Sinossi

The increasing connectivity of society and business has fostered collaborations and sharing to the extreme. Open innovation, which was academically introduced in 2003 by Chesbrough, can be deemed as the result of a mass-diffusion digitalized fashion amid users, businesses, and other public or private institutions. Prior open innovation studies are copious beyond imagination. Nonetheless, this strategy arises as the very conundrum, a riddle far yet to be solved. In fact, thus far open innovation conception was evolving ceaselessly, assuming different facets time by time. Beyond the façade, open innovation is not simply a mode to develop novelties. On the converse, it can be integrally deemed as a new economic paradigm, which reflects societal zeitgeist and its changes over-time. If we ought to identify only two main traits of open innovation, then, we have to focus on two aspects: it entails collaboration between diverse actors by definition, and it is tied inextricably to digital technologies, to the point that it coevolves with them.