Call for Papers

7th Annual World Open Innovation Conference

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?

Topics

Open innovation behavior & cognition
  • Individual-level attributes and behaviors associated with open innovation (e.g., identity, commitment, motivation, resistance to change, communication and learning)
  • Microfoundations of open innovation and related topics
  • The human side of open innovation and the role of human resource management
Open innovation strategy and design
  • Formal and informal organizational structures for open innovation
  • Project-level attributes related to open innovation strategy and design (e.g., project complexity and uncertainty)
  • Nature and outcomes of entrepreneurial opportunities that open innovation can enable and help to enact
  • Combinations of “open” and “closed” strategies
  • Intellectual property strategy
  • Business model innovation
Open innovation communities and users
  • Leveraging knowledge produced by individual users with different abilities and motivations
  • How to sustain different forms of open innovation communities
  • Alignment between organizations and communities of innovation
Open innovation ecosystems
  • How new network forms combine value creation and value capture
  • Interactions between heterogeneous actors in innovation ecosystems (and their governance)
  • Governance of digital platforms
  • Crowd-based search and financing
Open policy & governance
  • The design, implementation, and effects of policies for open innovation
  • New forms of democracy and collaborative public management (e.g., cities, regions, governments)
Related topic areas in this rapidly expanding field, such as
  • Technology, digitization and open innovation
  • Open innovation and sustainability
  • Open science and open innovation in science
  • Open innovation and entrepreneurship
  • Open innovation in different contexts (e.g., services, SMEs, international business, different industries)
  • New metrics or methodologies for studying open innovation
  • Linking open innovation to broader theories of management or economics