Open innovation: a ´swingers´ club´ or ´going steady´?

The term Open Innovation has become popular in recent years to describe an approach to innovation that decidedly goes beyond the boundaries of a single organization by encouraging firms to pull together knowledge and creativity from a wide variety of parties. As such, Open Innovation evokes an image of firms working with a multitude of partners, always searching for new linkages that could enhance their innovative potential, or for the highest bidders for knowledge that they may wish to sell - in short, this is a "swingers club" of firms engaged in innovation.