Two decades ago, Henry Chesbrough introduced the term “Open Innovation,” encapsulating a paradigm that encourages firms to harness both internal and external ideas, as well as diverse pathways to market, in their pursuit of technological advancement. This concept has since gained immense traction within management literature, culminating in the recent release of The Oxford Handbook of Open Innovation on its 20th anniversary. Boasting 136 contributions, this comprehensive handbook offers empirical, conceptual, and practical insights, emphasizing the imperative of fostering practice-inspired research and facilitating purposeful knowledge exchanges across individuals, organizations, and ecosystems. 

Among the contributions is a conceptual chapter co-authored by Jacopo Cricchio and myself, titled Open Innovation Policy: The Outline-Inspire-Promote Spinner. 

Open innovation is a paradigm that illustrates a business strategy. In this chapter, however, the question is asked, how is the OI paradigm capable of influencing innovation policy? After briefly illustrating how the OI paradigm has found its way into the realm of public policy, a new vision for integrating OI within innovation policy practice is presented: the Outline-Inspire-Promote (OIP) spinner. It is argued that throughout the last 20 years, policymakers have found in the OI paradigm a useful tool: (1) to design the fundamentals of new policies; (2) to name and explain their actions; and (3) to identify areas of intervention for capacity building and business development. The chapter argues that the OIP spinner is a useful tool to represent the stance according to which innovation policy is adopting or supporting OI.

Please download the full chapter at this link and feel free to share with me and Jacopo your comments and ideas for further research on this fascinating topic.