This paper explores how sustainability can be achieved through open innovation in the current 4th industrial revolution. Through a literature and practice review, we identify micro- and macro-dynamics of open innovation in addition to the dynamic roles of industry, government, university, and society. In particular, the industry continuously adopts open platforms to create and maintain ecosystem innovation. The government’s role has changed from regulation control toward facilitation. Universities have become proactively engaged in multiple areas, from technology transfer to knowledge co-creation. Societies and customers have started to form new concepts, R&D, and commercialization, resulting in a shared economy. Based on the analysis, we propose a conceptual framework to understand open innovation micro- and macro-dynamics with a quadruple-helix model for social, environmental, economic, cultural, policy, and knowledge sustainability. Furthermore, this provides an overview of the special issue, “Sustainability of Economy, Society, and Environment in the 4th Industrial Revolution”, which aims to respond to the 4th industrial revolution in terms of open innovation and cyber-physics from manufacturing to the service industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge and disruptive technological changes in the healthcare sector, transforming the way businesses and societies function. To respond to the global health crisis, there have been numerous innovation projects in the healthcare sector, including the fast design and manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical devices, and testing, treatment, and vaccine technologies. Many of these innovative activities happen beyond organizational boundaries with collaboration and open innovation. In this paper, we review the current literature on open innovation strategy during the pandemic and adopt the co-evolution view of business ecosystems to address the context of change. Based on a detailed exploration of the COVID-19-related technologies in the UK and global healthcare sectors, we identify the key emerging themes of open innovation in crisis. Further discussions are conducted in relation to each theme. Our results and analysis can help provide policy recommendations for the healthcare sector, businesses, and society to recover from the crisis.

With technology advancement, industrial revolution 4.0, businesses nowadays are in competition in terms of product, service and business model innovation. Meanwhile, the emergent socio-ecological crisis is making it increasingly important to identify the impact of business on environment and the society. To date, much literature has explored how sustainability might be achieved through firms’ internal research and development, and supply chain collaboration. However, issues such as how different stakeholders including customers, partners, government, and universities can be involved, forming innovation ecosystem in a sustainable way is under-explored. This paper aims to provide connection between innovation and sustainability, through literature review and exploratory case studies. A conceptual framework is generated starting from firm/intra-firm level, to supply chain/inter-firm level, and towards ecosystem level. With emerging themes of innovation from sustainability perspective proposed, the framework can be enriched and validated through future empirical studies.

With business today relying increasingly more on collaboration, new product development is also on a network base. The concept of innovation ecosystem is built upon knowledge creating and sharing across companies, knowledge institutions, policy regimes, business enterprises and industry boundaries. China as the largest emerging market has witnessed innovation with interaction among government, university, industry and research. Though government plays an important role in promoting innovation, not many studies have covered the detailed dynamic process and impact of policy on forming innovation ecosystem, especially in places where initial knowledge resources such as universities and research institutes are limited. Therefore, our article aims to fill in this research gap. Through document review and case study on Changzhou region of China, ¹ we map out the local government policy concerns and changes during each stage of innovation ecosystem formation, development and expansion from 2001 to 2015. The interaction mechanism among government, university, industry and research is summarised with a proposed framework to highlight the key policy making areas. Further research areas are recommended with implication and conclusion.

With digitalization and the support of policies, the creative industries have shown rapid growth in the last 20 years. Open forms of collective learning, user engagement and social networks have become popular to generate IPs and values. Meanwhile, government policy can support the sectors through subsidies, regulations, standardization, and protections at regional and national levels. This paper aims to explore the role of government policy in the innovation of creative industries from a macro dynamic perspective. The research method combines a structured literature review, a secondary document review of industry reports and government policy, and thematic content analysis. Through in-depth studies of the UK’s and China’s animation sectors, the paper identifies key elements of closed innovation, social innovation, and open innovation systems in the market. Comparisons of national government policies since 2000 reveal different approaches for countries where creative sectors are well-established, and for those starting with limited knowledge resources. A dynamic model is developed to address the evolution of macro dynamic innovation systems and the role of policies as interactive mechanisms. Practical implementation and future research areas are also suggested.

In the past 20 years, there have been increasingly more studies on sustainable technology innovation (STI), possessing a significance for sustainable development. This paper aims to provide a research landscape, since the systematic understanding of STI is still inadequate. Through bibliometric analysis, it explores the literature distribution characteristics and the literature citation network. Based on the relevant literature data in the Web of Science (WOS), the study visually analyzes the development trend, topic distribution, burst literature, and co-citation network of the research literature, and extracts the evolution path of literature citation by using the main path analysis method. Through the analysis of co-citation and main path, 13 clusters in the co-citation network are found, which are further extracted as the main path network containing 82 nodes. Furthermore, this paper summarized the bibliometric landscape and discussed the frontier STI research topics. The comprehensive framework contributes to the understanding of STI themes and identifying future research agenda.