"We Have Everything to Win": Collaboration and Open Innovation in Public Administration

While the concept of open innovation has attracted significant industry and research interest in the past five years, there remains a paucity of research on the application of the concept in non-commercial settings. This paper presents an exploration of a network of Swedish municipal authorities. Within this network, we have observed a move from isolated innovation to the purposive leveraging of knowledge inflows and outflows in a manner characteristic of the open innovation paradigm. This paper presents a characterization of these knowledge exchanges using an existing framework of open innovation archetypes, as well as a description of the business model impacts of these innovation approaches for the participant municipalities. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for future research.

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