An Open Innovation Lens on the Digital Transformation Frontiers

Introduction

In today’s extremely dynamic environment characterized by the rapid technological progress, globalization, unlimited knowledge sharing, and collaborative innovation with the new active role of users, businesses have no alternative but to take into account this new realm in order to be sustainable and competitive in the long run. The fundamental transformation of business models and work practices toward open and collaborative mode brought by digital technologies is witnessed in all levels of economic activity (Eaton, 2015). Open Innovation (OI) of today goes far beyond licensing, spin-offs and traditional collaborative methods of OI coined by Chesbrough back in 2006 as innovation process that intentionally manages knowledge flows across organizational boundaries. It is recognized that modern mode of OI has become a new space for each level of the society to collaborate and co-innovate (Nieto et al., 2007; Cassiman et al., 2009; Cassiman et al., 2010; Lichtenthaler, 2011; Rayna et al., 2015; Cassiman et.al, 2016). This transition has been thrust forward by a variety of factors, where among the most important are fast-developing ICT, digital technologies that made possible the valuable knowledge to be widely diffused and easily accessible (von Hippel, 2005; Barrett et.al., 2012; Yoo, 2012; Fitzgerald et al., 2014; & Parviainen et al., 2017). Indeed, the coexistence of OI and digital transformation (DT) has fueled the emergence of the new perception of innovation in the digital era, which favors extensive networking and co-creative collaboration between a variety of stakeholders - from users (Baldwin et al., 2011; Afonso et al., 2012) to public sector, SMEs, industry incumbents (Curley et al., 2013; Skarzauskiene et al., 2016).

Most of prior OI reviews have offered qualitative attempts to assess and structure the current state of development of the field. More specifically, Gassmann (2006; 2010) revealed research streams and developed a situational approach and a comprehensive structure of OI management, taking into account various aspects form industry to firm level. Elmquist and colleagues (2009) deepened the research domain and identified new OI themes while rethinking the concept of OI, its strengths, and weaknesses, and proposing conceptual models. Lichtenthaler (2011) put his efforts on compiling existing view and future perspectives of OI, while West and Bogers (2014) changed the research focus moving towards business models, commercialization of OI. In contrast, a few reviews adopted a quantitative approach. In particular, Kovacs et al. (2015) represented both overviews of decade literature of OI domain and its research fronts; however, while focusing predominantly on the OI phenomenon, it neglected specific insights on DT dynamics making this “digital advent” gap more than evident. Van Oorschot et al. (2018) although provided a comprehensive picture of an innovation adoption field in their recent bibliometric review work, they investigated especially the adoption of open systems.