Being a grand challenge of global scale, the COVID‐19 pandemic requires collective and collaborative efforts from a variety of actors to enable the expected scientific advancement and technological progress. To achieve such an open innovation approach, several initiatives have been launched in order to leverage potential distributed knowledge sources that go beyond those available to any single organization. A particular tool that has gained some momentum during COVID‐19 times is hackathons, which have been used to unleash the innovation potential of individuals who voluntarily came together, for a relatively short period of time, with the aim to solve specific problems. In this paper, we describe and analyze the case of the hackathon EUvsVirus, led by the European Innovation Council. EUvs Virus was a 3‐day online hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners, and investors across Europe and beyond in order to develop innovative solutions to coronavirus‐related challenges. We have identified four dimensions to explore hackathons as a crowdsourcing tool for practicing effective open innovation in the face of COVID‐19: broad scope, participatory architecture, online setting, and community creation. We discuss how these four elements can play a strategic role in the face of grand challenges, which require, as in the case of the COVID‐19 pandemic, both urgent action and long‐term thinking. Our case analysis also suggests the need to look beyond the ‘usual suspects’, through knowledge recombination with atypical resources (e.g., retired experts, graduate students, and the general public). On this basis, we call for a broader perspective on open innovation, to be extended beyond openness across organizational boundaries, and to explore the role of openness at societal level.

Governments are increasingly focusing their efforts on stimulating innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, university-industry-government collaboration is gaining importance among the agenda of policymakers to enable open innovation in SMEs. However, these inter-organisational relationships often fail to meet expectations, especially when projects are oriented to pre-competitive R&D. Nevertheless, the literature has not yet provided sufficient evidence of the challenges related to the participation of traditional SMEs (i.e., low- and medium-low tech SMEs) in this specific type of collaboration. We collected qualitative data to analyse longitudinally three pre-competitive projects, exploring the main challenges faced by traditional SMEs. We have bracketed the projects in four phases: initiation and planning phase, execution phase, closing phase, and monitoring and control phase. For each of these phases we have individuated firm- and project-level challenges, providing practical and theoretical insights for open innovation scholars.

In order to face the challenges of internationalization and to cope more efficiently with the uncertainty of foreign expansion, firms are called to analyze an increasing amount of real-time semi-structured and unstructured datasets. In this sense, big data analytics (BDA) can become strategic in stimulating the international growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, the specific relationship between BDA and internationalization has been analyzed fragmentarily within the mainstream literature. With the purpose of shedding light on this relationship, the authors drew on resource-based view (RBV) and collected data through a questionnaire directed to CEOs of 266 SMEs, receiving 103 responses. A quantitative analysis based on an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression showed that the relationship between governance of BDA infrastructure and the degree of internationalization (DOI) is not significant, while the direct effect of BDA capabilities as well as the interaction term between BDA infrastructure and BDA capabilities are positive and significant. This suggests that the governance of BDA per se is not enough for enhancing internationalization in SMEs. On the contrary, this article points out the relevance of developing specific BDA capabilities and the existence of a positive interplay between governance of BDA infrastructure and BDA capabilities that can exploit the new knowledge coming from BDA in SME international growth.

Open innovation is now a widely used concept in academia, industry, and policy-making. According to the recent report “The Open Innovation Barometer”, released by the Economist, 90% of organizations have either adopted or are planning to implement key open innovation practices by opening up their organizational boundaries to collaborative innovation in the next three years (The Economist Group 2022). However, the social and economic changes imposed by the emerging processes of transition towards a more digital and sustainable society raise questions on how the open innovation field of studies is evolving to meet new, emerging needs. By combining bibliometric techniques and content analysis, this study illustrates how this research community has evolved in the last 12 years. More specifically, this study provides a descriptive analysis of the literature on open innovation, defines its knowledge structure, and illustrates a representative picture of the theoretical landscape. Our analysis shows that attempts to consolidate established topics and theoretical approaches in this field of studies go hand in hand with the emergence of new conversations about unexplored dimensions of open innovation. We conclude this article by outlining some avenues for future research on how to conceptualize, theorize, and research (methods and analytical techniques) open innovation.