Chapter 35 W/ Yao Sun

This chapter reviews open innovation theories from the perspectives of collaboration dynamics, socio-technical affordances, and governance approaches. The theories suggest that successful open innovation results from the online crowd’s stigmergic self-organization, robust action, and coopetition. Socio-technical systems afford successful open innovation through supporting knowledge collaging, knowledge interlacing, and purposeful deliberating. Accordingly, research on open innovation is evolving from focusing on solving constrained problems with traditional distant search to studying large-scale crowd-based collective knowledge sharing and co-creation to tackle grand challenges that are broadly defined and of ample scope. Implications for future open innovation research on managerial actions that maximize the novelty and implementability of crowd-generated solutions as well as on crowds’ cognitive and behavioral variations are discussed.