Faems et al., 2010; Laursen & Salter, 2006).

To help identify and develop the best new theoretical and applied research in open innovation, we are organizing the third annual World Open Innovation Conference (WOIC). While the first two WOICs were held in Napa Valley in 2014 and in Silicon Valley in 2015, respectively, it is now moving to Europe. The 3rd WOIC will be held at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain.

As in the first two WOICs, the conference will allow leading and emerging innovation scholars to present their work, interact with other scholars studying related topics, and hear the latest trends in open innovation research. In addition to academic scholars, the conference seeks to engage open innovation practitioners to understand key challenges they face today as well as opportunities to address such challenges in future research.

Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of R&D Management Journal with the theme “Open Innovation in the Digital Age”. More background on the special issue follows below. For the conference in general and the special issue in particular, we are seeking both traditional research papers and those with a more managerial orientation. From the accepted submissions, we will be selecting two academic award winners: the Best Student Paper Award and the Best Emerging Scholar Paper Award. A separate Call for Problems will be used to identify relevant problems and attract managerial participants, while the conference will also feature particular practitioner awards.