New shapes and new stakes: a portrait of open innovation as a promising phenomenon

Open innovation has attracted extensive interest (and has raised numerous debates) in the recent literature on economics and management of innovation. If rich and stimulating, open innovation remains however a loose concept, which calls for further exploration of its shapes and stakes. This article precisely intends to 1) question the originality of the open innovation paradigm, by confronting it with other related concepts developed in the literature previously; 2) investigate more in depth the new modalities that open innovation may take in reality; and 3) discuss the rationales and challenges of the different declinations of the open innovation model by analyzing their benefits and their costs. In other words, we both summarize the state of the art on open innovation and identify research tracks worth being investigating in the future. JEL Codes: L22, L24, O32, M2