While open innovation and university–industry collaboration contribute significantly to innovation in industrialized countries, it is less clear how these create value in emerging economies and new application contexts. This study examines the introduction of global practices into the Nicaraguan context. Adopting a service-dominant logic perspective of value co-creation through interaction on multiple levels, we noted the importance of systemic orchestration or staging of the ecosystem, organizations, and challenge project delivery. We also recognize the importance of enabling activities and spaces that promote innovation. While our findings indicated that the expected and perceived value creation did not fully match, we found encouraging signs of the build-up of foundational practices to support national development agendas. There is evidence of shifted mindsets and looped learning across the system. We propose a model for the systemic development of enabling structures, value creation, and innovation spaces when transferring practices into new application areas. We expect this model to be useful for practitioners when planning and engaging in transferring open innovation practices across application contexts. The study contributes to our knowledge and practice of creating value through applying open innovation within university–industry collaboration in emerging economies, a little-studied theme.

Sharing global knowledge and practices while adapting them to local contexts is a central concern in innovation and sustainable development. In this paper, we examined how intermediary organisations promoting innovation can foster and enable the diffusion and local adaptation of knowledge, practices of open innovation and collaboration between universities, firms and social innovators. We studied three longitudinal, interlinked cases from Finland, Mexico and Nicaragua, moving from highly industrialised to emerging-economy contexts. We traced how innovation intermediaries support developing cultures of collaboration and the value co-creation by diffusing knowledge, getting actors together, sharing activities and supporting the engagement between organisations. Through observation, interviews, participatory action and self-reflection, we proposed a stepwise generic model for diffusion and adaptation. We argued that all steps and roles must co-exist to achieve successful transfers, and noted the evolutionary nature of the process and the importance of aligning the interests and activities of the actors. We contributed to sustainable development goals through the global diffusion of open innovation knowledge within the collaboration of universities, firms and social innovators. We noted the limitations of addressing three cases, while proposing directions for further research on the capabilities of actors, collaboration practices and the co-creation of value by actors.

While innovation is essential for sustainable development, micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which account for more than 90% of firms in Latin America, face the challenge of benefiting systematically from innovation due to capability and negotiation asymmetries when compared with large organizations. In this context, open innovation holds promise to enable shared-value creation in terms of developing MSME capabilities, operations, and the organization of activities, especially when mediated and supported by public sector actors. It may also hold promise for the development of MSMEs when there is a lack of well-developed ecosystems with multiple central actors, as is the case in many less-developed Latin American countries, such as Nicaragua. Open innovation ecosystems support platforms that form the delivery vehicles for the offerings of firms, providing a framework of processes, rules, and policies for the purpose of co-creating value. These platforms also offer a development gateway for the participating MSMEs, impacting the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) created by The United Nations. Despite the potential for open innovation and its application in entrepreneurship ecosystems, few cases document the essential elements for designing these supporting platforms. In this case study, we aim to provide a framework for mediated, shared-value open innovation platforms by applying design science and case study approaches. Our work contributes to the field of knowledge-based ecosystems and open innovation platforms and considers best practices that can be applied in similar contexts.

Engaging students as partners in university-industry collaboration (UIC) through challenge-based and real-life projects creates significant value for all participants through novel educational approaches, talent recruitment, user-driven innovation, new resources, and research-related opportunities. However, as these practices have developed iteratively over time in industrialized countries and are highly context dependent, it is unclear how they can be best transferred to emerging economy contexts. In this paper, we present a research and design process of creating an innovation intermediary to foster student-centric UIC in Nairobi, Kenya. Seen as a set of services that reside on a multilevel platform, the intermediary aims to add value to the existing ecosystem through open access knowledge sharing, promoting partnerships, and mentoring for impact in an integrative, complementary way. Through a four-step qualitative research process involving interviews and co-creation workshops with local stakeholders, we examine the ecosystem, define value creation, design the services of the intermediary, and propose a step-wise model for further diffusion. We note the importance of establishing a solid rationale for collaboration, understanding the expected value to be created, creating a neutral space for the collaboration, and planning the implementation in detail. We contribute to transferring student-centric UIC practices into emerging economy contexts.

Tourism is a major global and local industry creating value through services that are enhanced and enabled through intermediaries that support innovation in the sector. This exploratory case study examines the roles and activities of a publicly funded tourism innovation intermediary for small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and professionals in Andalucia, Spain. We note the gap in knowledge on how intermediaries may best support stakeholders in achieving resilience and sustainability in transitions in tourism service ecosystems. Building on interviews, reports, and observations, this study finds that the intermediary has successfully supported its stakeholders in enhancing their adaptability in the current service ecosystem. There is less evidence of achieving deliberate transformations towards long-term sustainability and resilience. As the intermediary is uniquely positioned at the meso-level of the regional tourism service ecosystem, this study proposes exploring engagement to cover both macro and micro-level activities to enable moving towards becoming a transition intermediary and a regional sustainability catalyst. This study furthermore proposes an expanded range of roles and activities for the intermediary to enable moving towards resilience and sustainability, while contributing to the understanding of innovation intermediaries supporting sustainability in the tourism sector.

Over the last few years, design thinking has been indicated to be an approach for making sense of complexity by focusing on collaborative work and interdisciplinary approaches. That being said, the concept itself and its applications still remain fluid and emerging today, posing an immediate question for education: How to educate design thinkers and what is the foundation of thought that this learning should be based on? This paper examines four foundational dimensions of design thinking in terms of the needed capabilities, the world of constraints that restricts the application of capabilities, the nature of collaboration, and the diffusion of ideas. The foundational work of Sen in the area of capabilities and constraints is linked to Deleuzian thinking about concepts, collision, and affect in the area of collaboration and the rhizomic diffusion of ideas in order to form a wide framework of thought that serves as a foundational base for design thinking.