In a distributed world, relationships and partnering become even more critical for business, as delivering on rising and complex demands and addressing complex issues is more than one organization can do alone. Such a situation constitutes a huge challenge for many organizations. Building on an inductive case study of an open innovation initiative, illustrating the complex and messy nature of such organizing, we outline five design principles that appear fundamental to the organizing for collaborative innovation. These design principles are our main contribution to the emerging research on organizing for collaborative innovation as they form a perspective and a conceptual tool to talk about and understand the messiness and disorganization of dynamic and discontinuous contemporary organizational constructs.

Despite the fact that Open Innovation (OI) has rapidly become one of the hottest topics in innovation management, comprehensive reviews of the state of the research field and its managerial implications are scarce. This could be one of the reasons why OI still represents a big challenge for innovation managers. This paper, based on a literature review covering the period from 2003 up until June 2009, identifies managerial implications of OI under four major categories: namely organizing for openness, co-creating value, leadership for diversity and intellectual property (IP) management. The contribution of this paper is both practical and theoretical. On the one hand, innovation managers can find useful suggestions for dealing with the challenge of openness in their organization. On the other hand, gaps and omissions in the practical aspects of OI management are identified in order to guide further research on the field.

This paper questions the applicability of traditional notions of intermediary activities, which are usually categorized as either brokering or networking, in cases of high uncertainty regarding technologies, markets or which actors to involve. In the case of collaborative open innovation, especially in circumstances when no single organization is able to take on the challenge alone, the activities traditionally associated with intermediation do not suffice to describe what an intermediary can do to support innovation. This paper presents two cases of intermediaries working with the early phases of traffic safety innovations, and how they have managed to develop their activities beyond solely brokering and networking, but also to take an active role in the process of joint exploration and creation of knowledge. We use a qualitative approach to analyze the two cases in order to provide examples of how rethinking intermediation activities can support open innovation in a collaborative setting. The findings suggest that intermediaries can take on a more active role, which could be described as an architect which designs prerequisites and offers leadership in the process of joint exploration and creation of knowledge.

Innovation intermediaries have become key actors in open innovation contexts. Research has improved our understanding of the managerial challenges inherent to intermediation in situations in which problems are rather well-defined. Yet, in some open innovation situations, the relevant actor networks may not be known, there may be no clear common interest, or severe problems may exist with no legitimate common place where they can be discussed. This paper contributes to the research on innovation intermediaries by showing how intermediaries address managerial challenges related to a high degree of unknown. We draw upon the extant literature to highlight the common core functions of different types of intermediaries. We then introduce the "degree of unknown" as a new contingency variable for the analysis of the role of intermediaries for each of these core functions. We illustrate the importance of this new variable with four empirical case studies in in different industries and countries in which intermediaries are experiencing situations of high level of unknown. We highlight the specific managerial principles that the four intermediaries applied in creating an environment for collective innovation. Therefore, we clarify what intermediation in the unknown may entail.

Seven years after Chesbrough published the first book on open innovation; the field has literally exploded, and is continuing to do so at an increasing speed. Earlier overviews have analyzed the current status of the field at different points in time. The purpose with this paper is to take this research one step further and analyze gaps in the field as it has progressed up to date, and also discuss the managerial implications of that literature. All scientific literature (as found through major databases) published in English on open innovation has been analyzed qualitatively. The paper identifies current streams in the literature and identifies key issues that future research needs to solve. Compared to earlier reviews, we identify a shift in the direction that the research is taken. The paper discusses why this may be the case and speculates on the future of the field.