Editorial Facing the winds of change: The managerial power of Open Innovation

Since Henry Chesbrough coined the term of Open Innovation in 2003, it has attracted increasing interest from academics, practitioners and policy-makers alike. More than a decade after, some noticeable and contrasted facts emerge. First, Open Innovation has deeply penetrated the research realms, across disciplines, yet mainly in business, economics and management. Interestingly, this research has primarily focused on the inbound side of Open Innovation, first depicting the phenomenon, then exploring the contingencies and processes, and finally, examining the relationship between Open Innovation adoption and performance. Qualitative, exploratory research has been progressively complemented by large-scale, empirical studies. Unfortunately, few studies exploit indicators going beyond the usual suspects, such as cooperation practices, information sourcing, strategic alliances, joint patenting, and the like to capture the complex and multifaceted nature of Open Innovation. The Outbound, and concomitantly, the coupled side of Open innovation is now gaining more popularity within the research community, with seminal contributions, usually depicting how firms can leverage on external channels to increase their profits and societal impact. An illustration of such research, authored by Chesbrough and Chen, is included in this thematic issue. This broadening of the scope of research on Open Innovation may signal a growing awareness of firms for alternative ways to monetize their novelties in times of uncertainty, complexity, volatility and ambiguity. It may also reflect a shift in the mindset of organizations, thanks to innumerable initiatives, networks, conferences, communities and events focusing on Open Innovation, with brilliant keynote speeches, excellent illustrations and showcases. The policy making arena is also increasingly involved and is actively shaping the R&D and innovation programs so that they require the involvement of several stakeholders, they advocate for an open and inclusive approach. Among this myriad of initiatives, we purposefully want to shed light on three of those, which also resonate with our aim of combining academia, practice and policy-making. First, the largest European-funded network, OI-Net, which aims at shaping new curricula centered on Open Innovation. The young generation is our future. Raising their awareness to Open Innovation and its foundational principles, is key as it may impact their propensity to implement Open Innovation practices, and to avoid the typical syndromes hampering its success, namely the “not-invented-here” (Katz & Allen, 1982) and the “not-sold-here” (Lichtenthaler et al., 2010) and to the best of our knowledge, the not-yet coined “not