Conference Theme

This year’s conference theme is “Leading the Recovery: Turning Threats into Opportunities with Open Innovation”. The major challenges that the world is facing are becoming more pressing and require urgent attention. These encompass complex problems, such as in areas as climate change, traffic safety, food ecologies and life expectancy and need to be addressed through an integrative, collaborative and global perspective. Accordingly, the SDGs have raised a lot of interest of managers and 3 academics alike. For the upcoming WOIC, we specifically call for research that shows how open innovation helps address grand challenges. Addressing these complex issues requires an inclusive and collaborative approach to balance the opportunities and challenges of open innovation in a very broad sense — implying potentially new approaches to science, education and business, all for the benefit of society. This more inclusive and collaborative approach is needed to better understand and cope with the underlying uncertainty of the problems and the ambiguity of what the possible solutions may be. But what are the antecedents, mechanisms, moderators and outcomes of some of these processes? How can the open innovation framework be applied to the context of grand challenges? How can open innovation turn societal challenges into opportunities for businesses? What can open innovation scholars learn from other perspectives to improve their research questions and designs as well as the implications of their research?

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