Companies have to innovate to stay competitive, and they have to collaborate with other organizations to innovate effectively. Although the benefits of "open innovation" have been described in detail before, mechanisms underlying how companies can be successful "open innovators" have not be understood well. A growing community of innovation management researchers started to develop different frameworks to understand open innovation in a more systematic way.

This book provides a thorough examination of research conducted to date on open innovation, as well as a comprehensive overview of what will be the most important, most promising and most relevant research topics in this area during the next decade. "Open Innovation: Researching a new paradigm" (OUP 2006) was the first initiative to bring open innovation closer to the academic community. Open innovation research has since then been growing in an exponential way and research has evolved in different and unexpected directions. As the research field is growing, it becomes increasingly difficult for young (and even experienced scholars) to keep an overview of the most important trends in open innovation research, of the research topics that are most promising for the coming years, and of the most interesting management challenges that are emerging in organizations practicing open innovation.
In the spirit of an open approach to innovation, the editors have engaged other scholars and practitioners to contribute some of their interesting insights in this book.