While industrial innovation was once assumed to be a vertically integrated process, three recent streams of research — open innovation, user innovation and cumulative innovation — have examined how innovation is created outside the boundaries of the firm. However, within these streams are...

Firms that practice open innovation strategies rely on the cooperation of external firms to provide components, complements and customers for the innovations of the focal firm (Chesbrough, 2003). Such strategies can be quite complex in systems-based industries, which inherently require...

We review the contribution and evolution of open innovation since the publication of Chesbrough’s 2003 Open Innovation book, and suggest likely directions going forward. We link the articles of this special issue to three key trends in open innovation research: better measurement, resolving...

There are many similarities in how firms pursuing an open innovation strategy can utilize crowds and communities as sources of external innovations. At the same time, the differences between these two network forms of collaboration have previously been blurred or overlooked. In this chapter, we...

Open innovation is a powerful framework encompassing the generation, capture, and employment of intellectual property at the firm level. We identify three fundamental challenges for firms in applying the concept of open innovation: finding creative ways to exploit internal innovation,...

In 2003, Chesbrough coined the term “open innovation” as a new paradigm for industrial innovation. In this paper, we review and synthesize the growing literature that follows Chesbrough by studying the commercialization of external innovations — one of the key open innovation...

Throughout its brief history, California has established itself as a national or international leader in key industries — such as aerospace, computing and entertainment — through early mover pre-emption and strong clustering effects. California was also an early leader in the three key...

Research on open source software, user innovation and open innovation have increasingly emphasized the role of communities in creating, shaping and disseminating innovations. However, the comparability of such studies has been hampered by the lack of a precise definition of the community...

Ecosystems are increasingly recognized as crucial for the success of a firm's innovation strategy and business model. They are also a topic attracting increasing academic interest, with more than 300 articles published in top journals since 1992, most in the past five years. Based on an...

Two key factors in the success of general-purpose computing platforms are the creation of a technical standards architecture and managing an ecosystem of third-party suppliers of complementary products. Here, we examine Symbian Ltd., a startup firm that developed a strong technical architecture...